From Normandy to Auschwitz

The unforgettable memoir of a WWII French Resistance fighter who survived the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

 


Paul le Goupil was about to take his first job as a teacher when Germany invaded France in May of 1940. Soon after, he joined the Front National and found his life irreversibly shaped by the horrors of the Second World War. Organizing the Front Patriotique de la Jeunesse in Normandy in 1943, le Goupil was militant in his defiance of the Nazi occupation of his homeland, but nevertheless was captured by the Gestapo. What followed was a catalog of brutality and despair, first in solitary confinement in French prisons, later in several labor camps, leading finally to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He was subjected to beatings, starvation, and a torturous SS march before his miraculous liberation at the hands of the Russian army. His experiences are captured here in a memoir rich with detail, emotion, and the spirit of a true survivor.