The American Spectator

The narrator drags a corpse out of a bunk and takes his place. On his right is an old man with a long white beard (who dies); on the left an older boy, his brothers and cousins, who, when told the Americans are coming do not run from the barracks. They cook and eat some potatoes an enterprising child has stolen from the kitchen. “They didn’t see the open gateway to freedom, because they didn’t know what freedom was.”

p>This book is hard to bear because of the fullness and clarity of its reality. But it is more than worth the pain and exhilaration you will feel when you read it. Hofmann quotes from Wander’s memoir, The Good Life , about Wander’s view of life in the camps, which makes a good last word on the subject: br> /p>

Basically the same rules and conditions obtained in the camps as in the world beyond the barbed wire — which is to say power and violence, opportunism and corruption — only in an exaggerated, distorted form. But there is another side to this as well, which is hardly ever mentioned, but which seems even more crucial to me: the fact that you could observe — if you had eyes to see — how a few of us struggled to keep alive our true and actual selves, our self-respect, our human bearing, some vestige of our human dignity.

br> Franklin Freeman is a writer living in Saco, Maine.