cover image The Human Race

The Human Race

Robert Antelme. Marlboro Press, $29.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-910395-77-9

A member of a French Resistance group headed by Francois Mitterrand, Robert Antelme was arrested by the Gestapo in June 1944, sent to Buchenwald, then to a work camp in Germany. First published in 1947 and now in its first English-language translation, this moving memoir is a testament to Holocaust survivors' furious desire to remain human, even as the Germans, through forced starvation, reduced them to near-skeletons, ``nothing but plumbing for soup.'' Writing with lucidity, detachment and meticulous observation, Antelme (who died in 1990) describes the camp hierarchy whereby kapos , German common criminals serving on the lowest rung of the SS administrative ladder, tried to set political prisoners, convicts and conscientious objectors against one another. His transfer to Dachau and its liberation by the Allies brings to a close a harrowing journey through the human depths. (June)