Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning

A concentration camp survivor confronts one of the most heated and vexed questions of the Holocaust: what price survival? In 1943 sixteen-year-old Paul Steinberg was arrested in Paris and deported to Auschwitz. A chemistry student Steinberg was assigned to work in the camps laboratory alongside Primo Levi who would later immortalize his fellow inmate as Henri the ultimate survivor the paradigm of the prisoner who clung to life at the cost of his own humanity. One seems to glimpse a human soul Levi wrote in If This Is a Man but then Henris sad smile freezes in a cold grimace and here he is again intent on his hunt and his struggle; hard and distant enclosed in armor the enemy of all.Now after fifty years Steinberg speaks for himself. In an unsparing act of self-scrutiny he traces his passage from artless adolescent to ruthless creature determined to do anything to live. He describes his strategies of survival: the boxing matches he staged for the camp commanders the English POWs he exploited the maneuvers and tactics he applied with cold competence. Ultimately he confirms Levis judgment: No doubt he saw straight. I probably was that creature prepared to use whatever means I had available. But he asks Is it so wrong to survive?Brave and rare Speak You Also is a profound and necessary addition to the body of Holocaust writing: a survivors reckoning with culpability and survival.