TEMOIGNAGES. DE DEPORTES POLITIQUES EN ALLEMAGNE LES CAMPS D'EXTERMINATION. "Testimonies". An early compilation of the testimonies of surviving prisoners from the death camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, the Ravensbrück women's camp, and others, accompanied by harsh photographs from the death camps. The testimonies were collected in the first days of the liberation of the camps, and are considered one of the earliest exposures published, which described in detail the process of extermination of the Jews in the camps. Liberation Publishing, Paris, June 1945. French.
Among other things, the prisoners detail the sorting of the Jews in Drancy for deportation to the death camps, the manner in which the Nazis crammed the Jews into the crowded trains that led to the death camps while trampling the weak who had fallen and fainted on the train. A prisoner who was on such a transport train describes: "Some of us start screaming out of madness, the SS guards would perform bursts of gunfire into the wagons to restore order... Some of the passengers commit suicide by primitive means they hid in their bags... By the time evening arrives and the train sets off, almost a third of the prisoners are already dead on its floor"... Another prisoner recounts the arrival of the train to and from the camp and the descent from it while being beaten incessantly as the prisoners who were already in the camp used to see: "We managed to see it twenty times, thirty times, it was repeated almost without changes, from 1942 until the liberation. The last time was in July 1944, it was called the "Death Convoy". Another prisoner describes the forced labor in Dachau and Buchenwald in detail, and another describes the horrors of Auschwitz in detail. A former Paris city councilor whose testimony appears anonymously explains: "The rule of the SS was to use the power of our bodies in their forced labor and let us die afterwards... Fear conquered the prisoner from the first conversation in the morning, the anguish clung to our flesh, at night waking up from the nagging pain, and the worst of all was the hunger... evil for no reason...".
There is a testimony of Mrs. Frenkel, who stayed in the Ravensbrück women's camp for nine months, and describes how on arrival at the camp, an SS officer released his dog, when they checked her documents and discovered that she was a doctor by profession and thanks to that she survived the inferno, she describes the human experiments carried out in the camp, and the crematoriums that operated there from January 1945, the horrific way in which the Nazis murdered the children of the camp, etc. Another prisoner describes how the gas chamber in Birkenau worked, etc. The booklet is signed by the publisher with the sentence: "This will be the eternal punishment of Germany, that when it speaks of its glory Beethoven, Mozart, Goethe and Bach, a heartbroken voice that cannot be silenced will answer: Auschwitz! Buchenwald! Dora! Belsen!"..
The report is accompanied by rare photographs (most of them emotionally difficult to view) including: children on their way to deportation to the death camps, prisoners as found in the camps on the day of liberation, muselmann survivors, piles of bodies of the victims, a rare photograph of a survivor who died a few minutes after being photographed on the day of liberation, a photograph of Irma Grese 'The Bitch of Auschwitz' - the infamous Nazi war criminal whose cruelty as part of her role as supervisor of 30,000 Jewish women in Auschwitz became a symbol of Nazi evil, After the war, she was sentenced to death in the Belsen trials, and executed in 1945], etc.
One of the first publications of the Nazi atrocities immediately after the end of World War II. Rare. It does not appear in the National Library.
32 p. Very good condition.
