Stalag 307 - Italy, 1945 - first edition with author's dedication

Stalag 307 - Italy, 1945 - first edition with author's dedication

Stalag 307 : Giornale Disegnato dell'internato 25685 - "Stalag 307 - Drawn Journal of the inmate 25685" by Franco Brunello. Published by E DIZIONI DEL PARTITO D'AZIONE, Vicenza 1945, Italian. On the protective page there is a dedication in the author's handwriting dated: 3/18/1945.

A booklet of drawings from a concentration camp by a prisoner who stayed in Stalag 307 in Dublin. It was a prisoner's attempt to overcome the inferno of prison through humor. Prisoners from Greece, Albania, France, and Italy stayed with him in the camp, with whom the author/illustrator shared his time in the camp. As he describes his way of dealing with the daily struggle to maintain a human image was to turn the difficult moments into humorous scenes as much as possible. He illustrated the paintings in the camp in Dublin, some of them he managed to keep in a hiding place until the end of the war, and others that were found by the Germans and were destroyed, he restored after the war. According to his Description in the introduction to the booklet, his surviving friends criticized his illustrations on the grounds that they did not reflect the difficult living conditions and that they were too "happy". To this criticism, he replied that his paintings deliberately did not reflect the stench of the overcrowded dormitories, the screams of the Germans, and the tortures, because he saw no point in self-strengthening in the illustration of these. Each painting over an entire page, surrounded by a wire fence to hint the real reality, and on the corresponding page a short description of a few lines.

Rare. Only two copies in the world library catalog "World cat" - one in the library of Milan and in the United States library.

83 p. 25 cm. Slight tears at the edges of the cover.  overall condition good.