You've Got to Tell Them

You've Got to Tell Them, first published in France in 2002, is the result of a friendship formed at Auschwitz in 1988 when Ida Grinspan, a former child prisoner of the camp, returned to visit the site from her native France for the first time since 1945. While there she met Bertrand Poirot-Delpeche, already a distinguished writer for the Paris newspaper Le Monde. As recounted by Ida and told by Poirot-Delpeche, You've Got to Tell Them is the story of Ida's arrest in German occupied France as part of the Third Reich's pogrom of European Jews. She recounts her imprisonment at Auschwitz and how she survived for the next year and a half in the concentration camp as a young girl. Later, Grinspan describes how she lived through the experience of being a survivor in the decades that followed as well as how she began doing lectures in schools and guiding groups that visited the death camps.

You've Got to Tell Them is an energetically told account of survival from the point of view of a young French Jewish girl. What truly sets the book apart from similar accounts is the clarity that results from Ida's account as mediated by Poirot-Delpeche.