Spark of Life is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque was a German author, best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front.-Life and work:...

, which appeared both in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 (as Der Funke Leben) and in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 in 1952.

The novel is set in the fictional Mellern concentration/labor camp during the Holocaust.

Overview

509 is a political prisoner in a German concentration camp. For ten years, he has persevered in the most hellish conditions. Deathly weak, he still has his wits about him and he senses that the end of the war is near. If he and the other living corpses in his barracks can hold on for liberation—or force their own—then their suffering will not have been in vain.

Now the SS who run the camp are ratcheting up the terror. But their expectations are jaded and their defenses are down. It is possible that the courageous, yet terribly weak prisoners have just enough left in them to resist. And if they die fighting, they will die on their own terms, cheating the Nazis out of their devil's contract.(1) For 509, it is not just a question of staying alive, but of staying human.