Charles Emmerson is an Australian-born writer and historian. He studied modern history at Oxford University and international relations in Paris. He is the author of The Future History of the Arctic and 1913: The World Before the Great War.Emmerson's latest book is Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World 1917-24.
At the Guardian he tagged ten top eyewitness accounts of 20th-century history, including:
If This Is a Man by Primo Levi [US title: Survival in Auschwitz]Read about another entry on the list.
It was decades before Levi’s account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in 1946 while working in a Turin paint factory, took on the significance it holds today. A testament told with simplicity and directness: the details of camp life and the visceral sensations accompanying it, the accumulation of horrors, the tenuousness of hope and then, one day: “The Germans were no longer there. The watchtowers were empty.”
Survival in Auschwitz is among six of Samantha Powers's favorite books, Michael Palin's six best books, Eve Claxton's top ten memoirs and autobiographies, and Gail Caldwell's five groundbreaking memoirs.
--Marshal Zeringue
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