SEIZE MOIS dans les bagnes allemands AUSCHWITZ BUCHENWALD DORA-NORDHAUSEN BERGEN BENZEL - Sixteen months in the German prisons Auschwitz Buchenwald Dora-Nordhausen, Bergen Benzel [Belsen], by former death camp inmate Charles CHAMBON, published by Imprimerie du progrès, France 1945 - first edition.
Testimony of a prisoner who survived four German concentration camps - one of the cruelest and most difficult of them and witnessed the mass extermination of the Jews of the occupied countries, and the "death trains" that arrived at the camps at the end of the war. Charles was arrested as a resistance fighter in January 1944 and was imprisoned in Fresnes, from where he was taken to Compiegne, and then to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dora Nordhausen, and Bergen-Belsen. His friends met him immediately after the war when he was recovering from his difficult physical condition, and he complied with their request to tell what happened to him in the camps. The testimony was given very succinctly, and it is evident from the things that were given close to their occurrence, and that he gave it in his difficult physical and mental condition, impatiently and at a time of effort to return to life. The publisher writes that he brought the words as they were heard from his mouth without editorial changes, and this is evident from the text. When he was captured by the Nazis, he was taken for interrogation under severe torture on charges of underground activity. In his memoirs, he writes: "I suffered a lot in the various concentration camps, from hunger, thirst, but My suffering was never as terrible as during these days of detention". The Nazis tried to extract information from him about his fellow resistance fighters, and when he refused, they made the torture worse, yet he stood by it, and did not give a single detail about them.
After a short stay in Compiegne, he was taken to Auschwitz on May 1, 1944, when he arrived at the camp he was tattooed with a prisoner's number, and was given a prisoner's uniform. In Auschwitz he witnessed Jews being sent to the crematorium, the murder of Jewish women, as well as the terrible abuse of prisoners who the Nazis discovered were Jews while in the camp. Some time later he was transferred to Buchenwald, where he was put in Block 57, and soon thereafter was taken to work in the quarry. He spent several months in forced labor in Buchenwald, and he says that the conditions there were more difficult than in Auschwitz. In January 1945 he was taken to Nordhausen on a train together with Jewish prisoners from Hungary. Upon his and his friend arrival at the camp, for several weeks they endured grueling roll calls during the day, beatings, hunger, and cold. When the Russians came closer, he says that every day more and more trains with murdered Jews arrive at the camp. With the increase of the American attacks and the shelling of Nordhausen, he was transferred to Bergen-Belsen. On his way to Bergen-Belsen, he tells about the countless bodies he and his friends saw along the way. The terrible sight was also repeated in Bergen-Belsen "I will never be able to forget the terrible sight of this camp" he says, where he stayed until the liberation of the camp, at the time of liberation his condition was relatively good and he assisted in the removal of the bodies. and finally returned to France.
At the beginning of the book is a map of the route the author took between the various camps. The book is accompanied by illustrations of forced labor prisoners.
38 p. Stains on the title cover. Good Condition.
