Breendonck camp de tortures et de mort - Breendonck Camp of Torture and Death, by Camp Inmate Boris Solonevitch Published by Goemaere. Brussels, 1944 - First Edition. French.
Early testimony of a Belgian inmate captured by the Gestapo and taken to the Breendonck camp, and stayed in it for a period of four years!. It begins right on the first day he arrives at the camp - interrogation by the Gestapo, shaving his head, marking a number of prisoners, imprisoning him in a dungeon with 20 other prisoners, and horrifying watching through a large group of Jews who are being subjected to exhausting torture in the yard right in front of the cell where he was imprisoned, And the quick internalization that the worst is yet to come. During the years he was imprisoned in the camp he was employed in hard forced labor - digging ditches without means of digging, and endless transport of dirt and stones in wheelbarrows until exhausted, severe torture, lost about half his weight, and finally survived the war with various ruse. He describes in detail the difficult daily life in the camp, recounting the most difficult scenes he witnessed - a son who met his father in the camp, and after a while was forced to see him executed, his fellow prisoners who collapsed to death during forced labor, the Gestapo's horrific methods of torture especially towards the Jews, and finally liberation and freedom, and a return to life.
Breendonk was a fortified military base for the Belgian army between the cities of Antwerp and Brussels in Belgium. During the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, it served as a detention camp, where Jews from the Belgian community were also imprisoned. On September 20, 1940, the first prisoners arrived at the fort. Belgian communists, members of the underground, hostages captured by the Germans, Jews from the Belgian community and also criminals were imprisoned there. In the first year of the camp, the Jews had about half the population of its prisoners. They were held in it separately from the other prisoners. Among others, Rabbi Shlomo Ullman, the chief rabbi of the Belgian Jewish community, and the heads of the Belgian Jewish Association were imprisoned in the fortress. The prisoners stayed in the fort for an average of about three months before being sent to concentration camps in Germany, Austria and Poland. The prisoners suffered from harsh living conditions, starvation, deprivation of medical care and cruel treatment by the camp staff, and they were enslaved; The Germans also conducted interrogations, torture and executions by hanging. Various 'political' prisoners were interrogated in the camp under severe torture. The first German commander of the fort, Philip Schmitt, was prosecuted in Belgium in 1949, convicted, sentenced to death and executed in 1950.
112 p. 20 cm. Slight tears in spine. Good condition.
