Boris Pahor spent the last fourteen months of World War II as a prisoner and medic in the Nazi camps at Bergen-Belsen, Harzungen, Dachau and Natzweiler-Struthof. Twenty years later, as he visited the preserved remains of a camp, his experiences came back to him: the emaciated prisoners; the ragged, zebra-striped uniforms; the infirmary reeking of dysentery and death.
Necropolis is Pahor's stirring account of providing medical aid to prisoners in the face of the utter brutality of the camps - and coming to terms with the guilt of surviving when millions did not. It is a classic account of the Holocaust and a powerful act of remembrance.
"
An extraordinary book . . . The raw intensity of Pahor's writing takes the reader deep into the world of the camps. It stands equal to Primo Levi's If This Is A Man
" - * Sunday Times *
"A superb English translation . . . [Pahor's] determination to provide the most truthful account possible brings him to question continually, and to examine every complication and contradiction. This is a testimony all of us would do well to discover" - * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"A harrowing book . . . described with hallucinatory precision and exceptionally subtle analysis" - * Le Monde *
"Deserves a place alongside Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz's masterpieces of Holocaust literature" - * La Repubblica *
"Extraordinarily poetic" - * Mirror *