Born in 1911 in Poland to a modest Jewish family, Alter Fajnzylberg was imprisoned for three years in Auschwitz-Birkenau, from April 1942 to January 1945. For eighteen months, he was forced to join the Sonderkommando—the “special unit” of Jewish prisoners forced to work in the extermination facilities.
He wrote three notebooks to bear witness to what he had endured, then hid them in a shoebox. It took decades for his son, RRoger Fajnzylberg, to recover these notebooks from the past, have them transcribed, translated, and placed in historical context with the help of historian Alban Perrin.
Published by Seuil in January 2025, these notebooks represent an exceptional testimony—made all the more vital by the extreme rarity of such accounts, as the Nazis systematically murdered almost all direct witnesses to their horrific crimes.
In French.
