It is always very difficult to say something about such books. It is very hard to read it, but it is impossible stop reading at the same time. You’re overcome with emotions and feelings. One want to whisper to the heroes “don’t give up! Help is coming.” It’s terrible to believe that all this things were here, in this world in which you habitually get up in the morning to work and complain about the morning traffic jams. It is impossible to imagine what these people had to go through and how they could not lose the “spark of life” in themselves. Everyone without exception should read such books. To know that war is only not battles and heroic feats on the battlefield, to know that hope and team spirit can save hundreds of lives, even If you think you’re in hell. Perhaps in a hundred years, when the word “war” will be used only in lessons of history, a child asks: “Why are there no more wars on Earth?” And the teacher will tell him that it’s all about awareness. It’s about the fact that people have learned what is the destruction, that no one can decide that his life is more valuable or more important than the life of another person. And literature helped people to understand all these simple truths. Such are the stories where you live a part of life with a man who is called simply 509, where you believe that love gives people strength, where you learn to understand how mutual support is important. E. M. Remarque does not try to explain to us the reasons of what happens, he only shows portraits of those who stood at the head of the concentration camps. That’s why this novel is so unique. It is severe, because it is truthful.

The point is that it is a novel about people. Not about how they suffered, but about how they managed to survive. How they did everything possible not to be broken. After many years spent in the camp, death is not as terrible as the danger of losing oneself and turning into a soulless creature that have no thoughts and feelings but the need to eat and sleep. Not everyone managed to save himself, not everyone managed get through this. But someone still could – not without painful tries, but could. The main goal is not to lose the spark of life.

Such books change something inside of you for the better. Forever. And I will remember this story.