THIS BOOK DOES NOT CLAIM TO BE an account of facts and events but
of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners
have suered time and again. It is the inside story of a concen‐
tration camp, told by one of its survivors. This tale is not con‐
cerned with the great horrors, which have already been de‐
scribed often enough (though less often believed), but with the
multitude of small torments. In other words, it will try to an‐
swer this question: How was everyday life in a concentration
camp reected in the mind of the average prisoner?
Most of the events described here did not take place in the
large and famous camps, but in the small ones where most of the
real extermination took place. This story is not about the suer‐
ing and death of great heroes and martyrs, nor is it about the
prominent Capos—prisoners who acted as trustees, having spe‐
cial privileges—or well-known prisoners. Thus it is not so much
concerned with the suerings of the mighty, but with the sacri‐
ces, the crucixion and the deaths of the great army of un‐
known and unrecorded victims. It was these common prisoners,
who bore no distinguishing marks on their sleeves, whom the
Capos really despised. While these ordinary prisoners had little
or nothing to eat, the Capos were never hungry; in fact many of
the Capos fared better in the camp than they had in their entire
lives. Often they were harder on the prisoners than were the
guards, and beat them more cruelly than the SS men did. These
Capos, of course, were chosen only from those prisoners whose
characters promised to make them suitable for such procedures,
and if they did not comply with what was expected of them,
they were immediately demoted. They soon became much like
the SS men and the camp wardens and may be judged on a simi‐
lar psychological basis.
It is easy for the outsider to get the wrong conception of camp
life, a conception mingled with sentiment and pity. Little does
he know of the hard ght for existence which raged among the
prisoners. This was an unrelenting struggle for daily bread and
for life itself, for one’s own sake or for that of a good friend.
Let us take the case of a transport which was ocially an‐
nounced to transfer a certain number of prisoners to another
camp; but it was a fairly safe guess that its nal destination
would be the gas chambers.
