“For the purposes of my book, One Long Night, I defined the concentration camp as the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of some aspect of identity. It might be religion, or ethnicity, or race, or political affiliation, but it has to do more with your association or identity than anything you’ve actually done. I didn’t want to be too arbitrary about it. I looked at when that phrase, concentration camp, emerged for the mass detention of civilians and then how that idea changed over time. The goal of the book was to find out, ‘How did we get to Auschwitz? How did concentration camps make it possible to get to a place like Auschwitz?’ And then what happened afterward.”
The best books on concentration camps, Andrea Pitzer Five Books interview, 30 July, 2020
The book, according to the author