The Desire to Live: Tragic Fates of Female Prisoners of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp

Before you is the culmination of seven years of labor and hundreds of testimonies from survivors: a story about women sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and about those who tried to wrench them from the clutches of death.

Stripped of protection and broken by fear, they nevertheless found within themselves incredible resilience, while doctors and Resistance members risked their own lives, refusing to become mere cogs in the murderous system.

This is a book of remembrance, a hymn to life and freedom—something that cannot be allowed to fade into oblivion.

The book is the result of seven years of work by writer and director Shoshana Buchobza: all this time she investigated the deportation of women to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which began in March 1942.

Drawing on hundreds of accounts by survivors and materials from postwar trials of SS men, the author reconstructs the everyday reality of a death camp and tells the stories of prisoners from all over occupied Europe.

At the heart of the narrative are the camp inmates, as well as underground workers who strove to save women from the gas chambers, and doctors who refused to take part in the SS’s experiments on human beings. In inhuman conditions and under the crushing weight of catastrophe, the prisoners of Auschwitz were left defenseless—but they displayed courage and valor. Written in their memory, this story sounds like a hymn to solidarity and freedom—and as testimony to the desire to live against all odds.