Deportee 50.440 - by Andrée Carliez Lambert de Loulay - Dedicated copy in memory of Mayor Paul Robbe who perished in the Neuengamme concentration camp, Brussels 1945 - First and limited edition, copy no. 42 out of 150 published copies. French.
The Camp Diary of Andrée Carliez Lambert de Loulay - A French woman suspected of resistance activities and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald and Ravensbrück concentration camps (where she stayed in Block 23) during World War II. In the book, Carliez Lambert describes being separated from her husband Jacques for all the years of the war, her experiences in the camp, from her arrival (changing into prisoner's clothes: "this dirty shirt from which I brush off cockroach feces with a wave of the hand"), to her liberation. She writes about the horrible conditions the prisoners endured ("the daily stench of rotting corpses weighs heavier on me than anything else"), the severe hunger, the rampant dysentery disease that afflicted many, the forced labor, the humiliating treatment the women received in the camp, the emaciation of the body to the point of gasping ("I cannot hide that I am beginning to weaken, those who surrender will not endure, the Hungarians are dying like flies, they are crammed into fewer and fewer barracks, our friend Marcel Taverd is walking with her chin at chest height... I must take example from the French women who endured... I have just been struck by a severe sore throat... I received an injection, I was in such a bad state that I saw myself as one of the dying women around me... the German nurse promised that before leaving, the Germans will lock us up to blow us up..."), and the impossible daily life in the camp, detailing in detail what the Nazis did to her dear camp inmate friends.
In the last chapters she documents the days of liberation, the chaos of those entering and leaving the camp, the approach of tanks when it was not clear to them if they were Nazi tanks intended to bomb the camp, or Allied tanks that were also intended to bomb the camp... At that time there were women in the camp who weighed 30 kilograms and could barely move. When Allied forces approached the camp, the Nazis forced the women on an eight kilometer "Death March", Lambert who was among the marchers, managed to escape along the way by jumping into a ditch with two other women, one woman was killed by a shot from the Nazi's pistol when he noticed them, and Lambert and her friend managed to escape injured and bruised after a 36-hour foot march nourished only by sucking leaves in the fields - "we looked as if we were a hundred years old" she writes. The two reached a local village and were found hiding among the bushes by an American soldier, from there they were brought to a shelter and treated for six days and so their lives were saved.
At the beginning of the book is a long dedication in memory of Mayor Paul Robbe who perished in Neuengamme from his wife asking his grandchildren to remember the holy death of their grandfather, dated: March 1946.
214 [2] pages. 20 cm. Good - Very good condition. Some of the book pages were not cut in the upper part during printing.
