GEDENK SCHRIFT VAN HET GEMEENTELIJK ANTWERPSCH ONDERWIJZEND PERSONEEL – 1940–1945 – An important and early memorial book published by the municipal teaching staff of Antwerp in memory of the Belgian educators who were murdered by the Nazis during the war years, among them many Jews. Antwerp, 1945 – Only edition. This copy was dedicated to the memory of educator Karel De Zutter, who was deported to Germany and perished. In Dutch. Rare.
A special publication issued at the end of the war to commemorate the lives and deaths of Belgian educators who were murdered by the Nazis during the war years in prisons and concentration camps. “In our view, those who returned from that hell should also be honored here, and where possible, we have provided some additional information about their time in imprisonment… Those who were persecuted, interrogated, and temporarily imprisoned by the occupying forces, as well as those who were expelled from our ranks due to racial delusions or Nazi political policies, are also mentioned. Finally, we could not omit those who died as a result of the violence of war…”. The booklet was intended to serve as a living testimony—both as a rebuttal to those who deny Nazi terror and as “a harsh indictment of the system and against the inhuman individuals who consciously planned this war, systematically prepared it, and then carried it out with satanic audacity and boundless fanaticism…”.
The book lists no fewer than 90 names of Belgian educators who perished, each accompanied by detailed documentation including their year of birth, profession, and accounts of their wartime experiences—when they were arrested by the Gestapo, which prison they were held in and for how long, the concentration camp to which they were deported, their experiences there, and how they were murdered. The editorial team compiled the material using countless first-hand testimonies, both oral accounts from survivors and written submissions sent to the committee preparing the book, often including highly detailed information on the fates of the victims. For example, the story is told of a head of a teaching staff who was the first Belgian to be placed by the Nazis on a torture device in Mauthausen as punishment for publications he had released to counter Nazi racial ideology in the years before the war; the story of the Jewish educator Mrs. Tatiana Teitsch, who was arrested on September 3, 1943, after devoting herself to educating Jewish children following the Nazi takeover of the schools, and who lost her two daughters, taken to Mechelen—never to be heard from again; accounts of Belgian teachers involved in underground resistance who continued to educate in secret, some teaching students in their homes until they were caught by the Gestapo; and accounts of teachers who were members of the resistance group “The White Brigade, ” which managed to hide students for months during the war years. The booklet also includes the documentation of the arrest of educator Frans Callens by Belgian Gestapo agents (!) in the courtyard of the school where he taught. Callens was taken for interrogation and brutally tortured for 14 days, after which he was deported to Buchenwald. The booklet contains harrowing descriptions of the torture endured by Belgian educators in Gestapo cellars, and more.
Each family of the victims mentioned in the book received a dedicated copy in their memory from the Antwerp Education Fund, which initiated this important project to commemorate those for whom educating the youth of their generation mattered more than their own lives. This particular copy was dedicated to the memory of educator Karel De Zutter (see p. 129), with a beautifully handwritten inscription on the front endpaper. Karel, born in March 1924, was a teacher at Boys’ School No. 11. He was arrested in the middle of his final exams at the secondary department of the municipal school, deported to Germany for forced labor, and attempted to escape on September 9, 1944. He was imprisoned in the Donaueschingen prison (Baden) and did not survive.
Apart from the copies distributed to the families of the deceased, only a few remained with the publisher—hence the rarity of this book.
The book is accompanied by five photographs from the special memorial evening held in honor of the Belgian educators mentioned in the volume at the end of the war.
156 pages. Very good condition.
