Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Simone Veil — we know some concentration camp survivors today because of the testimonies they wrote, or their political or literary work.
Their names will shine during the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, including the largest and best known among them, Auschwitz, which was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945 by the Russian army.
As French psychoanalyst Anne-Lise Stern, herself a survivor of this camp in Poland, wrote: “Having been in the camp, alone, does not make you a Primo Levi.” The anonymous survivors did not write successful books (Levi is the author of the moving memoir, If This is a Man) and some never shared testimonies of their experience.
