Sajer, Guy Der vergessene Soldat

Born in Alsace to a French father and a German mother, Sajer was seventeen years old when he was drawn into the maelstrom of the Second World War in 1942. He was quicker than most to find his voice again and left behind a uniquely captivating document that comes as close as the simple stringing together of words can as the horror of war and the helplessness with which individual soldiers face the overwhelming forces arrayed against them. While everything seems like a great adventure to the young friends, Sajer and Halls, at the beginning, hunger, cold, fear and the unleashed violence of war in Kursk, Kharkov and Bjelgorod soon bring them back down to earth. But this war has already completely engulfed them and there is no turning back. The tide begins to turn in the East, and the German soldiers in Russia embark on a tough, hard and cruelly fought retreat that takes the friends via Romania and Poland to Memel on the Baltic Sea, where they experience the bloody inferno of doom. In the end, what remains is the profound humanity of great suffering, something greater and more resonant than even the documentation of the time and the war. Sajer brings this to light from his memories, and we cannot and do not want to know what infinite effort this may have cost him.