Roger Fajnzylberg Book Signing: Ce Que J'ai Vu à Auschwitz, Les Cahiers d'Alter
- Place
- Bookshop
- Hours
- 6:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
The Fondation is pleased to host a book signing of the work Ce Que J'ai Vu à Auschwitz, Les Cahiers d'Alter (“What I Saw at Auschwitz: Alter’s Notebooks”), a poignant testimony that resonates with the Gerhard Richter exhibition and the “Birkenau” series presented in Gallery 10 as part of the larger display.
The man responsible for the book’s release is Roger, the son of Alter, one of the four members of the Sonderkommando who took the photographs that inspired Richter’s paintings. Roger shares his father’s story of survival, resistance and remembrance. Published by Éditions du Seuil, this work is important to discourse about the Holocaust and for passing on the history of that time, just as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of the Camps.
Publication of the notebooks of Alter Fajnzylberg – a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau from April 1942 to January 1945 who was forced to serve in the Sonderkommando for eighteen months – is an exceptional contribution to Holocaust history. These never-before-published writings – which Alter, feeling an urgent need to tell of all he had witnessed in the camps, penned in Polish once he arrived in France between autumn 1945 and spring 1946 – were then buried in a shoebox, much like top-secret documents. Decades passed before his only son, Roger, unearthed them and had them transcribed, translated and contextualised with help from Holocaust historian Alban Perrin.
This testimony is all the more precious and vital given how very few Sonderkommando survivors existed, as the Nazis took great care to wipe out all eyewitnesses to their monstruous enterprise.
Alter Fajnzylberg was born in Stoczek, Poland, in 1911 to a modest Jewish family. He became a communist activist when he was quite young and was imprisoned for his convictions. In 1937, he joined the International Brigades in Spain, where he was wounded, but nevertheless rejoined the fighting. Though later interned in the camps of Argelès, Gurs and Saint-Cyprien, he eventually escaped. He was arrested in 1941 by the French police in Paris, taken to the internment camps at Drancy and Compiègne, and was part of the first convoy of Jewish deportees sent from France to Auschwitz in late March 1942. He survived it all and, in his notebooks, recounted the horrific truth about those experiences. Alter Fajnzylberg died in 1987.
