David Rousset was born on 18 January 1912 in Roanne, about 70 kilometres from Lyon, into a working-class family. He was nevertheless able to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he graduated in philosophy and literature at the age of 20. He initially worked as a teacher. Even before graduating, he had joined the student organisation of the socialist party Section francaise de l'internationale ouvriere (SFIO). He met Leon Trotsky in France and, after being expelled from the SFIO, co-founded the Trotskyist party Parti ouvrier internationaliste (POI).

Correspondent before the outbreak of war
Rousset worked as a journalist until the German occupation of France. He was a correspondent for the US magazines Time and Fortune, specialising in economics and politics. As part of his political work, he was primarily concerned with questions of colonial policy. After the invasion of the German troops, he continued his work for the POI illegally.

Buchenwald, Barkhausen, Beendorf
The Gestapo arrested Rousset in October 1943 and he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in January 1944 via Fresnes prison and the transit camp in Compiègne. Less than two months later, he was taken to Porta Westfalica on the first prisoner transport and imprisoned in the Kaiserhof camp. He did not stay at Porta Westfalica for long. Due to an infection, he was transferred to the Neuengamme main camp shortly after the transport arrived and from there to the Helmstedt-Beendorf satellite camp at the end of April. Here, the SS had initiated the so-called Project A3, in which concentration camp prisoners were forced to work as forced labourers to build underground production facilities in salt mines, similar to Porta Westfalica.

Liberation in Wöbbelin
After the evacuation of Beendorf, David Rousset and around 4,000 other prisoners were transported to Wöbbelin, where he was liberated on 2 May 1945. After liberation, he assisted the American troops in organising the transfer of seriously ill prisoners. He contracted typhus in the process.

A World Apart
After his return to France, Rousset recovered from the illness. Within a few weeks, he dictated the manuscript for his book "L'Univers Concentrationnaire" ("A World Apart"), which was published at the turn of the year 1945/1946. The analysis of the concentration camp system presented in the book influenced George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, among others, in the years that followed. A short time later, "Les Jours de notre mort" (The Days of Our Death) was published, a second work on the concentration camp system, which is much more extensive and has stronger autobiographical traits.

Activist & journalist
In the late 1940s, David Rousset worked with Jean-Paul Sartre to found the left-wing party Rassemblement democratique revolutionaire as a counter-project to the growing Cold War. However, the project was unsuccessful in the long term due to the differing views of Sartre and Rousset. In the years that followed, Rousset was seen by the public as an anti-communist who did not hold back in criticising Stalin's terror regime and campaigned internationally for the Soviet gulag prison system to be outlawed. From the 1960s onwards, Rousset worked more as a journalist, including for the daily newspaper Le Figaro. In 1968, he was elected as a member of the French National Assembly, but left after the resignation and death of Charles de Gaulle. He subsequently worked as a journalist again, but also as an author and commentator. David Rousset died in Paris on 13 December 1997 at the age of 85.

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