Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems
1 total work
Vol 516
In 1943 16 year-old Paul Steinberg was arrested in Paris and deported to Auschwitz. He survived the death camp due in part to his admitted ruthlessness and not a little to luck. Some 50 years later, Steinberg describes his strategies for survival, the maneouvres and tactics he applied with cold competence. In an unsparing act of self-examination he traces his passage from artless adolescent to a ruthless creature determined to do anything to live, described and identified in Primo Levi's "If This Is A Man As "Henri"". Steinberg was assigned to work in the camp's laboratory alongside Levi, who immortalised his fellow inmate as the ultimate survivor, the paradigm of the prisoner who clung to life at the cost of his own humanity. His story decribes this netherworld where the boundaries between life and death, innocence and guilt, dignity and shame are forever blurred.