The Last Consolation Vanished

By Zalmen Gradowski, Rubye Monet (translator), Arnold I. Davidson (editor) , Philippe Mesnard (editor)

Book cover of The Last Consolation Vanished: The Testimony of a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz

Book description

A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz.

On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Last Consolation Vanished as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Reading these messages in a bottle discovered buried under a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, I am staggered and amazed at the indomitable human capacity for resilience and creativity.

I read these harrowing literary masterworks, which report on the most hellish degradations, and I am stunned that Zalmen Gradowski, from deep within his suffering, could wrest from the horrors before him and from his own despair, a literary art that is beautiful and solacing. I am reminded of the human capacity, which we all must certainly share, to snatch shreds of beauty from the darkest of circumstances and of the…

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