As a member of a resistance group, Robert Antelme was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris in June 1944. He was taken to Fresnes, then to the labor camp in Gandersheim, and finally transported in one of the freight trains where prisoners were moved across Germany for weeks under terrible conditions just before the end of the war, to the concentration camp Dachau. After his liberation, with the help of François Mitterrand, who was a member of the same resistance cell as Antelme and was now responsible for prisoners of war in de Gaulle's cabinet, he was brought to Paris. He survived a long and painful process of physical recovery lasting several months. His account "The Human Race" is one of the most significant testimonies written immediately after the war. In it, Antelme describes the systematic extermination carried out by the Nazis.