Available in English for the first time, Joaquim Amat-Piniella’s searing Catalan novel, K.L. Reich, is a central work of testimonial literature of the Nazi concentration camps. Begun immediately after Amat-Piniella’s liberation in 1945, the book is based on his own four-year internment at Mauthausen.   “When the war is over, remember all this. Remember me,” implores one of the book’s characters on his deathbed, and it is this call to bear witness that Amat-Piniella takes up in his account of the Spanish Republican fighters who were exiled in France at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and soon swept up into the German concentration camp system. As an already organized anti-fascist army, they played an important role as a nucleus of resistance within the camps, and their story is little known to English-language readers.   Because of the length of his internment, his decision to write his book as fiction, and his staggering powers of observation and recollection, Amat-Piniella’s portrayal of life in the camps is unmatched in scope and detail. It is also a compelling study of three powerful ideological movements at work at the time: anarchism, communism, and fascism, all within the desperate and brutal world of the camps.   “My book does not seek to deepen wounds or differences, but to unite people before cruelty,” said Amat-Piniella. This is an essential text as we ponder the twentieth century and its meaning to us today. This edition includes a new preface, annotations, and a translators’ note.

K.L. Reich (Memory and Testimony Studies, 1)

Literature & Fiction

Amat-Piniella, Joaquim

Genre Fiction

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

<p>About the Author\nJoaquim Amat-Piniella was a writer and a politician who fought in the Spanish Civil War. He later moved to France, where he was interned at concentration camps beginning in 1940, eventually being deported by the Germans to Mauthausen. He survived in the camp until his liberation in 1945. His books in Catalan include Ombres al calidoscopi, La pau a casa, Retaule en gris, La ribera deserta, and Roda de solitaris, among others. Ignacio Martínez de Pisón is a writer and a screenwriter. He is the author of a dozen books, including the novel La buena reputación.\nFrancesc and Emili, two ex republican soldiers in the Spanish Civil War who are now in the French army, get captured by Nazi troops. They, along with other Spanish former fighters, are deported to Mauthausen concentration camp, where their nightmare begins—the terrible experience that turns them into witnesses and victims of the so-called International of Pain. The story focuses on Emili, who manages to survive by making pornographic drawings for the SS. Through him we see the inner workings of the camp: the corrupt network of kapos, the different classes of prisoners, the horrific extermination system, the malnutrition—the inhumanity of one of the most tragic chapters of our history. Author Amat-Piniella wrote this novel, published for the first time in 1963, based on his experiences as a prisoner for nearly five years in different Nazi concentration camps. His objective was to carry on the memory of the thousands of Spaniards interned in camps.</p>

K. L. Reich (Spanish Edition)

Libros del Asteroide

K. L. Reich (El Balancí) (Catalan Edition)

Edicions 62

K.L. Reich

CLUB EDITOR 1959, S.L.

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