About 300,000 people were inmates of the Majdanek Concentration Camp (also spelled "Maidanek") at one time or another, and it was the best-preserved of all the camps because it was so close to the Russian border that the Nazis didn't have time to destroy it in their retreat. The camp is almost unknown in the West today, however. Functioning between October 1941 and July 1944, it mainly housed Jews, Poles and Russian prisoners of war. Rudolf Vrba was an inmate briefly, as was his brother, who died there.

The State Museum of Majdanek put together this slim book, which is basically a museum exhibit on paper: photographs of a few dozen secret letters written by inmates of the camp, the texts of those letters and some biographical information for the writers. Many of the letters are merely scraps, tattered and faded, and many of them are written in a kind of semi-code to avoid incrimination. The book explains the code and need for it. I think the letter-writers were all or mostly Polish rather than Jewish; at any rate, none of the letters are in Yiddish.

This book is interesting, although you need a decent knowledge of Nazi concentration camps to appreciate it. It's quite hard to find however, and oddly enough, the original Polish text is in more American libraries than the English translation. I would recommend this book for scholars rather than the ordinary reader; it's good and a worthy source, but not worth the trouble of trying to track down if you don't have a specific interest in the topic. ( )