The Human Race

The Human Race (1947) - an autobiographical tale, or rather a true story - is the first and last book of Robert Antelme (1917-1990), a French writer, poet, and Resistance participant. It represents a unique testimony describing the dehumanization of people in camps and the will to live, due to which a person - despite everything - retains their belonging to humanity.

Initially almost unnoticed, the book was over time translated into several European languages and gave rise to a number of thorough philosophical interpretations of the phenomenon of camp life - the events of prisoners, guards, and accomplices. The book by Antelme was written about by Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, Sara Kofman and Edgar Morin, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Marguerite Duras and Georges Perec, who asserted that with the appearance of this book, literature was born anew.