The Journey Back from Hell: Memoirs of Concentration Camp Survivors - Tapa blanda

This book is a record of oral history as the author recorded the personal testimony of over 100 survivors of the Nazi concentration camps in the course of his enquiry into how they have come to terms with their ordeals since World War II. Anton Gill has talked to political opponents and resistance fighters as well as Jewish victims. Some have remained in Austria, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary; others have emigrated to Israel, the USA and England. Many have never before talked about their experiences to anyone, not even their own families. All have singular tales to tell of the physical and mental aftermath, but, above all, there is hope - in the words of Ben Helfgott, a Polish-Jewish survivor and chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Committee in the UK: "Better people than me died and so I must try to make my life something good, for the only way to triumph over evil is to make sure that some good comes out of it". Anton Gill is also the author of "Martin Allen is Missing", "Mad about the Boy" and "How to be Oxbridge".

Forty years on, how do the survivors of the most horrific episode in world history regard their wartime experiences, and how have they come to terms with their memories? How did their experience of the Nazi concentration camps change them emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, politically? And what are their feelings about their former tormentors today?

In talking to some 120 survivors in 14 different countries – including political prisoners and resistance fighters – Anton Gill has produced a masterpiece of oral history that is both an account of the survivors lives after liberation and a testament to their courage.

Each experience of 'The Journey Back from Hell' is unique, and readers are free to draw their own conclusions from what the survivors tell them. But the combined effect of the stories is so poignant and important to the core experience of the twentieth century that nobody can afford to turn away – or to forget.

"Brilliant, compelling... an inspiration"
MAIL ON SUNDAY

"A thoughtful, caring book, full of sociological and psychological insight"
SUNDAY TIMES

"The first-person narratives alone make this book worth reading"
THE TIMES