Customer Reviews

Scum of the Earth

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Arthur Koestler's memoir about his experiences during the beginning of the Second World War is interesting from a historical standpoint. Koestler finds himself all over Europe, in and out of internment camps, encountering people from all over of all classes. Koestler's experience is interesting because the way he was treated was not the norm, it was the product of his unique background and situation, but it still represents the wide range of possible experiences during this historically uncertain time. The level that it succeeds on most, however, is a personal one. Koestler is a damn witty, talented author, who knows how to tell a story. Despite the subject matter he finds much work with. One can't help but smile at he way he describes the inbreed locals of a small village or the way he personifies his car. As interesting as the historical and stylistic elements is his description of himself (clearly a flawed man with a drinking problem) and his unlikely relationship with a younger woman he wasn't meant to end up with. It may be a comparatively obscure piece of literature, but it's certainly one worth reading.

The true story of Arthur Koestlers experiences in France immediately before the invasion by Germany. This is a shocking story of a France that we do not hear about in contemporary accounts of WWII. With Germany poised to invade France and nothing that the French could do to stop them the French government decided to appease their new rulers by arresting all refugees from Nazi Europe and putting them into French Concentration camps. Arthur Koester ,a political writer, was one of these refugees that thought he was safe in Paris is a country that was still free of Nazi rule but was soon to find otherwise. His story tells of the French camps where conditions were worse than anything the Nazis were doing and the only way out was bribery and friends in high places. Once released he was still unable to leave the country and the story takes another twist when he discovers that the only way to escape is to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, first of all spending a year in the Italian mountains where his unit was

ONE of the greatest books to come out of the second world war now carries a tragic irony. The reverberations of its author's suicide in 1983 spill over into one's reading of it.

In 1939, Koestler was living in the South of France working on Darkness At Noon. Moving to Paris to enlist with the Allies he was, along with thousands of others who had fought Fascism around Europe, imprisoned as an undesirable alien. Life in the camp, which German emigres testified to being comparable with Dachau, is illuminated by a writer whose humanity, optimism and intelligence shine on every page.

There are so many people in our society who do things for their own pleasure which are likely to get them thrown into prison that it is difficult for me to picture a prison in which most of the prisoners have a long history of being locked up because of their political activities. The Epilogue of this book, in the form of a letter to Colonel Blimp, complains of an economic order which "reminds one of a certain goose which, instead of golden eggs, lays a time bomb every day and then settles down to hatch it. But all this need not disturb you." (p. 250) The section called Purgatory starts on October 2nd, 1939, with Koestler getting out of a bathtub and wrapping himself in a towel to answer the door, only to have the police ask him, "Have you a gun on you?" (p. 63) The book is full of details, and the pages that are most chilling for me are 94 and 95. "We were two thousand in the camp of Vernet. The average time each of us had spent in jail or internment was eighteen months. . . . If somebody screamed at night in our barrack, we knew he had dreamt of the Gestapo." When Koestler wrote this book, "of its 2000 prisoners only about fifty have been released; . . . and the camp is under the control of the Gestapo."

The book itself is interseting, beceause it describes how many situations a man can experience during wartime. How the idyllic countryside life changes into the terror of a concentration camp, and then into a desperate fight against the bureacracy. I am pleased to recommend this book to everybody, who is not only interested in cheap thrillers.......

Arthur Koestler was a known Communist that turned anti-Communist and anti-Fascist. He wrote several works that acted as memoirs from various time periods in this life. This particular book was written just after his harrowing time in and out of prisons and concentration camps in France just before and after the Germans invaded in 1940.

The story begins in an idyllic French countryside town just before the Germans begin to invade Czechoslovakia. Koestler is an Hungarian citizen living in France and writing of his time on death row in Spain. As a political activist he seems to take these things as normal, although not without fear. Since Koestler was known as anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist, one would think that he would be cleared of any issues when the round ups began. But it was because of the Vichy French selling out the country that anyone that was anti-Nazi was corralled and placed in a concentration camp. This was the first time that I had heard of the French concentration camps and if Koestler can be believed, they were every bit as horrific as the German concentration camps. While people were not gassed, they were worked to death and given little to eat so that starvation and disease were rampant.

Koestler gives quite an interesting essay on the breakdown of French morale and citizenship leading up to the invasing. Unfortunately, the reader has to wade through quite a bit of day to day minutiae of Koestler's life at that time to get to these nuggets. It is not that these daily stories are boring, but at times, they do get redundant and self centered - after all, they are his memoirs.

I found Koestler to be refreshing and since this was written before the wonderful time of political correctness, true honesty and commentary can be found. Additionally, because this was a memoir and written in 1941, there was not any revisionist history that retold the story. This book is often startling in its candor and I was shocked at the conditions that were portrayed. I would recommend this book to any WWII history buff that wants to look inside France during this important time frame in world history.

Why this memoir is not a classic of WWII is a mystery to me. Not to say Koestler was'nt a flawed giant of 20th century literature, but he had important things to say. This book perhaps provides insights to Koestler, including his suicide, that have not been well appreciated.

Highly recommended.

before the war started. Arthur Koestler's book Scum of the Earth is a readable memoir of his adventures in France just before, and at the beginning of, the Second World War. France is described by the author as "wine and bread" country with little industrialization and a desire to be left alone after going though the anguish of the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. As an anti-Nazi, he was imprisioned by the Franch at the concentration camp as a political prisoner at Verant and suffered various deprivations.

His philosophical outlook is revealed to be one of democratic socialism which he believed was a balance between plutocratic capitalism and communism. The book that I read (an old Macmillian edition) was a short 280 pages long and was easily readable. There are no illustrations in the book, but his written descriptions more than made up for this deficiency. Some of his viewpoints on government I have some disagreement with (being a libertarian), but I give five stars for this book.

This is the history that France would rather forget, despite claims that the account was part fictionalised it nonetheless reveals disturbing tendencies in pre-German invasion France that were to aid the Nazi occupation and also create the Vichy regime. Anti-Communist and anti-Jewish tendencies, he claims were spreading through France at the time, and leading some people there to believe that German occupation may have been a necessary evil to purge France of left wing and Jewish elements. Koestler also documents the xenophobia spreading through the country...

Koestler and others were put into camps by the French. Koestler himself was partly a refugee fleeing the Nazis who killed other parts of his family in Hungary and Austria. Being an ex-Communist, led him into suspicion both by the French authorities and the Communists themselves. Koestler was to experience other traumas after this, notably being imprisoned in Franco's Spain (documented in his book "Spanish Testament"). "The Homeless Mind" is the only modern biography of Koestler I'm aware of and should be available from this stockist... and talks of this fascinating and intelligent but sometimes stupid and brutal man.

No French inhabitants can on a general basis be proud of their countrys efforts during the second world war, after reading this masterpiece. The funny thing about the fact that anti-fascists generally were treated worse than both the jews and the fascists is that we in some extent can find the same phenomena in todays western society. The Koestler description of the things happening to them are to be found again in todays Germany, for instance, where anti-fascicst demonstrating again the newnazis are arrested, while the nazis to some extent are given amnesty. The book shows how "doing as believing" will be judged as a non.conform act, as long as the majority of society prefer "not doing at all".