Borlant came from a Bessarabian Jewish family of literary accomplishment. His maternal aunt Fanny Beznos was a Surrealist poet whose work later appeared in 1998's "Surrealist Women: An International Anthology" from The University of Texas Press. Sadly, though, Beznos's literary talent did not save her, as she was murdered at Auschwitz in the early 1940s. In 1995, Serge Klarsfeld described Henri Borlant, a French Jewish doctor born in 1927, as "the sole survivor out of 6000 French Jew- ish children under age 16 who were deported to Auschwitz in 1942". On March 3, Borlant published a lucidly eloquent memoir from Les editions du Seuil, 'Thanks for Surviving" (Merci d'avoir survécu). In 1945, Borlant returned home to Paris, where he found that his mother had survived, although most of her family had been murdered. Borlant records how his mother was surprised to find that in the three years since she last saw him, Henri had learned to speak Yiddish, and could now converse with her in that language. Describing his 1942 arrival at Birkenau, Borlant notes that as soon as aprisoner was tattooed with a number, it was essential to learn that number "very quickly, in all the camp's languages. If we did not understand immediatel, our torturers brandished a sick which they derisively termed "the interpreter" (der Dolmetscher) with which they beat us. That's how Istarted to learn foreign languages"