Seweryna Szmaglewska - Smoke Over Birkenau
Smoke Over Birkenau by Seweryna Szmaglewska (1916-1992) is a unique book, the first eyewitness non-fiction account of life and death in the most infamous of Nazi extermination camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oświęcim), an eloquent and important analysis of the individual experience of modern war. Its author was a student of Warsaw University in 1939 when war broke over her native Poland. She immediately joined the underground, risking the possibility of the inevitable arrest which came in 1942 when she was sent to Birkenau. In the foreword to "Smoke over Birkenau" she wrote:
"May story tells of olny one fragment of the gigantic machine of death that was Oświęcim. I will give olny the data of what I observed or what I myself endured directly... These are the experiences of one person alone - a drop in the vast immeasurable ocean. Without doubt there will be others who return alive form Oświęcim and who will talk. There will be others who will come back from many others camps. But the majority will never return and will never talk".
The book was written very quickly after Szmaglewska managed to escape in January 1945. It was ready for publication before the end of 1945, and in Fabruary 1946 the International War Tribunal in Neuremberg included the text of "Smoke over Birkenau" in the papers for prosecution, and invited the author to testify. Reprinted about twenty times in Poland, the book was also published in the United States, Russia, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia and even Mongolia. Here, in this book whole had an overwhelming success in Poland, is the whole story of one prisoner's experience of life in a Nazi death camp. Critics, and there generations of readers, praised it for truthfulness, accuraxcy, and lasting literary merit: as memories of war-time genocide fade with the passage of time, Szmaglewska's readers are able to stay in touch with extremes of experience whichg must never br forgotten.