STUCK 72889 COBAYE HUMAIN A DACHAU – Human Guinea pig No. 72889 by Clement Quentin – an important testimony of former Dachau camp prisoner Clement Quentin written with the encouragement of his family and friends some 60 years after the war, in which he tells his remarkable story. Private edition of the author – dedicated copy by the author’s – France, 2004. French.
An important publication in a private edition of the Dachau camp survivor Clement Quentin. Quentin was born in 1920 in the French commune of Fuilet. By the time he reached draft age, World War II had broken out, but his father refused to sign for him and allow him to enlist in the army, and he chose to join the French underground organization Liberation Nord, which operated throughout France under the leadership of Christian Pineau and included 992 agents throughout France. In 1942, he began his activities in the organization by taking down German signs and tilting them in the opposite direction, in order to make it difficult for German soldiers to orient themselves on the roads, and later advanced to a senior position of recruiting undercover agents who provided the underground with information about the German army, and was responsible for collecting information for the Allies. He posed as a Nazi and conspired with various Nazi activists. At one point, he was caught by the Gestapo and taken for interrogation where he underwent severe torture in an attempt to extract information about other members of the underground, and even signed a document stating his death sentence. Despite the severe torture he endured, he did not give a single real name. After he was transferred from one prison to another, the Nazis eventually led him to the Dachau camp by train with a group of prisoners, this was June 1943. The second part of the book deals entirely with the months he spent in Dachau and his personal struggle for survival. Clement describes in great detail the structure of the Dachau camp. He explains how the Nazi torture machine worked with the aim of bringing the prisoners to a state of humiliation of the human spirit to the lowest level. Clement goes on to describe the struggle for survival of himself and his fellow prisoners despite the constant hunger, the arduous agenda, the beatings and torture, the deprivation of sleep, the harsh forced labor in the freezing cold, and his friends who died, and more. Among other things, he discovers that the prisoners had many escape plans from the camp, including really successful and easy-to-carry out plans, in particular escape plans for prisoners who left the camp gate every day to work, and could escape in different ways, but the reason they did not actually escape was because they did not speak German – the prisoners knew that wherever they went they would be immediately recognized for this, and they would be turned over to the Gestapo and would be punished with immediate death.
At the end of the book, Clement describes the liberation of the camp by the Allies, and how the prisoners did not have the minimum strength to get up and go outside. Clement was released on January 2, 1945, on the same day he weighed 37 kilograms. He was treated at a Red Army hospital and underwent several operations to restore his stomach to health. As a result of what he went through in Dachau, he was also damaged in his eyes. After the war, he returned to France, and over the years was involved in instilling the memory of the Holocaust in countless educational institutions, where he told his story wherever he went. In 1991, he was awarded the Legion of Honor. Clement writes that if it were not for his family and friends who urged him to write his wartime memoirs, he would not have done so. And that even sixty years after the war, when he goes out into the street, he does not stop looking at all sides, to see that there is no one ambushing him and trying to harm him – a habit that remained with him even sixty years after the war! He also writes that he is not able to watch violent scenes in movies at all, even though he knows that the scene is staged.
At the end of the book, Clement mentions the names of his fellow former prisoners in Dachau, their places of residence after the war, and the years of their deaths. There are also photographs of himself and his friends from the time of the war, as well as photographs of the bodies of those who perished in Dachau, scenes from the day of liberation of the camp, important documents, and more.
Rare. Printed by private publishing in a limited number of copies. As mentioned, a dedicated copy by the author
171 p. 21 cm. Very good condition.
