Sky Tinged Red: A Chronicle of Two and a Half Years in Auschwitz

''Yes, even in the concentration camps one could distinguish between beasts and human beings, who, although they were physically abused and rundown, remained spiritually dignified.''

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a planet unto itself, with its own brutal hierarchy of enslavement. For prisoners there, days were marked by hunger, hard labor, beatings and fear. Yet even in the extermination hub of Europe's Jews, seeds of dignity and humanity took root. Sons ''organized'' food to sustain their ill fathers. Friends found each other work. Some plotted escape and others armed resistance.

Sky Tinged Red is Isaia Eiger's chronicle of two and a half years as a prisoner in Birkenau. As a schreiber--intake scribe--and member of the resistance movement Eiger's knowledge of the camp was extensive. His incisive record of those he met documents the extremes of human behavior, highlighting the courage of those who maintained their humanity in a world dominated by brutality. Written shortly after the war, Sky Tinged Red, for both its compassionate narrative and the remarkable story of its publication, is a tribute to the power of survivor testimony and the transmission of memory through successive generations.