The Polish writer Wieslaw Kielar experienced a hell created and organized by humans - the concentration camp Auschwitz, the largest Nazi extermination camp during World War II. In Auschwitz, the torturers and murderers of the Third Reich systematically killed about 1.6 million people. Auschwitz is the ultimate, brutal expression of German racial arrogance and megalomania; these are methods of extermination that can only be conceived by minds filled with contempt for humanity. Auschwitz is a sea of pain, torment, humiliation, and fear of death. Auschwitz is a trauma for humanity that cannot be erased. Who can think of Auschwitz and still believe naively that humanity is evolving towards greater humanity? Has Auschwitz at least prevented new wars, extermination camps, and torture horrors? Years after World War II, Wieslaw Kielar wrote a book about his experiences in the hell of Auschwitz, from a temporal and inner distance, a book that transcends all conventional literary criteria. It possesses all the characteristics of a great novel: powerful language, gripping portrayals of human characters, and tension, as cynical as that term may sound in this context. Yet it is much more than a novel; it is a document of human suffering capacity, a document of human greatness amidst human baseness.