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Painful questions will keep disturbing the nation's conscience, begging for right solutions. But when the civilized world probes them in the future, our children and grandchildren will at least be able to turn to books such as this, as a proof that the martyrs were not totally forgotten. </p>--Stephane Groueff, <em>Boston Book Review</em></p>

Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-born French philosopher, studied the phenomenon of the concentration camps in totalitarian societies from the detached point of view of the historian and social scientist he is, with as much objectivity as is possible for a normal mind. Taking for example the death camp in Lovech, he used personal accounts by former prisoners and guards in books and interviews published soon after the fall of Communist dictator Zhivkov, or included in the overwhelming 1990 documentary film The Survivors (Stories from the Camps) by director Atanas Kiryakov. The value of Todorov s book is not so much as a sinister chronicle of atrocities by psychopaths empowered to dispose of their fellow men s lives. What is impressive is his analysis of the reasons for and nature of such abominable practices. His chilling conclusion is that they were not an exception, not an aberration, but an inherent part of the entire system, a conditio sine qua non institutionalized by the regime. Stephane Groueff, Boston Book Review

Painful questions will keep disturbing the nation's conscience, begging for right solutions. But when the civilized world probes them in the future, our children and grandchildren will at least be able to turn to books such as this, as a proof that the martyrs were not totally forgotten. --Stephane Groueff, Boston Book Review Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-born French philosopher, studied the phenomenon of the concentration camps in totalitarian societies from the detached point of view of the historian and social scientist he is, with as much objectivity as is possible for a normal mind. Taking for example the death camp in Lovech, he used personal accounts by former prisoners and guards in books and interviews published soon after the fall of Communist dictator Zhivkov, or included in the overwhelming 1990 documentary film The Survivors (Stories from the Camps) by director Atanas Kiryakov. The value of Todorov's book is not so much as a sinister chronicle of atrocities by psychopaths empowered to dispose of their fellow men's lives. What is impressive is his analysis of the reasons for and nature of such abominable practices. His chilling conclusion is that they were not an exception, not an aberration, but an inherent part of the entire system, a conditio sine qua non institutionalized by the regime. --Stephane Groueff, Boston Book Review

Painful questions will keep disturbing the nation's conscience, begging for right solutions. But when the civilized world probes them in the future, our children and grandchildren will at least be able to turn to books such as this, as a proof that the martyrs were not totally forgotten. --Stephane Groueff, Boston Book Review

Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-born French philosopher, studied the phenomenon of the concentration camps in totalitarian societies from the detached point of view of the historian and social scientist he is, with as much objectivity as is possible for a normal mind. Taking for example the death camp in Lovech, he used personal accounts by former prisoners and guards in books and interviews published soon after the fall of Communist dictator Zhivkov, or included in the overwhelming 1990 documentary film The Survivors (Stories from the Camps) by director Atanas Kiryakov. The value of Todorov's book is not so much as a sinister chronicle of atrocities by psychopaths empowered to dispose of their fellow men's lives. What is impressive is his analysis of the reasons for and nature of such abominable practices. His chilling conclusion is that they were not an exception, not an aberration, but an inherent part of the entire system, a conditio sine qua non institutionalized by the regime. --Stephane Groueff, Boston Book Review

Author Information

Born in Sofia, Tzvetan Todorov left Bulgaria in the early 1960s and moved to Paris, where he established himself as a literary theorist, historian of ideas, and world-renowned essayist. He is a director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the author of numerous books. Several of these have been translated into English, including: Facing the Extreme (1996), A French Tragedy (1996), On Human Diversity (1993), and The Conquest of America (1984). Robert D. Zaretsky is an Associate Professor at the University of Houston where he holds a joint appointment in the Honors College and the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. He is the author of Nimes at War: Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion in the Department of the Gard, 1938–94 (Penn State, 1995), which won the 1997 Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

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