A GESTAPO FOGLYA VOLTAM - I Was a Prisoner of the Gestapo, by Petyke Mihaly, Gabor Aron Publishing, Budapest, 1945 - First Edition. Hungarian. A rare copy with a handwritten dedication and signature of the author, dated: 1946.
The author, a political journalist who was captured in Budapest by the Gestapo when the Nazis arrived in the city in March 1944, and taken to a local prison controlled by the Nazis, where he was held until the end of the war. He was caught at his place of work as a journalist as part of the Gestapo's takeover of the country's power centers. He was taken to the German station, where all his property was confiscated, all his personal documents were confiscated, he was interrogated with severe torture, and sent to prison in a dungeon cell, without being told at any stage what he was accused of. In the first weeks in the Gestapo prison, he met a Jew who warned him that he would do everything to stay in the Gestapo prison and behave exactly as the Nazis expected of him, because if they transferred him to the Mauthausen camp (where the Nazis transferred some of the prisoners who were caught with him and stayed in the same prison) he would almost certainly die there. In his book he tells at length his story about those months he was in the Gestapo prison in Hungary - the torture he went through until his body was exhausted, and the harsh decrees he experienced day after day, until he was right on the brink of death. The conditions in the Gestapo prisons were no less harsh than those in the concentration camps, but the chance of being saved there was higher because the Nazis did not carry out mass executions there. The prisoners used to pass the pieces of information about what was happening outside the prison to each other on small pieces of newspaper pages torn from German newspapers, on which they wrote in small letters in pencil hints to what they heard. During all those months he wrote letters to his family without knowing that the Nazis were taking the letter papers and throwing them away. The portions of food he received became smaller and smaller over time. As part of the psychological warfare conducted by the Germans, he was told that at the end of the war, all of Europe would be German, and he and his ilk would forever remain in "cages" as subhumans. Towards the end of the war he and several prisoners were taken out of prison and taken to a hiding villa in a last attempt by the Nazis to keep the prisoners in various places in Hungary, until the Red Cross arrived and escorted them out at the end of the war. He wrote down his difficult story while he was in prison, finished it at the end of the war, and published it already in 1945, before us is the first edition of the book, as mentioned with the author's dedication.
118 [2] p. Some pages have stains. A subsequent tear in the margins of the first pages without damage to the text. condition good - moderate.
