Bidspirit auction | Two rare lectures delivered by

Two rare lectures delivered by death camp survivors to a small public audience shortly after the war. France, 1945 – first edition - “BUCHENWALD par Henri Barbier et Les Luttes de l’Institututeur Français sous la IIIe République, Vichy et les occupants nazis par J. Carrez” - “BUCHENWALD” by Henri Barbier and “The Struggles of the French Schoolteacher under the Third Republic, Vichy, and the Nazi Occupiers” by J. Carrez. Published by the Syndicat des Instituteurs et Institutrices du Doubs (Teachers’ Union of the Doubs Department, eastern France). Besançon (France), 1945 – first edition. Extremely rare. Two bound publications: BUCHENWALD – France, 1945 – first edition. Full transcript of a lecture delivered at the French-Swiss Synod of Porrentruy on July 28, 1945, published by the Teachers’ Union of the Doubs Department. A raw and moving testimony presented to a public audience shortly after the war by a former Buchenwald camp inmate: “The purpose of these camps was to destroy as many as possible. For that, our tormentors skillfully exploited hunger, cold, sleeplessness, beatings, and mind-numbing labor. Everything was done to reduce us to the level of beasts, to kill all inner life of heart and soul… In the crucible of the concentration camps, too many men lost their identity there.” The speaker, Porrentruy, gives a detailed account of the camp’s layout, its various sectors, the horrific medical experiments carried out by Nazi doctors on Jewish inmates in Block 46, the forced labor at the weapons factory operating inside the camp, the role of block elders in overseeing prisoner behavior, the brutality of foremen and kapos, the terrifying execution methods used by the Nazis, the journey deportees underwent across Europe to Buchenwald—packed into cattle cars with deadly consequences, the conditions in isolation units, forced labor near the camp, and tragic stories of inmates who survived until just before liberation only to die of exhaustion. He also describes attempted escapes from the camp. At the end of his lecture, Porrentruy firmly refutes the claim that the German people were unaware of what occurred in the death camps, presenting several pieces of evidence to show that even the most ordinary Germans knew about the mass extermination taking place throughout the war. LES LUTTES DE L’INSTITUTEUR FRANÇAIS SOUS LA IIIe RÉPUBLIQUE, VICHY ET L’OCCUPANT NAZI – The Struggles of the French Schoolteacher under the Third Republic, Vichy, and the Nazi Occupation, by J. Carrez. Published by the Teachers’ Union of the Doubs Department. France, 1945 – first edition. Full transcript of a lecture delivered by J. Carrez at the French-Swiss Synod of Porrentruy on July 28, 1945. The lecture addresses the hardships faced by teachers in occupied France, caught between the official curriculum of the Vichy regime and their own inner resistance to its ideology. Carrez testifies: “In the depths of my heart, when I heard the first steps taken against the Jews, I decided to refuse, at any cost, any racial instruction in schools, if our leaders dared to impose it. From that moment on…” He goes on to recount the deep moral and professional struggles of educators in France during the war years. Extremely rare. Neither work appears in the WorldCat global library catalog. 76 pages (continuous pagination for both titles). Very good condition.