You've Got to Tell Them
Grinspan, Ida, Poirot-Delpech, BertrandOn a quiet winter night in 1944, as part of their support of the Third Reich's pogrom of European Jews, French authorities arrested Ida Grinspan, a young Jewish girl hiding in a neighbor's home in Nazi-occupied France. Of the many lessons she would learn after her arrest and the subsequent year and a half in Auschwitz, the most notorious concentration camp of the Holocaust, the first was that "barbarity enters on tiptoes . . . [even] in a hamlet where everything seemed to promise the peaceful slumber of places forgotten by history."
Translated by Charles B. Potter, You've Got to Tell Them is the result of a friendship that formed in 1988, when Grinspan returned to visit Auschwitz for the first time since 1945 and where she met Bertrand Poirot-Delpeche, a distinguished writer for the Paris newspaper Le Monde. Sometimes speaking alone, sometimes speaking in close alternation, Grinspan and Poirot-Delpeche simultaneously narrate the story of her survival and the...