LE CAMP DU SILENCE DE LA MORT ET DU CRIME BREENDONCK – ‘The Brindock Silence and Death Camp’ by Victor Trido – one of the only and earliest testimonies of what happened in the Brendonk camp in Belgium – Accompanied by photographs of the atrocities of the camp, and the manner of the Nazi abuse. Paris, 1944.
Memoirs of a Belgian political inmate imprisoned in the Brandonek camp (Belgium) during WWII. Trido was a member of the Belgian resistance movement during the war. Following informing, he was captured by the Gestapo in December 1942, and imprisoned in Brindonk for about a year. The Germans agreed to release him for a short time under surveillance, and provided that in return would provide them information on additional resistance fighters who had not yet been arrested. Immediately upon his release, his journey of escape began. Although repeated attempts were made by the Germans to find him, Trido managed to evade them in various hiding places, until the end of the war. In 1944 he served as a central witness in trials against Nazi war criminals, and in the same year he published the book before us in which he tells his story. Among other things, Trido describes both his stay in the camp, and the various methods of torture of the SS soldiers, (including a fascinating chapter about his friend Marcel Van Shelley who was executed in the camp), and the period of his escape.
From the earliest and only publications about what was happening in the Brindonk camp.
Brindonk was a fortified military base for the Belgian army between the cities of Antwerp and Brussels in Belgium. During the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, it served as a detention camp, where Jews from the Belgian community were also imprisoned. On September 20, 1940, the first prisoners arrived at the fort. Belgian communists, members of the underground, hostages captured by the Germans, Jews from the Belgian community and also criminals were imprisoned there. In the first year of the camp, the Jews had about half the population of its prisoners. They were held in it separately from the other prisoners. Among others, Rabbi Shlomo Ullman, the chief rabbi of the Belgian Jewish community, and the heads of the Belgian Jewish Association were imprisoned in the fortress. The prisoners stayed in the fort for an average of about three months before being sent to concentration camps in Germany, Austria and Poland. The prisoners suffered from harsh living conditions, starvation, deprivation of medical care and cruel treatment by the camp staff, and they were enslaved; The Germans also conducted interrogations, torture and executions by hanging. Various ‘political’ prisoners were interrogated in the camp under severe torture. The first German commander of the fort, Philip Schmitt, was prosecuted in Belgium in 1949, convicted, sentenced to death and executed in 1950.
Attached: ‘Prisoner of War’ postcard – signed with ink stamp – Brussels – Belgium on 8/2/1946 and ink stamp of: ‘UNION MAXIMAPHILE ALGERIENNE’.
195 p. 20 cm. Good condition.
