Journey through the night

More about the book

In 1948, a Holocaust memoir was published in German under the title Notes from a Bunker and the authorship of Jakob Littner. In 1991, the book was republished as Jakob Littner's Notes from a Bunker authored by Wolfgang Koeppen, a noted postwar German novelist who died in 1996. Koeppen's book bore the appellation "a novel."As it turns out, Koeppen worked from a fully completed typescript written by Jakob Littner who did indeed experience the horrific events described in this "novel" and who then emigrated to America, where he died in 1950. This is his own true story, with additional family and historical material provided by a younger relative. Littner's story is unusual in that it takes place not in a concentration camp but in a town in Ukraine on the Eastern front.