Speak You Also A Survivor's Reckoning

Arrested in Paris in 1943, the sixteen-year-old Steinberg was deported to Auschwitz. As a chemistry student, he was assigned to work in the camp's laboratory alongside Primo Levi, who would later immortalize him as "Henri," the prisoner who clung to his life at the cost of his own humanity in Survival in Auschwitz. Fifty years later, in this unsparing act of self-examination, Steinberg ultimately confirms Levi's judgment of him: "Probably I was that creature, prepared to use whatever means I had available." But he asks, "Is it so wrong to survive?"

Paul Steinberg was born in Berlin in 1926 and immigrated to France at the age of seven. Deported to Auschwitz in l943, he was the only member of his family to survive the war. After liberation, Steinberg returned to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1999.