Volume 23, Number 3 · March 4, 1976
Living through Hell
By J.M. Cameron
The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps
by Terrence Des Pres
Oxford University Press, 218 pp., $10.00
Mr. Des Pres has examined with great attention and an eye for what is theoretically interesting accounts by survivors of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Under conditions of 'extremity'—Auschwitz, Karaganda—ordinary patterns of behavior vanish and are replaced by other patterns that manifest, so Des Pres believes, certain fundamental truths about human nature. Such truths will certainly be of interest to social anthropologists and to psychologists and psychotherapists; even more, they will be of interest—a more than speculative interest—to all men who know themselves to be moral and political animals and wish to think reflectively about their condition.
Review, 2435 words
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