My Stripes Were Earned in Hell: A French Resistance Fighter's Memoir of Survival in a Nazi Prison Camp

This remarkable memoir tells the story of Jean-Pierre Renouard, a gentile, in Germany's Nazi prison camps. In this spare, compelling memoir of a year during which he and the world he knew descended into hell, he recounts his battle to survive physically, emotionally, and morally. In May 1944, just a month before D-Day, Renouard, then a teenaged French underground fighter, was captured and imprisoned by the Gestapo. He vividly depicts the labor camps' brutal daily life and social hierarchies, his personal struggles, the friendships gained and lost, and, of course, his incredible and primary task of survival. When he was finally transferred to the infamous Bergen-Belsen death camp, a typhus epidemic had already spread, and he helplessly watched his last surviving comrades die before Allied troops liberated the camp on April 15, 1945. Written in a deliberately neutral tone, without hatred or even resentment, Renouard's memoir is a memorial to those murdered and powerful testimony to the human capacity to commit and to survive mass atrocity.