Le calvaire de Breendonck by Pierre Lansvreugt and R. Lemaitre. Brussels - Paris, 28 February 1945 - First edition published a few months before the end of the war, the first testimony of the atrocities that took place in the Belgian camp at Breendonk, from the mouths of two prisoners who had been there for a long time. Dedicated copy by the author Pierre Lansvreugt. French.
A horrifying and early testimony written by the two heads of the National Association of Breendonk Survivors – both survivors of Camp Breendonk – was published during the war and was intended to reveal what the Nazis sought to obscure – the way the camp operated during the war, especially in 1943, when the atrocities took place there. The Nazis sought to conceal the horrors of the camp by spreading rumors that in 1943 onwards it was operating as it did in 1940, in 1940 conditions were relatively reasonable. For that reason, the two came to expose the drastic change that the camp had undergone, and how it had turned from an ordinary prison into a real torture camp, a "camp of villains" as they put it. Some chapters in the book were written by Pierre Lansvreugt and others by R. Lemaitre. Most of the chapters in the book are difficult to read, and we will not detail them here, because it describes the severe torture that the two men witnessed and underwent in their own flesh. The shouting, the beating, the hunger ("We ate beets with the shell, we ate green vegetation... We became beasts" they write), the diseases, humiliations, executions witnessed by the two, humiliating the condemned before they died. The Nazis forced the other prisoners to stand and watch the executions of their friends. They also describe the terrible suffering that the Jews endured in the camp. Among other things, the book describes the testimony of a woman who was in Breendonk's torture chamber and managed to escape from the camp and reach the Allies like a broken vessel - and in her difficult situation, she still managed to tell what the Nazis had done to her. This was the first time that the Allies understood that Breendonk was a torture camp and not a prison or "fortress" as in he past.
In autumn 1944, after the liberation of Belgium by the Allied armies, the fortress was briefly used by the Belgian authorities as a detention camp where Belgians suspected of collaborating with the German occupation forces were held. The two were also released from the camp at the time this testimony was written, but they were still not mentally healthy, and Breendonk's nightmare still accompanied them, they speak in their testimony of "terrible visions that cannot be forgotten, nightmares, sudden awakenings, terrible bursts of memory that still plague us at night..." they experienced in those days.
79 [1] pages. Slight tear in Jacket. Good Condition.
