I had to bear witness in order to protect the future, bear witness in order to overcome the amnesia of my contemporaries. The result is a terrifying and heartbreaking memoir, extraordinary for its frankness and courage. As he noted, "If I do not speak, I will become the accomplice of my torturers". Finally, haunted by his experiences and by the silence of others, he decided to bear witness to an aspect of the Holocaust rarely seen. "The Liberation", he writes, "was for others". He found a wife through a personal ad, married, and raised three children. For nearly forty years he kept his experiences - including torture, humiliation, and witnessing the vicious murder of his lover at the hands of the Nazis - a secret in order to cover up his homosexuality. So begins the astonishing chain of events that led to the Schirmeck-Vorbruch concentration camp, where Seel suffered unspeakable horrors for the sole "crime" of being a homosexual.The story of survival in the camps has been told many times, but Seel's is one of the only firsthand accounts of the Nazi roundup and deportation of homosexuals. The Book Report: At the age of seventeen, in the arms of a thief, Pierre Seel felt his watch sliding off his wrist.
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