In 2019, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, the story of survival and suffering by and about Sim Kessel was published. The young Frenchman, Jew and professional boxer, wrote his autobiography about the years 1940-45 in 1969, describing how he survived against all odds in Auschwitz and other concentration and extermination camps of the Nazi regime.

In 1940, immediately after his demobilisation, he joined the French resistance movement against the German occupation of France, the Résistance. Two years later, he was arrested by the Gestapo. Despite torture, he confessed nothing about his underground work.

As a Jew, he was transferred to Drancy near Paris, imprisoned there and subsequently deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Under the appalling conditions of the Nazi extermination camps, as number 130 665, he unloaded building materials in Birkenau and worked in the mines of Jawarzno.

Completely exhausted and ill, a simple bureaucratic error saved him from the gas chamber for the first time. In 1943, the camp Gestapo again tried to force him to confess his resistance activities. He was tortured, one of his fingers was torn out. He was saved from the gas chamber a second time, this time by an SS man who was also a boxer. Paris had been freed for three months when he tried to escape. He failed to escape and was hanged in front of 25,000 deportees. The rope broke. That meant murder by a shot in the neck. But the executioner who was supposed to shoot him was also a boxer and saved him at the last minute. On 18 January 1945, Auschwitz was evacuated. The death march followed, in daily stages of thirty to forty kilometres, for thirteen days, to the Mauthausen concentration camp, then to the Gusen 2 camp. On the morning of 7 May 1945, the deportees were suddenly alone in the deserted camp; the Germans had fled from the US army.

Sim Kessel’s autobiography was first published in his native French in 1970, followed by English editions in the years that followed. The German first edition is now available for the first time. The book is being published to mark the 100th anniversary birthday of Sim Kessel, who was born in July 1919.

You can order the paperback, the e-book and the hardcover edition here: