The Last of the Just

André Schwarz-Bart was born in Metz, France, to parents who had immigrated from Poland four years earlier. Following their deportation in 1942, Schwarz-Bart joined the French Resistance, reputedly the youngest person to do so. At age thirty-one, Schwarz-Bart made history through the publication of his family saga, Le dernier des justes (The Last of the Just). Embracing eight centuries of Jewish life in Europe, the novel exposed the Christian roots of Nazi paganism, indicted the Vichy regime, and, most outrageously, penetrated the very heart of darkness—the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Provoking a major controversy at home, it became the first internationally best-selling novel on the Holocaust. Schwarz-Bart died in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, where he lived with his wife.