Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age.

Béon’s memoir of imprisonment at Dora, the concentration camp near Nordhausen where tens of thousands of prisoners were worked to death from 1943 to 1945 building the V-1 and V-2 rockets in an underground tunnel factory.

Active in the French Resistance from age fifteen until his capture, Béon survived Buchenwald, Dora, and Bergen-Belsen; he wrote his account using only inmates’ first names, so that, in his words, “what happened to one of them happened to all of them.”

First published in France as La planète Dora (Éditions du Seuil, 1985); this English edition, translated by Béon and Richard L. Fague, carries an introduction by Michael J. Neufeld, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.