Stephane Hessel, Resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor, tells the young of today that their lives and liberties are worth fighting for. Remembering the ideals for which he risked his life, while never forgetting the evils against which he struggled, the now 94-year-old writer and diplomat calls on all of us to take back the rights that have slowly slipped away since the Second World War ended. As sales of this masterful polemic approach a million in France, it is published here for the first time in English. Published by Charles Glass Books, a new imprint of Quartet Books.

About the Author

Stephane Hessel was born in Germany in 1917, emigrated with his Jewish writer father and mother to France in 1924 and fought in the French Army in 1940. From a German prisoner of war camp, he escaped to join General Charles de Gaulle's Free French in London. On his clandestine return to organise the Resistance in France, he was captured, tortured and sent to concentration camps. He escaped death to work after the war on drafting the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose ideals he defends passionately to this day.