One of the most heartbreaking narrative that I have ever read. There was no dramatisation, there was no shout or call for sympathy of any kind. It was a narration that makes you cry from inside.

I've visited Auschwitz. I've walked the stark grounds with a shaking feeling of anger too great to express at the sheer arrogant absurdity of it all. The practical idiotic mindset and machine which the Nazis created to perpetrate such unspeakable crimes, yet rather ordinary people allowed themselves to be manipulated into doing so and rationalized the acts. And then you have Filip, a prisoner, who with chained hands was forced to help turn the cogs for a time.

I've an extensive library of Holocaust works of all kinds. Some of the most notable and controversial I have on my shelves. Personal accounts I keep separate because they are separate in my mind. All of them can be heartbreaking, and it's a grim subject and interest, but still necessary for me. Only a few, of which this is one, have I had to stop several times, close its covers and cover my face and simply weep.

To name it superlative is almost a travesty. In it's sheer power of catacylsmic emotion it is not surpassed, but for me the point is not simply to read for information sake or even a shock factor: it is the depth of Filip's emotional and spiritual suffering which binds the reader to the writer. I've never read anything quite like it.

There is not the eloquence of others like Primo Levi, or the almost direct request for empathy others have presented in their memoirs. Müller wrote it as he recalled. Only that. It needed nothing else. It was enough and far beyond imagining.

3.25

This is the absolutely horrifying account of a man who served in the sonderkommando at Auschwitz. He recalls the gassing of thousands of innocent victims, the pits where bodies we burned after the gassing, and the depravity of man. This is a chilling look at man's capacity for evil.