De Francfort à Dachau: Souvenirs et croquis - From Frankfurt to Dachau: Memories - Paris, 1946 - the first and rare edition. Early testimony from an inmate of the Dachau camp - a copy dedicated and signed by the author on the title page: Dédié aux combattants de la liberté Rene Fraysse "- "Dedicated to the freedom fighters Rene Fraysse".
Hard and detailed testimony published only fifteen months after the release of Dachau camp inmate Rene Fraysse. The author was Caught by the Gestapo at the end of 1943 on charges of belonging to the "spiritual front of the resistance" - an underground resistance of churchmen. The Gestapo slapped him in the face that he had material in his possession indicating that on various occasions he had preached against the party. After a grueling 19-hour interrogation, and using a fake ID in which his official role as a priest was replaced by a "mine worker" he survived death. For 21 days he was placed in a dungeon which could not even stand inside, after which he was led to Dachau along with another 2400 deportees, of whom only 900 survived until the last months of the war. Arriving in Dachau he met French prisoners who received him with the sentence: "Here you are going to starve to death like the rest of us." As soon as he arrived at the camp he was employed in forced labor transporting large machine parts. He makes good contact with French prisoners like him who are members of the idea of resistance and they decide that even in the most difficult situations all their meager property will be shared. Rene Fraysse describes in detail the daily routine in Dachau: arriving at the camp, ordering, confiscating property and belongings, showering, dressing in prisoner clothes, getting up at 5 in the morning, arranging hours in the freezing cold and scorching sun, going to forced labor, slicing bread in the morning and serving soup at noon, and gas deaths inmates unfit for work. The weak die one after another every day from exhaustion and typhus or torture. One of the most difficult Paragraphs in the book describes the arrival of a group of about 1,000 Jews from Buchenwald. As he describes all the harsh sights he saw in the camp to that day did not come close in the slightest to the harsh sight of those thin Jews with dysentery who were on the verge of death, and resembled the dead rather than the living. Similarly, in a significant part of the testimony, Fraysse describes in detail the process of gas killing and cremation in the crematorium, where 120 bodies were cremated every day.
The book is accompanied by illustrations of scenes from the camp - among them a portrait of the author himself made by a Dachau camp inmate from Block 26 named 'Michelle' who knew the author, and also survived the inferno.
63 p. 21 cm. Very good condition.
