While reading, my primary struggle was trying to keep track of all the different characters we meet in this story. There's a ton, roughly, all with interesting snippets of backstories, tantalizing moments in the prison, but relatively few with complete histories. The author did a wonderful job of piecing together what information he had, there was just a lot of it.

After reading, my primary struggle was wondering what happened to the daughter of Louis De Houwer and Charlotte Hamburger. As the story unfolded, it became clear that both her parents did not survive, and then the author lets drop that her grandparents and other relatives are also sent to concentration camps. WHAT HAPPENED TO HER?! Fortunately, I skimmed through the acknowledgements, and caught her name. The daughter survived and proved a valuable resource for the author, but I did not catch any further detail. And now, after all the intense research and overwhelming information in the book, I am struck by how this was left out. How did this girl survive? Did she ask that the information be withheld? Was it not exciting enough to include?

Overall, this is a fascinating look at a little known slice of Holocaust history. The most disturbing part of the story was the feeling I kept having while reading that this prison didn't seem that bad. That feeling kept returning, despite the arrests without cause, the torture, the starvation, the executions. I think it's because some of the prisoners were released during the prison operations (it couldn't have been that bad if they were releasing prisoners, right?), and perhaps because - if they weren't released - the camps they went to afterward seem even crueler and less humane. And then I found myself stunned by the magnitude of the horror during this time, when a place like Breendonk could seem by comparison 'not so bad.'