Arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Dachau, Robert Antelme recovered his freedom a year later when Francois Mitterand, visiting the camp in an official capacity, recognized the dying Antelme and had him spirited to Paris. Antelme's story of his experiences in Germany--his only book--indelibly marked an entire generation, -a work written without hatred, a work of boundless compassion such as that is to be found only in the great Russians.-

Rescued in 1945 from Dachau--where Francois Mitterand, his onetime comrade in the resistance, recognized him among the thousands of quarantined prisoners--Robert Antelme set out to do what seemed "unimaginable," to describe not only his experience but the humanity of his captors. The result, "The Human Race, " was called by George Perec "the finest example in contemporary French writing of what literature can be."
In this volume, the extraordinary nature and extent of Robert Antelme's accomplishment, and of the reverberations he set in motion in French life and literature, finds eloquent...