Bidspirit auction | The Tragedy of the Deportation,

The Tragedy of the Deportation, an early collection of testimonies of survivors from the German concentration camps after World War II. Paris, 1954 - First edition - Tragédie de la déportation 1940-1945 - The Tragedy of the Deportation, an early collection of testimonies of survivors from the German concentration camps after World War II. Edited by Olga Wormser and Henri Michel, Hachette Publishing, Paris 1954 - First edition. French. Accompanied by harsh photos of survivors in severe physical condition, bodies of the deceased, and more. Extremely rare. “Since 1945, the reports of the survivors, the examination of part of the camp archives, the Nuremberg trials, and the reports of the commandants of the principal camps, Struthof and Schirmeck, have revealed the various modes of operation of the system: the exploitation of slave labor to keep the Hitlerite war machine running, techniques of proven science, the placing of the most barbaric instincts at its service, the extermination of the unusable, the recycling of ‘waste, ’ bodies and ashes... The concentration camps must not be erased from human consciousness... The network of memory has gathered in one volume the most significant pages of the reports given by the deportees upon their return... In this book, the reader will follow, step by step, the difficult path along which the deportees ascended. They will accompany men, women, and children, Christians and Jews, mechanics and doctors, Gaullists and Communists, from the sealed railway car to the hospital or the crematorium, striving to preserve their human dignity amid forced labor, daily hardships, indescribable suffering, hunger, fear, illness, and humiliation. The reader will witness their gradual dehumanization and the merciless process of selection that, day after day, hour after hour, turned every human being into a number, into an object, into a grain of dust. We give voice to those who experienced hell..” (from the introduction). In the years following the war, the “Commission for the History of the Deportation” collected firsthand testimonies and findings concerning the crimes of the Nazis in the death camps. This is a comprehensive publication that includes dozens of shocking testimonies by former camp prisoners documenting their years in the Nazi concentration camps. The book contains numerous first-person accounts from prisoners of the camps Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Oranienburg, and others, in which they detail the severe abuses endured by prisoners in the camps, the selections, the various methods of killing, the extermination machinery in the gas chambers, how the deportations operated from Jewish population centers across Europe, and the operational system of the camps. The testimonies include, among other things, extensive details of places, individuals, dates, and identifying information from firsthand sources regarding mass murders carried out by the Nazis in the occupied countries, as well as the abuse of children and women and their brutal executions during the war years. Many of the testimonies, difficult to read, document the horrific medical experiments carried out by Nazi doctors on the bodies of prisoners in the death camps. From the testimonies it emerges how, in a systematic manner, facilities for mass killing were established in the extermination camps, primarily through gas chambers and crematoria. Many prisoners were murdered immediately upon arrival, while others were held under harsh conditions of hunger, disease, forced labor, and systematic violence from the guards. Many died as a result of abuse, medical experiments, or inhumane living conditions. Testimony upon testimony demonstrates how the camp system was a central component of the extermination policy of the Nazi regime, leading to the deaths of millions of Jews and other groups persecuted by the Nazi regime. The editors were among the first to engage in early and meticulous research in France on deportations to the camps and the atrocities committed there. Henri Michel was one of the first researchers of the French Resistance movement, and Olga Wormser devoted many years to the study of the concentration camp system and deportation. The book is considered one of the earliest collections of survivor testimonies published in France after the war, and it is one of the reliable sources upon which the more comprehensive historical research on the Holocaust and the camp system, conducted in later years, was based. Extremely rare. In the WorldCat global library catalog, only a single record of this edition appears, in a library in Switzerland. 511 [1] pages. Light stains on the cover. Good condition.