Lucie Adelsberger's memoir of surviving Auschwitz, opens with a description of life in Berlin in 1938. "It began with only a few so called 'trifles,' " she says, citing three incidents which leapt out of the maelstrom of edicts and indignities to confront her with the relentless cruelty of the regime. The first of these limited Jews to public benches marked for them, thereby denying the elderly, many already displaced from their homes, the solace of parks. The second occurred when her elderly mother smiled at a functionary who processed her emigration papers. The official screamed at her mother for her effrontery.
"That's when I realized that these people were beyond the reach of human kindness," says Adelsberger. The third was the denial, after months of wrangling, of her mother's exit visa by the host country. Adelsberger realized finally that "the outside world didn't want to get involved."

Adelsberger missed her last chance to flee when her mother fell sick. As round-ups of Jews accelerated she found herself praying her mother would die before the SS came for her. Those prayers were answered but her own ordeal surpassed her worst imaginings.

In unadorned prose Adelsberger recounts life and the varieties of death at Auschwitz. Her voice is gentle, her eye sharp and compassionate, quick to note small ironies as well as gratuitous kindness and cruelty.

As a doctor, Adelsberger was assigned to the gypsy camp where an epidemic of typhus was raging. There were no medicines and hundreds died daily in their own filth. Why the camp commanders bothered with a hospital at all is a mystery which can be inadequately answered only by the Nazi passion for order.

Meticulous records were kept of everyone. One of the camp's most grueling rituals was the daily roll call. With 25 to 35,000 inmates in the women's camp alone, with the camp's policy of moving inmates from one section to another without notice, and with hundreds dying enroute to forced labor or hidden in a corner of their block, an exact roll call was difficult to achieve. Twice a day, before dawn and after work, inmates stood for roll call. This encompassed everyone except the dead and lasted one to two hours ??? unless the tally did not match. "A roll call that lasted a day and a night without interruption was nothing unusual."

Roll call, the unexplained withholding of food from already starving people, forced labor, these were routine. Then there were the days that stood out. Sunday in the gypsy camp when gymnasts and musicians put on a show (the Gypsies were allowed to keep their possessions) and an audience of 16,000 sang and danced to music which ended abruptly with an order for "block confinement." After hours of waiting ??? and the Gypsies know what they're waiting for ??? the SS appear, calling out names and numbers. That night 2,500 Czech Gypsies were sent to the gas chambers.

Adelsberger also tells of strategies for survival, although she says no one expected to leave the camp alive. But certain work details ??? the kitchen, the bathhouse where prisoners were stripped of their last possessions, the band, were coveted. Barter and communication systems were devised despite the dangers of detection.

But the vast majority worked in the mills or munitions factories or the potato bunker. Or they dug graves. The worst was reserved for young, healthy Jewish men. Totally isolated from the rest of the camp, they worked in the crematorium. After two or three months they too were gassed. "Sometime while at work, one never knew when, the valves of the gas chamber would close, the gas would be turned on, and ??? a new Sonderkommando would replace the old."

A heart-rending memoir, yes, but it speaks as much for the beauties and strength of the human heart as for the incomprehensible monstrousness of the experience.

I loved this book, and I couldn't put it down. Great read about the Holocaust. Very chilling to see how the women in the death camps, especially Auschwitz were treated. The font is for 6th Graders, but I feel that it souldn't be read, for the graphic nature, until high school.

A very good read.