“In December 1944,” begins Sim Kessel’s Holocaust memoir, “I was hanged at Auschwitz.” He was twenty-five years old and had been caught attempting to escape. Sim Kessel (called “Sam” in some accounts), a French Jew who boxed professionally, had been at Auschwitz for two years — a staggering period of time where the normal lifespan of a prisoner was at most three months — and had already escaped the gas chambers on two occasions. The first time, he was in the infirmary recuperating from a severe beating and torture at the hands of the SS (one of his fingers had...