André Rogerie

André Rogerie (25 December 1921 – May 2014 ) was a member of the French Resistance in World War II and survivor of seven Nazi concentration camps who testified after the war about what he had seen in the camps.

Rogerie was born in Villefagnan in the Charente department of south-western France. His trajectory was "typical of the complexity of the movement of deportees among the camps." His eyewitness account of Auschwitz-Birkenau exemplifies the self-published eyewitness accounts published in the immediate aftermath of the war, but ignored until the 1980s. He is also notable for having produced the oldest contemporary sketch of a camp crematorium, also ignored by historians for decades until the 1987 publication of Le Monde juif by .

Early years and entry into the French Resistance André Rogerie was born to Joseph and Jeanne Rogerie in Villefagnan, in the department of Charente in western France on 25 December 1921, the fifth child in a Catholic military family. His father was an officer who died in 1923 from wounds he received in World War I. It was at that moment that he learned about the extermination of the Jews. He made a promise to himself to bear witness if he were to get out alive.

After the liberation

On 13 April 1945, the Americans liberated the sector. Rogerie remained one month in a German school, regaining . He began writing his memoir in a school notebook. After a month, he was evacuated to France by truck, arriving in Angouleme on 17 May 1945. He continued writing, with his sister helping with the typing, and completed his manuscript on 21 October. He self-published it in 1945 under the title "You Win By Living" (Vivre c'est vaincre) with a print run of 1,000 copies using monies he received as back salary.

He illustrated his book with a map of Birkenau and a sketch of a crematorium both drawn from memory. This graphic was credited by as being the oldest of its kind and highly accurate. The fact of having drawn it immediately after liberation became a source of relief to Rogerie, because what he lived through later seemed so incredible, that he sometimes wondered if it was possible. He believed that what he lived through was so beyond normal experience that words fail. "The deportees try to recount it—actual historical facts, but unimaginable—but how to convey the cold, the hunger, the beatings, the suffering, the cries, the howling, the shrieks, the fear, the fatigue, the filth, the stink, the promiscuity, the endlessness, the poverty, the disease, the torture, the horror, the hangings, the gas chambers, the deaths?"

Rogerie matriculated as an officer candidate in Saint-Cyr, the French West Point or Sandhurst, in 1946. He chose a specialty in engineering and was posted to Germany before going on to French Indochina. Auschwitz-Birkenau. Leçons de ténèbres (Auschwitz-Birkenau. Lessons from the Gloom), Plon, 1995. Calembredaines et billevesées (Claptrap and Balderdash), 1995 ; FRBnF: 35827440w.