A book by Hermann Wenkart · Free to read & listen

Command Responsibility

A Different Perspective — Facts by a Jewish Camp Official

Hermann Wenkart, my grandfather, was deported from Vienna to Poland in 1940. As the Jewish camp elder of the Deblin-Irena forced labor camp he stood between the German command and a thousand prisoners — a position of impossible choices. He wrote this account in 1963; it is published here in full, together with historical analysis, the story of survivor Sam Harris, and the history of the Dęblin camp.

“The inner need to write and free myself from the burden of experience by putting it on paper.”

— Dunja Rosen, the Jewish writer, on why she was compelled to write

27k words · approx. 3.1 hours · 2024 Edition, edited and with a foreword by Michael Marcovici