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I Survived A Secret Nazi Extermination Camp

A Shocking True Story

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I Survived A Secret Nazi Extermination Camp

By: Mark Irwin Forstater
Narrated by: David Suchet, Mark Forstater
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About this listen

Rudolf Reder was the only postwar survivor of Belzec, an infamous Nazi death camp where 700,000 Jews were killed in a few short months. David Suchet reads Mr. Reder's little-known but remarkable and shocking firsthand account of how the SS organised death on an industrial and inhuman scale. Mark Forstater provides an introduction to the audio and adds a personal memoir of his own family, and how he discovered Mr. Reder's witness statement.

©2012 Mark Forstater Productions Ltd. (P)2012 Mark Forstater Productions Ltd. Holocaust Survival
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I’m a keen listener to any holocaust first hand account. I’m not sure of my motives, not being Jewish. I feel a strong affinity with the underdog, and considerable sympathy for the Jewish race. I don’t think it’s “morbid voyeurism”, words used by Mark Forstater in Chapter 3, or “misery porn” as used by some today. It does however give me gratitude when I am overwhelmed with my own (minimal) problems.

Given I have now read or listened to nearly every account, surprisingly I consider this one by Rudolf Reder to be the most powerful for his parsimony and direct recounting of the key elements of the suffering. Its shortness is a strength not a weakness. Given he was only one (or two) to survive, its power is boosted. What he conveys is the destruction of the will against the most precise account of human cruelty inflicted, and one feels the every minute nightmare of the experience. In Belzec there is very little of the “meaning” that one here’s about in “Man’s Search For Meaning” in Auschwitz. It comes across as the worst place of them all with more suicidal thoughts among the imprisoned than anywhere else.

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