Sonderkommando. Birkenau 1944 - Thessalonique 1947. Résurgence

Deluxe first edition on Oikos paper, limited to 200 copies, this copy being one of 5 presentation copies signed by the publisher and enriched with unpublished documents relating to the discovery of the manuscript.

Swiss binding with exposed stitching, smooth cloth spine, illustrated boards and slipcase.

Original French translation of the last manuscript recovered from a deportee assigned to the Sonderkommandos.

Marcel Nadjary (1917-1971), a Greek Jew from Thessaloniki, deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, was assigned to the Sonderkommando. He wrote a letter to dear friends to bid them farewell and describe the horrific work he was forced to carry out. He then buried his clandestine manuscript in the soil of Birkenau. This document was recovered thirty-six years later, on October 24, 1980.

This testimony, written at "the epicenter of the catastrophe," is published here for the first time in French translation, together with a second manuscript that Marcel Nadjary wrote in 1947 to preserve a record of his experience at the heart of the Birkenau inferno.

Texts by Serge Klarsfeld, Nelly Nadjary, Alberto Nadjary, Fragiski Ampatzopoulou, Georges Didi-Huberman, Tal Bruttmann, Loïc Marcou, and Andreas Kilian accompany and illuminate these two exceptional documents.

Translated from Greek by Loïc Marcou

This exceptional art book symbolically recreates the original burial by using the fold of uncut gatherings to conceal photographs of the almost entirely effaced manuscript. On the reverse, the multispectral image that reveals the text is the result of 10 years of work to obtain a complete transcription.

The French translation that follows this slow and complex restoration of memory constitutes a unique testimony whose concision contributes to its importance through the crucial choice of words and message. Indeed, Marcel Nadjary, one of the rare survivors of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, wrote a much longer second manuscript in 1947, illustrated with detailed sketches of the camp, which is reproduced in its entirety following the first.

This dual account by the same man constitutes a unique reading experience, between the urgency of the condemned and the reflection of the survivor, intimate letter and historical testimony, dense script filling the pages and careful writing on ruled sheets. Yet, throughout this second account, the wide margins gradually diminish until they disappear, giving rise once again to the cramped writing of the first manuscript.

The five presentation copies, not announced in the colophon, are enriched with photographic reproductions of the discovery of the bag and thermos flask in which the manuscript was preserved, as well as a copy of the official report of its exhumation, annotated by the publisher.

The Artulis Éditions book-object, through the interplay of unopened gatherings that recreates the exhumation of the manuscript and the exposed stitching that suggests its fragility, is one of the most elegant editorial achievements paying tribute to the memory of Holocaust survivors.

Exceptional edition of the last unpublished Sonderkommando text in French, one of five presentation copies enriched and signed by the publisher.