Le sel, la cendre et la flamme

by Henri Rosencher

Henri Rosencher's "Le sel, la cendre, la flamme" [Salt, Ash, Fire] is the memoir of a resistor to the Nazis, from his birth in Warsaw in 1915, his young manhood as a Marxist medical student in Paris, through his imprisonment at the Natzweiler-Struthof (near Strasbourg, Alsace) and Dachau concentration camps, to his return to a world in which none of his family remained. He is the sole survivor of a family of seven. His mother, father, brother and wife (both deaf-mutes) their two children (ages 2 and 6 months), were all massacred by the Nazis. Along the way, he was a soldier for France, twice arrested and twice escaped from prisoner of war camps, a scout and weapons instructor in the British initiatives in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and, an explosives expert in the desperate resistance struggle to liberate the Vercors plateau [near the French Alpine town of Grenoble].