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

Renouard, Jean-Pierre

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 144221399X ISBN 13: 9781442213999

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011

Synopsis

This remarkable memoir tells the story of Jean-Pierre Renouard, a gentile, in Germany's Nazi prison camps. In this spare, compelling narrative 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 by the Gestapo, crammed into a cattle wagon with a hundred others, and sent to Neuengamme in Germany. After two months, he was transferred to the Misburg subcamp. In both camps he suffered, as did all his fellow inmates, from insufficient food and shelter and no medicine while being forced to do long hours of hard labor. Renouard 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. Even after Allied troops liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, he had to wait painful months before he could return to France. Written in a deliberately neutral tone, without hatred or even resentment, Renouard's memoir is a memorial to those murdered and a powerful testimony to the human capacity to commit—and to survive—mass atrocity.

About this title

About the Author:

Jean-Pierre Renouard, a former member of the French Resistance, is a commander of the Legion of Honor. He was awarded the Medal of Resistance and the Croix de Guerre.

Review:

Renouard—gentile, former member of the French Resistance, and recipient of the Medal of Resistance—delivers an evocative first-person account of his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, and as a survivor in the wake of WWII. With vivid prose and striking details, Renouard renders scenes like a master storyteller: Shell fragments hit tent cloth 'with the sound of popping champagne corks,' and an SS guard whistles one of the author's favorite Bach concertos, unaware of the common ground between them. These fragmented moments are alternately absurd, heartwarming, and horrible. But whether the author is recalling the sensation of drinking a cold beer in a burning house, or the moans of his friend dying from systematic starvation in Bergen-Belsen, Renouard's account strives for objectivity and retains an unsentimental tone, painting a picture of human nature that is capable of generosity and evil. Having survived a place where inmates are considered less than human and their corpses are piled in the lavatories, the author affords both the Germans and their prisoners a humanity that the Nazi camps did not. Renouard claims the book should be read simply as 'an expression of myself, nothing more,' yet by also sharing the stories of those who did not live to record their own histories, this powerful debut memoir becomes far more than just one individual's WWII narrative. (Publishers Weekly)

With the utmost delicacy, Jean-Pierre Renouard culls his memories and unveils a fascinating world. . . . If he sometimes sketches with a wry smile, his testimony is no less poignant. Whether he recounts the trivial matter of trafficking gasoline in soup cans, the story of a Russian who eats a live mouse, or the gesture of a passing German who offers his gloves on the sly for the author’s bloody hands—each story is exemplary. And it is also a hopeful book because it demonstrates how in an impossible situation, people in distress still find the will to survive beyond ordinary resistance. Although the author is discreet about the problem of faith, it can be glimpsed throughout this magnificent testimony. (Le Figaro)

Nazi concentration camps, including the extermination centers, weren’t populated only by Jews; inmates included other racial and ethnic minorities and both religious and political dissidents. As a teenager, Renouard joined the French Resistance, primarily serving by gathering information and passing it on to higher-ups. He was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1944, and this harrowing memoir describes his experiences as he was transferred to a variety of camps over the next year, ending up in the notorious Bergen-Belsen death camp. . . . The sheer power of his experiences makes for a moving chronicle. There are moments here of comradeship and even acts of compassion from unexpected sources. But this is primarily a grim account of a struggle to stay alive as Renouard and others endure neglect, starvation, and rampant disease, making this an often-unpleasant but ultimately inspiring example of a triumph over seemingly unbearable conditions. (Booklist)

My Stripes Were Earned in Hell reads like a novel. It is an outstanding and inspiring example of one man’s triumph over insufferable conditions and his courage to survive, making this book a superb reading experience. (New York Journal of Books)

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 144221399X
• ISBN 13: 9781442213999
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 136