Beyond the Darkness

Description

A memoir of a French resistance fighter and concentration camp inmate during WWII. A survivor of the Armenian Genocide and Nazi concentration camps, Mihran Mavian bears witness to some of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century. A French-Armenian communist and resistance fighter, he worked as a liaison agent for the Workers International Movement against Nazi occupation in Paris before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. Tortured and starved, as he was transported from Fresnes prison to Compiègne-Royallieu, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Flossenbürg extermination camps, Mavian survived against all odds. Returning to Paris in 1945, weighing just 40 kilos, he went on to testify against his captors. A tribute to his fellow prisoners-including Armenians arrested in France and officers and soldiers of the Soviet army-who were treated with extreme cruelty and almost none of whom survived the camps, his memoir was first published in Armenian in 1976. It was translated into French by his daughter Alice Mavian in 2010.