Review by Choice Review
Bonifas is now a retired Protestant clergyman and human rights activist whose public affairs experience began with service in the French resistance in 1940. The author was apprehended in 1943, and spent the rest of the war in German captivity, sharing the full agony of concentration camp experience with all those persecuted by the Nazi regime. His story is that of a passionately devout Christian asking why God permitted such horrors, and why Christian resistance to Nazism was so faint. In general, what Bonifas tells of life in prisons and concentration camps resembles the testimony of most other good accounts. The specific places, except for Buchenwald, are less familiar, but hardly less sinister. Compiegne was a temporary station for Bonifas; he was then transferred to the brutal work camps of Germany, to Dora, Laura, Mackenrode, Osterhagen, and other outcamps near Nordhausen. This book was first published in 1946, and has appeared in four French, four German, a Spanish, and an English edition before this one. Nor is it unique. It presents information covered by scores, even hundreds of other accounts by survivors of Nazi captivity. But not all of these are in English, and relatively few of them concern French political captives in the process of being worked and starved to death in obscure work camps while constructing underground factories for the secret weapons of the Third Reich. The book is easily read and emotionally engaging. Suitable for undergraduate and research libraries, and of interest to students of philosophy and theology as well as history.-G.H. Davis, Georgia State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
