Voyage en Enfer: A Moving Testimony by a Survivor of the Ravensbrück Camp – “A Journey Through Hell: A moving testimony by a survivor of the Ravensbrück camp” by Madeleine Felloni. One of the earliest documented accounts of the horrors of the camp – harrowing excerpts. Châlons-sur-Marne, France, 1946. Extremely rare. On the title page, the author’s prisoner number, 57516, is handwritten in red ink.
“I am publishing this lecture against my will. Willingly, quite the opposite – I longed to summon all the forces of forgetfulness; I strove with all my might to remember no more. But I was told, and it was repeated to me so many times, that I have no right to bury in silence all that led to the death of so many political deportees. What I am about to recount, I do so not in any way to make you pity me, but to tell you what that terrible year I spent far from you was like for me. Three months ago yesterday, on April 21, I left the infamous Ravensbrück camp, as it is called, weighing thirty-two kilograms, covered in scabs, wounds, vitamin deficiencies, pus everywhere, trembling, with tanned, wrinkled skin, without the strength even to smile at the freedom that awaited me beyond the camp’s great gates….” (from the foreword).
A searing testimony written shortly after the release of prisoner Madeleine Felloni from the camp. Felloni was captured by the Gestapo in July 1944 and taken for interrogation in Châlons. Believing she could appease her captors, she swore on Hitler’s life that she had no part in resistance activitiesת – an act that only brought upon her even harsher torture. Still in Châlons, in the Gestapo’s basement cells, she encountered other prisoners who told her that the worst was yet to come: the Nazis forced prisoners into ice baths until they lost consciousness, amputated limbs in order to extract information, and committed other horrific atrocities. Fearing intentional poisoning, she did not dare touch the food served to her, and thus lost 30 kilograms in a short time. After some time, she was transferred to the Ravensbrück women’s camp. The horrors she witnessed upon arrival are described in her words: “Ravensbrück, a black land where flowers seemed ironic. I looked around me, dizzy, stunned as I saw the terrible wounds of the women walking past me and returning – what made me think of a leper colony; when I saw the German women come and savagely kick our poor bundles; when I saw that the beer flowing in front of us was not meant for our burning throats; when I saw so many anxious expressions on so many yellow and emaciated faces; when I saw before my eyes a prisoner beaten to death – I understood within minutes what a Nazi concentration camp was…”.
Within hours, Felloni was assigned prisoner number 57516 and taken for forced labor, uprooting trees from the frozen ground to make way for a road deep in the forest. “The atmosphere in the camp is horrific… around thirty-five thousand starving women. Their suffering is expressed, for most of them, in crude words, in vulgar reflexes…”. Felloni describes how the camp’s food supply was based on an entire system of theft. Prisoners stole anything they could in exchange for a piece of bread. Defecation took place on open seats with no partitions, and before long she realized that the gas chambers were not used, as initially claimed, for prisoners who were too weak to continue working, but rather for the systematic extermination of Jewish prisoners.
She also recounts the horrific experiments the Nazis conducted on the women’s bodies. Body parts such as the ankle bone or kneecap were removed from prisoners in order to create implants for wounded German soldiers. “And when people ask me if I suffered much, I reply: I would never have believed it was possible to suffer so much—morally and physically—without dying, ” she writes.
She further describes the terrible suffering she endured over the course of months: “At noon, a truck brought us soup, each of us received half a liter of a very clear liquid, which we ate standing, always outside. I saw ice cubes at the bottom of my food bucket. On Sundays we worked until noon. I lived this prisoner’s life from October 15 to February 2, with temperatures of minus 30 degrees, under snow, wind, rain, and hail, suffering from malnutrition, with red, bluish, limp hands…”. Felloni remained in the camp until its liberation, when the Germans abandoned it. She describes how the prisoners stormed the camp kitchen, but it was of no help to them, as their stomachs were already destroyed and they no longer had the strength to digest the food. Of the 250 women who arrived at the camp with her, only she and 15 others survived. They were transferred to a convalescent home in Sweden, where they underwent physical and psychological rehabilitation for about two months.
Extremely rare. Only two copies are recorded in the global WorldCat library catalog, both in libraries in France.
13 [1] pp. Very good condition.
