'I Am Healthy and I Feel Fine'. The Auschwitz Letters of Marian Henryk Serejski

This extraordinary book contains 25 letters sent by Auschwitz prisoner Marian Henryk Serejski to his wife. Also, included is his personal history, description of the content of the letters, and many photographs, copies of Auschwitz documents. In the introduction, Mr. Serejski's daughter Krystyna Serejski Olszer writes:"In front of me is a packet of letters sent by my father from the concentration camp at Auschwitz. There are twentyfive of them. Not very many. They arrived regularly from January 1941 through March 1942. Each is comprised of four lined pages. On the first page is the prisoner's personal data and the rules governing correspondence signed by Der Lagerkommandant. With the exception of two postcards, all the letters look the same and, at face value, do not differ much in content. But this is only at face value; they were deliberately composed and assiduously edited to deceive the censors. Even after many years, the code created by my parents was still not entirely clear to me. Because of this it is only now that I can fully interpret this correspondence and connect it to the experiences of a small girl who was a witness and participant in this family drama.[...] Dr. Zygmunt Gross, with whom I worked on the translation of these letters, bored with sentences about unchanging good moods and changeable weather, once commented: "There's nothing sensational here, is there?" Quite the contrary, for me the reading of these letters was unusually interesting and led me to believe that they could be more important than I had previously thought. But the translator's comment made me realize that I needed to provide a more extensive commentary which, eventually, I wrote based on preserved documents, my own memories, and my mother's notes (see "A Daughter Remembers").[...] It was important to work out a code that would allow them to convey information about the true situation of my father and his family and about the efforts to win his release."