We Sue! The executioners of the concentration camps - early testimony from husband and wife, prisoners of ...

We Sue! The executioners of the concentration camps - early testimony from husband and wife, prisoners of Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz - in Dutch. The Hague, [1946]

Wij klagen aan! : de beulen van de concentratiekampen - We sue! The executioners of the concentration camps. By H.F. Kemperman, Mary Kemperman-Peitel. Published by DE HOFSTAD, The Hague [1946]. Preliminary, detailed and early testimony about the abuse experienced by a husband and wife in the Nazi death camps. Accompanied by harsh photographs from the camps. Dutch.

"Our fate in 1941-1942 is indescribable... I myself came home torn apart... With my wife, who spent three years in the notorious Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz camps... Very few returned home from Bergen-Belsen, they were murdered by the thousands, hanged, beaten to death, gassed, starved, burned alive. And those who remain mentally and physically broken, bruised for the rest of their lives... People of the Netherlands, we must not forget what National Socialism and its SS herd did to us and to your sons, daughters, fathers, children, and mothers..." (from the introduction).

The tale of the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg camp inmate and his wife from Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz - a thrilling and detailed testimony about what happened to him and his fellow prisoners in the camp - especially the prisoners brought there from the Netherlands, which was published shortly after the end of the war. Kemperman documents extensively and accurately every moment that passed in the camp, and his wife adds descriptions from her memory of what happened to her. In many pages of the book he describes the severe torture he and his fellow prisoners endured by the hands of SS and Kapo commanders. These descriptions are emotionally difficult to read, and it is almost inconceivable that these atrocities were committed (one of the harshest descriptions in the book is the hanging of death row inmates to the sound of music that other prisoners were forced to play while their comrades were executed). A large part of the book describes the methods of punishment and execution in the camp employed by the SS, and the strict laws that left almost no chance for the prisoner to survive. In one chapter, the author compiles a long list of all the torture methods he was familiar within the camp, and then he documents in detail the manner in which the Nazis used each of them, and for what the prisoner was punished each kind of punishment, and who the punishers were, adding: "All the punishments were sadistic, too evil to say, an someone from outside is incapable of creating even the faintest idea of what actually happened... And yet we testify to it, we saw it every day, every hour, we went through all this...". In this part of the book, his wife also adds harsh descriptions of how the Nazis abused Jewish women in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. This is one of the first detailed testimonies written in Dutch from a husband and wife who themselves endured the horrors of the camps and survived, a testimony published shortly after the war. The book is accompanied by harsh photographs of the bodies of those perished in Dachau and other camps, "victims of gas, torture, hanging, etc.".

Rare. The World Cat Library Catalog shows the book only in libraries in the Netherlands.

48 p. 21 cm. Light stains on the cover. Good - Very Good Condition .