Speak You Also

Arrested in Paris in 1943, the sixteen-year-old Steinberg was deported to Auschwitz. As a chemistry student, he was assigned to work in the camp's laboratory alongside Primo Levi, who would later immortalize him as "Henri," the prisoner who clung to his life at the cost of his own humanity in Survival in Auschwitz. Fifty years later, in this unsparing act of self-examination, Steinberg ultimately confirms Levi's judgement of him: "Probably I was that creature, prepared to use whatever means I had available." But he asks, "Is it so wrong to survive?"