THE DUNGEON DEMOCRACY. The story of Christopher Burney – prisoner of the Buchenwald camp who stayed there for fifteen months, published by WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD London 1945 – first edition. From notebooks he wrote in the camp himself, some of which he recalled from his memory at the end of the war. From the early testimonies written by a prisoner from the death camps in the English language. Detailed testimony about the Nazis’ abuse of the Jews in the camp.
In the introduction to the book, the author writes the impression and conclusions he reached as a result of those difficult months as a prisoner in the death camp:
“I suffered enough at the hands of the Nazis, from the basic suffering of humanity – of cruelty, hunger, cold, and fatigue, to be able to understand and talk about them first hand… I saw with my own eyes how others suffered much more. I watched people die in the filth and insult of their rotting flesh, the inhumanity they had reached, no longer capable of feeling more than tortured animals… The plague is inhumanity, and this book is meant to warn against its presence, Nazism indeed was infected with the germ as no other regime in history was, but when Nazism died, the germ still exists…”
At the beginning of the book, the author apologizes for not writing exact dates for the events he describes in the book. The descriptions were written by him in occasional notebooks in the camp while he was there under difficult working conditions, and some of them disappeared from the hiding place where he left them in the camp when he returned to look for them at the end of the war, so that he had to reconstruct the events from his memory. The author provides a detailed description of the structure of the camp, the internal hierarchy, the forced labor, the harsh food conditions, and the methods of punishment the Nazis used in the camp. He also explains the differences of the Nazis in their attitude towards the members of the different nations, and the reaction of the members of the different nations to this attitude – the Russian prisoners (“There was not a block in the camp where there were no Russians… They behaved like members of a proud nation, and there was no place in the camp that you did not see Russians…”), the Czechs (“The main characteristic of the Czechs who were with us were the food parcels they received from home…”), and the French (“Most of the 28,000 French who passed through Buchenwald were worthy ambassadors of a great country… Germany, and the German methods were alien to them…”) Later on he describes the fate of the Jewish prisoners from Germany, Poland, and Hungary in Buchenwald.
A significant part of the book documents the fate of the Jews in the camp. Christopher explains that if the Nazis showed a changing attitude towards the nations mentioned above with reasonable chances of staying alive and surviving, towards the Jews the attitude was aimed at one goal – murder. Whether during abuse, or from starvation, due to the exhaustion of work, or immediate execution for various reasons. He tells about transports of Jews that arrived by train to Buchenwald which he saw, most of whom already died on their way to the camp due to the inhuman road conditions in which they were placed. On one occasion, the number of dead was so great that the removal of the bodies took three consecutive days. He describes the abuse of the Jews by the Nazis in the factories near the camp, and that there was no Jewish worker who lasted more than three months in those factories, and the unimaginable amount of Jewish corpses that piled up in the camp towards the end the war. He also tells about the terrible acts of abuse by the Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch (the wife of the camp commander Karl Koch) of the Jewish prisoners – horrors that stunned the world when they were revealed after the war, and more. At the end of the book, he excitedly describes in detail the days of the liberation of the camp.
The author dedicated the book to the memory of Morris Partchuk who perished on March 29, 1945.
IX, 100 p. 19 cm. Hardcover. Ex-libris in memory of Hilda Monte who was shot by Nazi murderers on the Swiss border. Condition Very Good.
