Pilgrim among the shadows

the long version

Boris Pahor, a Slovene from Trieste, spent the last fourteen months of World War II as a prisoner and medic in the camps at Belsen, Harzungen, Dachau, and Natzweiler. His fellow prisoners comprised a veritable microcosm of Europe - Italians, French, Russians, Dutch, Poles, Germans. Twenty years later, he visits a camp in the Vosges mountains which has been preserved as an historical monument. Images of the camps come back to him: corpses being carried to the ovens; emaciated prisoners, in wooden clogs and ragged, zebra-striped clothes, struggling up the steps of a quarry, or standing at roll call in the cold rain; the infirmary, reeking of dysentery and death. Pahor gives a stirring account of his attempts to render medical aid in the face of utter brutality and mass death. And of the ineradicable guilt he feels, having survived when millions did not.