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So different from David Koker's 400 page At The Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944 ... composed as diary entries sent surreptitiously to friends in Holland, and altogether different from cousin Odd Nansen's book: From Day To Day: One Man's Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps ... both books published after the fact ... Koker's long after his death on the way from Auschwitz to Dachau, near the end of the war, but primarily composed during his interment at Konzentrationslager Herzogenbush,, located near a small Dutch village called Vught.
Koker managed to make a life in what eventually became a transit camp, by becoming "useful', both as a teacher of the children in the camp ... and as a worker at the Phllips Electronic Corporation workshop.

Nansen, of course, wasn't Jewish, but he was arrested at his home in Norway, when it became known that he had helped German Jews escape Germany ... (actually, before the war even started).. Compared to some concentration camp inmates, he was an "Aryan", and the son of Fridtjof Nansen, world famous Arctic explorer (and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize),, Odd Nansen was somewhat privileged during his internment at prison camps in Grini, near Oslo, at Veidal, north of the Arctic Circle ... and later, at Sachsenhausen, the notorious German Concentration Camp north of Berlin. Nansen managed to keep an almost daily diary ... each page of which was spirited out of those camps to his wife in Oslo. As his diary was written to his wife, Nansen must have concealed much of the truth of what he experienced and saw ... if only to spare her feelings. His book was published after his return to Norway. Later translated into English, Nansen's book fills more than 600 pages.

On the other hand, Joseph Kohout's slim 120 page remembrance: The Men With The Pink Triangle, was compiled years after the war by Hans Neumann, based on a series of interviews with Kohout. Free by then to say exactly what he thought and experienced ... Kohout's brief narrative pulls no punches.

After being arrested in March 1939 by the SS,at his Austrian home, Kohout spent his first six months imprisoned in Austria, after which he was transferred to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp .. and though, like Nansen, not Jewish, Kohout, being a despised "homosexual" ... (despised not only by their Nazi overlords, but by every other concentration camp inmate), he saw and experienced many of the particularly brutal horrors inflicted by the SS upon his kind.(Note: The play BENT was based on his experiences at Sachsenhausen)

In May 1940 Kohout was transferred to Flossenburg Concentration Camp, located just west of the Czech border. Young, intelligent, and educated,, Kohout quickly learned that survival depended upon bending his moral principles to conform to the needs of those few who were in positions of power ... whether they be SS or a CAPO ... a prisoner in charge of work details. Six long years later ... Joseph Kohout and all the other prisoners at Flossenburg were told they were to be marched out under SS guard ... on their way (like David Koker) to Dachau. After walking for three days and nights, the prisoners awoke to find their SS guards had mysteriously vanished ...After spending the next night in a farmer's barn, they awoke to the sound of American tanks ... and freedom.

The only quibble I have with Hans Neumann's book is that apparently Joseph Kohout did not edit the manuscript. Neumann's rendition of the horrors witnessed and experienced by Joseph Kohout seems all too matter-of-fact ... Neumann's version lacks a certain force of "I was there This is what I saw and experienced, and this is how those things affected me."

I can appreciate this work, but I alternate in thinking it needed to be longer. But this does tell the story of one particular gentleman who was in a camp because he was gay. He had it better than most that is for sure, or at least what I have heard. ( )

This is a recent translation of a book which is a statement of a homosexual man who was sent to the concentration camps during the Second World War, as told to another person.

It is very well written, contains much information on the day-to-day life of "the men wearing pink triangles" - the pink triangle symbolising that the wearer is homosexual - in a concentration camp.

Being homosexual, they were considered as bad as Jews and Romani people, and even worse than the pedofiles and convicted criminals (not that being convicted during the nazi regime actually meant something).

All in all: naturally very upsetting, but not written as a scare tactic, but very upfront. The afterword is especially interesting, while Jonas Gardell's self-serving foreword is quite bad. ( )

Sometimes there are books that as you read them that you can't stop yourself from crying because they are a truth that one can't fathom within themselves. This was one of those books. A gay survivor of a concentration camp tells his story to Heinz Heger, but only under the pretenses that he remains anonymous. Through this story we discover the life of a pink triangle (gay male) in the concentration camp. We are drawn into this story in a profound way because we see the survival techniques that the man had to use to survive throughout his years in the camps. He had to resort to things that he never thought he would have to do in his life, but he did them because life was that important to him (which it is for almost everyone).

While there is one graphic scene (involving a camp guard getting pleasure from the whipping of prisoners) the majority of the book opens up the doors of the workings of the concentration camps. You learn the chain of command and the inner workings in a way that many other books about the Holocaust simply do not do. It also shows you the world that these men with the pink triangle found themselves in and how they were treated worse than many of the other people because of their homosexuality. This book has so much that one can take from it that it is a bit overwhelming, but when you close the book you will be better off for doing so. It can help you understand why hatred for this particular group still exists even in our modern society, but why we need to learn not to be so hateful. ( )