Book Description

Memoirs of Sobolewski, as told to Tanenbaum. Sobolewski, a Pole born in Nisko in 1923, spent four and a half years in Auschwitz from its very beginning - hence the title and his identity as "prisoner 88." As a Pole, he was relatively privileged, but saw how most Jews were either killed immediately or subjected to far more tormenting and lethal treatment than others. 20 years after the war he had an experience that transformed him into a witness of the Jewish suffering he had seen and a protester against Holocaust denial and neo-Nazism in Canada and against attempts (especially at the museum at Auschwitz) to de-Judaize the Holocaust in Poland. He expresses great concern about the failures of his own Roman Catholic Church during the Holocaust as well as its failure since to fully repent. He has been active in trying to teach younger generations about the Holocaust. His testimony includes information on the gas chambers and crematoria, the revolt of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Birkenau, and other aspects of the Holocaust that others have tried to dispute or reject. To draw attention to his role, Sobolewski has appeared in public in the uniform of a concentration camp prisoner.