Le Sel, la cendre, la flamme: La tragedie du Vercors ( The Tragedy of the Vercors )

Le sel, la cendre, la flamme [Salt, Ash, Fire] by Henri Rosencher is the memoir of a resistor to the Nazis, from his birth in Warsaw in 1915, his young manhood as a Marxist medical student in Paris, through his imprisonment at the Natzweiler-Struthof and Dachau concentration camps, to his return to a world in which none of his family remained.

Along the way, he was:

- a soldier for France

- twice arrested and twice escaped from prisoner of war camps

- a scout and weapons instructor in the British initiatives in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and

- an explosives expert in the desperate resistance struggle to liberate the Vercors plateau in France,

the experience you will read here.

This chapter, “The Tragedy of the Vercors” is a gripping insider’s narrative of the controversial betrayal by the Allies of the most promising insurrection in Western Europe from which very few survived to tell the tale.

Dr. Rosencher resides in Paris with his wife, and on my visit with him in December of 2000 he summarized his book, in his inscription to me, as “memories of somber but exalting times.”

Dr. Rosencher’s book, winner of the prestigious French “Literary Prize of the Resistance,” in the English language, deserves to be published in English and the reading public will then be treated to one heck of a good read as well as a powerful education about what makes a Jew a warrior in desperate times.

Henri Rosencher images

 

 

 

"To Mrs. Diana Mara Henry with gratitude and my friendship for her action and dovotion to make known the horrors of Hitlerism. A resistor, H. Rosencher."