Mauthausen 1942 - Dachau 1945 - Czech Republic. Rare and uncensored edition

Mauthausen 1942 - Dachau 1945 - Czech Republic. Rare and uncensored edition

Mauthausen 1942 - Dachau 1945 - Testimonies and documents, by Dr. Milos Vitek Published by KLUB KOUNICOVYCH KOLEJI V BRNE. Czech Republic 1946. Testimony of the inmate of the Mauthausen and Dachau camps. The book is accompanied by many difficult photographs that were published only in this edition, documenting the atrocities of the Nazi camps - Murdered, and corpses with severe signs of torture, some of the most shocking photographs we know today documenting the Nazi cruelty. A rare edition with a dust jacket on which a hard drawing of a corpse lying against the background of the swastika. This shell is the original and rare one designed by Zdenek Rossman who was himself a prisoner in Mauthausen. This  dust jacket was replaced in later editions by a softened cover, with only a wire fence painting.

The horrific story of a Mauthausen and Dachau camp inmate Dr. Milos Vitek, written mostly inside the camp in the weeks following his release by Allied forces, while he was still in the camp. Vitek was captured by the Gestapo in 1941 on charges of aiding the resistance movement while a student at the University of Brno. He was taken with some of his classmates to Mauthausen. There he was imprisoned for three years, and from there transferred to Dachau. When he reached Mauthausen he were told that the only way out of the camp was through the chimney "no man comes out of here alive". Vitek, who was taken to forced labor at a quarry near the camp, describes in his detailed testimony the suffering, cruelty, human experimentation, mass killing, and daily occurrence in the camps, in what he defines as "the tragedy unparalleled in human suffering history." On the scale of 'suffering' in the camp, Vitek describes that the Spaniards, Poles, and Russians suffered in the camp. But the hardest hell was that of the Jews. He describes in his testimony how countless times he was close to death, and was sure he never left the camp alive, especially in light of the fact that many of his friends were murdered or killed in strange deaths before his eyes (At the end of the book he mentions a name list of everyone who knew and was murdered in the camp, as well as brief details that were known to him about them, and the way they were murdered). The book is accompanied by harsh photographs from the camps most of which were first published here, and are not known from any other source. At the end of the book, a number of preliminary photographs documenting the liberation of the camp by the Allies, and the joy of the survivors. Also, difficult drawings of scenes from the camp were presented in the book.

108 [2] p. 22 cm. Thick and special paper. Slight tears at the top of the dust jacket. Very good condition.