This review was originally posted at A Simple Cup of Tea.

I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Content warning: This book may be unsuitable for people under 17 years of age due to its use of violence.

This book is quite a way away from my usual fiction reading. When I saw it on NetGalley however I just had to request it because as a Belgian teenager I went to Breendonk with school while on a trip to Antwerp and Amsterdam.

For some reason we were never taught about the actual camp and what went on there. In none of my history lessons about World War II was there any mention of Breendonk. Odd in my opinion as it is the only real concentration camp in Belgium.

The only thing I really remember from visiting fort Breendonk is walking around with this sick feeling in my stomach. A sick feeling that didn’t exactly go away when we went into one of the isolation cells and you could see the gouge marks from where prisoners had tried to get out of their personal hell.

In The Prisoners of Breendonk James M. Deem uses the histories of the prisoners as his lead to give us an insight of the day to day life in the so-called holding camp. With access to not only the camp archives but also recent photographs taken in the camp and rare finds he paints a vivid picture of not just the place itself but the lives of the prisoners before, during and after their time there.

The book uses a lot of the German terms that prisoners would encounter every day, mostly names for hierarchal positions and terms that distinguish different kind of Nazi camps. These are explained at the beginning with a very useful glossary.

German phrases that would be shouted at the prisoners always have an English translation throughout the book. This makes the reading experience smooth and keeps the reader in what’s happening to the prisoners rather than making them go back and forth or having to use a dictionary.

One of the best additions to the book in my opinion are the drawings that prisoner Jacques Ochs was forced to make of the camp and his fellow prisoners. Together with the photographs taken by German propaganda photographer Kropf they give a vivid poignancy to the events told: from the very beginning to the end of the camp.

From the ‘quiet’ days in the beginning of the camp to the time when political prisoners were tortured for information and the executions began, this book doesn’t hold back. With prisoner accounts and pictures some of the later chapters are not for the faint-hearted. I have to admit that with a vivid imagination I had to take quite a few breaks in those chapters.

I understand after reading why there was nothing in my history syllabus during secondary school. It doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t have been anything taught but the sheer terror and brutality that has been used by officers and guards alike is in my opinion too much for students that age. Learning about World War II through Auschwitz and the like makes it a tad more distant and makes it easier to look at in a more objective way.

All in all this book is an awful yet wonderful account of Belgium’s sole concentration camp. Awful because of the atrocities committed and the role the fort played in the bigger Nazi picture. And yet wonderful because of the way James M. Deem shows us the people behind the prisoner numbers. His focus is on their suffering, their strength and determination to survive. Even though the majority of them did not survive they live on in this gritty yet hopeful story. A story that shouldn’t be forgotten or ignored in history books and the school syllabus.