Hermann Langbein (1912-1995) was born in Vienna. In 1938 he was a member of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, then he was interned in various French camps, Following the German conquest, he was transferred to Dachau, then to Auschwitz, where he remained for two years. There he was a leading participant in the International resistance organization in the camp. After liberation he became general secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee and later secretary of the Comite International des Camps. Among the many important works he wrote or edited are Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concen- tration Camps, 1938-1945 and Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas. Harry Zohn (1923-2001) wrote, edited, or translated forty books, including a translation of Langbein's Against All Hope.
The preparation of this classic for the English-speaking world
makes one of the most important and powerful survivor accounts of
Auschwitz accessible to the West, and introduces general readers to
the mind and experience of a crucially placed and astonishingly
observant witness to the Holocaust. In the first-person literature
created by survivors and victims in the ghettos and concentration
camps, "People in Auschwitz" ranks as an historical document with
works like "The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow", and the memoirs
of Buchenwald survivor Eugen Kogon, "The Theory and Practice of
Hell". Langbein's epic, at long last, also serves as a moral
antidote and historical counterweight to the memoirs of the
notorious Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, first published
nearly fifty years ago.(Charles W. Sydnor Jr., author of "Soldiers
of Destruction: The SS Death's Head Division, 1933-1945")
Hermann Langbein, then a communist activist, was a leading member
of the underground movement in Auschwitz concentration camp, and an
acute observer of the situation there. His memoir is one of the
foundation stones of research on Auschwitz, an indispensable
contribution to the complex and fearsome reality of the
camp.(Yehuda Bauer, director of the International School for
Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem)
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