NON-FICTION: SURVIVING THE HOLOCAUST.

Much has been said and written about the horrors at the concentration camps and the crimes that took place across Europe during the Holocaust. A number of writers have shared their experiences of the camps during the Second World War, but Last Stop Auschwitz: My Story of Survival from Within the Camp by Eddy de Wind is believed to be the only book written from inside a concentration camp.

De Wind was the last Jewish doctor to graduate from Leiden University in the Netherlands, before the German occupiers began forcing Dutch universities to exclude Jewish students and faculty. He volunteered to work at Westerbork - a transit camp for the deportation of Jews in north-eastern Netherlands - as he was told that his mother, who had earlier been taken to Westerbork, would be exempted from deportation in exchange for his work. However, at the camp, he found out that she had already been sent to Auschwitz. While working at Westerbork, he met Friedel, a nurse, and soon they got married. The couple was deported to Auschwitz in 1943.

Located in southern Poland, Auschwitz - the largest of the Nazi concentration and death camps - was set up in 1940 as a detention centre for political prisoners. However, it soon became a network of camps where Jewish people and anti-Nazi activists, politicians, resistance members and luminaries from the cultural and scientific communities were detained. A sub-camp within the Auschwitz complex - Auschwitz II-Birkenau - contained the notorious crematoriums.

It is believed that, during the Second World War, about 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz, out of which 1.1 million lost their lives, including 960,000 Jews. Those who were initially spared, died of starvation, exhaustion, disease or beatings; many were subjected to brutal medical experiments.

In January 1945, an estimated 60,000 prisoners were forced to make the death march to other locations, as German officials left the camp in fear of the approaching Soviet army. On entering Auschwitz, the Soviets found thousands of emaciated detainees who had been left behind.

Seventy five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, English readers get an extraordinary account of life in a concentration camp

To avoid the death march, De Wind hid in a pile of old rags and stayed in the camp. He found a register and some pencils and began to write about his experiences. He was so traumatised by the horrors of his experience that he created the character of Hans to be the narrator...