Issue of the French newspaper FRATERNITÉ – from May 9, 1946 – featuring a fascinating report on a visit by a French journalist to the Bergen-Belsen DP camp. “A year after the liberation of the camp, we still find displaced persons in Bergen-Belsen… The Belsen camp is considered the largest black market center in the entire British zone. Everything is traded there, madly…”. impressive design on the front page: airplanes and Allied soldiers closing in on ruined Berlin. Rare.
The French journalist Claude Chaillet visited the Bergen-Belsen camp about a year after its liberation, as well as the nearby Belsen DP camp. Upon arriving at the camp, he describes: “The fence is still there, between the metal posts hangs the wire, rusty and torn… Installations, blocks, labyrinths, the gallows, the factories of death—only the memory of the survivors preserves them… I have never seen a crematorium before, but I recognize it. It is made of rusty iron. One end opens to reveal the type of cart or stretcher on which the body was laid. It is filthy, pathetic, disgusting, and disturbing. Once, there were entire rows of these. As many as there were, they could not, despite their relentless operation, keep up with the bodies piling up. The rest were destroyed. This one alone remains, with its chimney reaching into the sky, a remnant of a world of terror… Right beside it, the location of the gas chambers. Here, men and women sentenced to death undressed before entering the ‘showers’…”.
After touring the death camp, Claude visited the nearby Belsen DP camp: “A year after the liberation of the camp, we still find displaced persons in Bergen-Belsen, ” he writes. Claude describes how Jews from Poland who survived Hitler’s slaughter look toward the Land of Israel or America, but have no intention of returning to their homeland, as there is no willingness to open its borders to them. During his visit, he interviewed six people and learned that the concern and search for their relatives mattered more to them than leaving the camp. At that time, approximately 20,000 people were living in Belsen. According to him, they wander in groups, and over time they have managed to return to normal physical conditions, but have no desire to take responsibility for their lives. “The Belsen camp is considered the largest black market center in the entire British zone. Everything is traded there, madly, under the calm eye of the military administration that oversees the camp. Goods enter and leave in shipments. Fortunes are made. People come and go, move from one region to another, from one country to another…” He describes that although the survivors’ physical condition is good, emotionally they appeared to him completely lacking in motivation. In light of the temporary condition of the inhabitants of the DP camp, Claude calls to do everything possible to help them immigrate to the Land of Israel and rebuild their lives as soon as possible. Another article in the issue describes postwar Berlin as a ghost town.
4 pages. Complete issue. 60 cm. Fold marks. Good condition.
