Аукцион Bidspirit | The Decisive Moment: Prisons and

The Decisive Moment: Prisons and Concentration Camps, 1940–1945 - The Testimony of Mauthausen Concentration Camp Prisoner Gregor Stein. First edition - Presentation Copy Inscribed and Signed by the Author - Die Cäsur der Entscheidung: Gefängnisse und Konzentrationslager 1940–1945 - ”The Decisive Moment: Prisons and Concentration Camps, 1940–1945”. By Gregor Stein, the pen name of Pierre Grégoire, a prominent Luxembourgish politician, journalist, and author, who later served as Luxembourg's Minister of Culture and Education and as President of its Parliament. Presentation copy inscribed and signed by the author in his real name. Sankt Paulus-Druckerei Publishing, Luxembourg, 1946 - First edition. German. Rare. ”A new transport of victims arrives from Sachsenhausen. Three hundred men. Take them behind the bathhouse! Remove your clothes! Look straight ahead! Stand at attention! There! Now endure until you die! Night. Frost and snow. Rain and ice. A storm raging from every direction. Screams from three hundred mouths. Lamentations. Attempts to escape. Gunfire. Pistol shots. Weeping. Silence and stillness. It is over... What is life, after all? A crawling disgrace in the path of the master race!...”. During the Second World War, the author, who was active in the Luxembourg Resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 following the German occupation of Luxembourg. He was imprisoned in several prisons before being deported to Mauthausen Concentration Camp, where he survived its brutal conditions until his liberation in 1945. The book opens with a moving passage in which he describes his emotions as he begins to write his memoirs of his years in the camps. Stein writes of himself, ”Myself of 1940 is dead, ” and seeks to convey directly to the reader his feelings as a survivor who endured torture in the concentration camps. Writing these painful recollections of his years in the camps served as a form of catharsis, and he explains that only after sharing these harrowing memories would he be able to devote himself to the tasks of the future with a sense of optimism. In his book, Stein describes daily life, the inhuman conditions, and the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps and prisons. He was arrested during the early stages of the occupation for his underground activities and anti-Nazi journalistic work in Luxembourg. He was initially held in local prisons and Gestapo detention facilities, where he endured brutal interrogations intended to break his spirit and extract information about the Resistance network. Stein survived the camp's horrific conditions, including forced labor in the Wiener Graben stone quarry. There, prisoners were compelled to quarry massive blocks of stone and carry them on their backs up the ”Stairs of Death”—186 steep and uneven steps. Countless prisoners collapsed under the weight of their loads, died from exhaustion, or were brutally murdered by guards who pushed them from the top of the quarry. Stein describes the quarry as a death machine ”producing corpses on an assembly line.” Food rations in the camp were meager, consisting primarily of thin watery soup and stale bread, resulting in extreme weight loss—reducing prisoners to Muselmänner - and deadly epidemics of typhus and dysentery. He describes the constant danger posed by the SS and the kapos. Even the slightest infraction of camp regulations could result in flogging, public hanging, or execution in the camp's small gas chamber (or at the crematorium of nearby Hartheim Castle). While imprisoned, Stein made repeated attempts to smuggle information out of the camp to reveal that systematic mass murder was taking place there, risking his life should he be discovered by the Nazis. He survived this inferno for nearly five years, largely thanks to clandestine internal aid networks established by the camp's political prisoners, who helped one another survive, shared scraps of food, and concealed sick prisoners from selections. His survival was also aided by the fact that he was eventually assigned to work in an armaments factory, sparing him from the deadly labor in the quarry. He was liberated in May 1945 with the arrival of the U.S. Army, physically broken but determined to record what had taken place. He published the book under the pen name Gregor Stein in order to separate his literary testimony from his political career. The author, Pierre Grégoire (1907–1991), was a prominent Luxembourgish statesman, intellectual, and author, regarded as one of the most influential public and cultural figures in twentieth-century Luxembourg. In the years following the war, he embarked on a distinguished political career, serving as Minister of Culture and Education, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Defense, and, from 1969 to 1974, as President of the Luxembourg Parliament. Throughout the book are charcoal drawings by the Luxembourgish artist Edmond Goergen,