Anus Mundi: 1,500 Days in Auschwitz/Birkenau [Hardcover]

Wiesaw Kielar (Author), Wieslaw Kielar (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Times Books; First edition. edition (November 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812909216
• ISBN-13: 978-0812909210
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,122,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Detailed and Shattering, October 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Anus Mundi: 1,500 Days in Auschwitz/Birkenau (Hardcover)

Anus Mundi--1500 Days in Auschwitz/Birkenau is a detailed and shattering view of life in the death camps of the Holocaust. Unlike the writing of Elie Wiesel, Jean Amery, and to a lesser extent, Primo Levi, which is deeply and movingly introspective, Wieslaw Kielar details the brutalities of life in the camps with a simple objectivity that is unsparing in its directness. In this narrative, we learn nothing about Kielar prior to June 1940 and nothing about him after his liberation of the camps four years later. We do know he is Polish Catholic who occasionally prays, but other than that the book is devoid of religious, philosophical or political overtones.

The dozens of camp vignettes that the author has accumulated in this book are as sharp as the eye of a camera: brilliant, detailed, focused and memorable. The closest comparison in style would be Borowski, Kielar's tragic countryman. In each case, the strict lack of sentiment and intellectual elaboration serve only to heighten the horror and leave us with no doubt as to the authenticity of the recollections and their attendant suffering.

Although Kielar's misery was unrelieved, for all its deprivations, his fate was slightly easier that that of the Jewish prisoners. This is in no way meant to be disparaging. Kielar suffered more than his share of harsh blows, severe winters, starvation and infestation with lice and fleas. Although not a Jew, for Kielar, too, the brutalities of the sadistic Kapos were never far away. His memoir records a long season in hell that would have destroyed a lesser man.

Amidst this suffering and degradation, however, Kielar reveals that contacts with the civilian world outside of the camp were still possible for him, that he was entitled to receive packages from home, that correspondence with his family took place with a certain amount of regularity and most of all, that he did not live each day in fear of the ovens and gas chambers which were reserved for the arriving Jews. Those Jews whose lives were spared suffered a fate that proved, ultimately, to be harsher than that suffered by Kielar and the other Polish political prisoners.

This is an intimate and extremely well-written book about the horrors of the Holocaust and it contains a wealth of information. One must though, when reading, remember that there were qualitatively different orders of experience among the various inmates of the camps. Kielar could, at least, count on the fact that he had a chance of outlasting and overcoming the wretchedness. The Jews, however, were from the moment of their arrival, marked for certain death. If not immediately dispatched to the gas chamber, they were worked until death mercifully overtook them.

The acknowledgment of this distinction among the prisoners in no way detracts from the vividness or the pathos of Kielar's memoir of his 1500 days in hell. We must read and remember each survivor's story for its own unique reasons. In Kielar's case, the reasons are compelling enough to make this a first-class memoir in the annals of Holocaust literature.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Striking memoir on life in Auschwitz/Birkenau., May 23, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Anus Mundi: 1,500 Days in Auschwitz/Birkenau (Hardcover)

If you only read one book about the holocaust, this should be it. Mr. Kielars memoir is the difinitive book on Auschwitz/Birkenau. This book is moveing, horrific and full of feeling. It goes beyond the documentation of events to the dreams, fears, and struggles of a human being in the face of one of the worst events in history. Anus Mundi gives a personal view of the people and events that shaped the concentration camp from those that helped ease suffering, to those who created it. Mr. Kielar shares not only the persecution of the Jews, but also the Gypsies, political prisoners, homosexuals, and more. This book is a beautifully detailed, extremely personal look at life and death in Auschwitz.