RECIT VECU d'um Rescape des Bagnes Nazis - "True Story of a Survivor of the Nazi Prisons" by Marcel Perdrix - A horrific testimony of a prisoner in the Natzweiler-Struthof and Dachau camps for about two years, who was saved from certain death several times. Dedicated copy by author. Paris [1945]. Rare.
"These lines only tell about me. Eager to tell you the truth, without exaggerating anything... but what I suffered, others also suffered, hundreds of thousands of deportees... if the Nazis' tortures in each camp had different torture methods, the result was the same: death..."
The author was arrested several times in Paris on charges of underground activities and released due to lack of evidence in 1942-1943. On September 8, 1943 he was taken for an eleven-hour interrogation in the Gestapo cellar and taken to prison. Shortly after, he was taken with another 70 prisoners to the Natzweiler-Strutthof concentration camp in northeastern France, where all his property and clothes were confiscated, given prisoner clothes and number, and immediately sent to forced labor under severe hunger and cold. As he describes, his weight dropped to just 42 kg within a short time and he was no longer able to work: "Fear of beatings, suffering from hard work and even death did not worry us... it was the hunger that gnawed at us, like hungry wolves we awaited the coming of the soup...", he writes and describes harsh scenes of fights over bread pieces between prisoners that recurred daily in the camp. In March 1944 his legs were injured as a result of the hard work, in addition he was diagnosed with eye inflammation and dysentery "for most prisoners suffering from this disease there is no hope of recovery...". Due to his inability to move and his emaciated body, the Nazis thought he was dead. "One morning they took me from my bed and threw me on the pile of corpses, waiting there for my turn to go to the crematorium. Luxemburger, my room chief, passed by and recognized me. He saw that I was not completely dead, and pulled me out. I was saved from the crematorium!". There were days when he simply fell lying on the ground all day until another prisoner came and lifted him. The Nazis transferred him to the infirmary in the Dachau camp where his condition somewhat improved. In Dachau he survived with his last strength until the camp's liberation by Allied forces.
In the last few pages under the title: "A Few Words about Natzweiler Camp", he describes the mass executions he witnessed in the camp, specifically describing an event that occurred in the camp in August 1944 in which several trucks arrived full of 180 men and 90 women to whom the Nazis injected a lethal injection and threw them in the crematorium. Towards the end he writes that although it is very difficult to read about these things, he felt an obligation to write them: "To convince people who are still hesitant to believe what they have heard or read about the lives of deportees in the German camps", and adds a Will: "Keep this book and later ask your children and grandchildren to read it so that everyone knows that on the other side of the Rhine there is a barbarous people who is always ready to slaughter us, and that this people in the eyes of the whole world is forever despised for the atrocities it committed...".
Rare. Not listed in the world cat library catalog.
6 [15] pages. 20 cm. Very good condition.
