Potence et pots de fleurs : Journal d'un déporté de Neuengamme - Diary of a Deportee from Neuengamme by E. M. Reynaud - published by Henri Defontaine, January 1945 - First Edition - Limited Edition of 1020 Numbered Copies. This copy is number 528. French.
The author, a French resistance fighter, was arrested at his home on June 7, 1944 without any specific charges. After a month in Gestapo prison, he was transferred to Compiègne on July 13. In Compiègne, he stayed less than a week and was transferred along with some 1,500 prisoners to Neuengamme. On the way to Neuengamme, some prisoners tried to escape by lifting the wooden plank covering the train car but the Nazis noticed and shot them on the spot. Upon arriving at Neuengamme, they were pushed inside the camp in groups of 50 while the Nazis threw barking wolf dogs attacking them. Their clothes were removed, prisoner uniforms and numbers given, and the torture regimen of Neuengamme began. In his book, he documents in detail what happened to him in the camp - the terrible overcrowding in the barracks, the hunger, the cold, the beatings, the longing for his wife and children whose fate he did not know, the rampant diseases, the hope for his country's leaders to end the war as soon as possible, etc. Reynaud talks about wearing the same clothes for three straight months until they were full of holes. Towards the end of the war, he was transferred with a group of prisoners to Theresienstadt, where he saw scenes even harder than Neuengamme - many of the inmates in Theresienstadt were barely alive at that time. He describes 400 prisoners sleeping in a cell, of whom at least sixty were sick, dying or dead. He describes the first inmates he noticed: "They look at us with dull eyes, without smiling, without light under the eyelids, looking like hunted animals". The task of collecting bodies was imposed on the Jews, and he, who was in relatively good condition, writes that it was a sight that cannot be described.
Rare. Only six entries in the Worldcat library catalog, some on microfilm only.
175 [2] p. Very good condition.
