Breendonk is often overlooked as a concentration camp, but life there was no less brutal than betterknown camps. This informational text includes incredible primary sources, including photos, letters, and artwork. Maps, Bibliography, Source Notes, Index, Appendix

THE PRISONERS OF BREENDONK by James M. Deem tells the compelling, personal stories associated with a lesser-known concentration camp during World War II.

Located in Belgium, the internment camp held both Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners who were political dissidents or accused of resistance activities. Occupied from 1940 through 1944, it was also used as a transit camp for Jews on their way to death camps in Germany and Poland. The prisoners were subjected to forced labor and lived under the constant threat of starvation, interrogation, and torture.

Following the chronology of World War II, Deem’s work of nonfiction provides a comprehensive examination of the camp and it’s inhabitants. Told through short narratives that weave in background information and personal histories, Deem brings the poor, over-crowded conditions to life for young adult readers.

Designed for young adults, this well-researched work contains an afterward and information source sections in addition to the body of text. Of particular note are the many high-quality illustrations including maps, signs, photographs, and drawings. The author also describes why so many photos and sketches are available from this camp.

Librarians will find this outstanding work of nonfiction to be an excellent addition to the history section of the library. Its focus on this brutal, but lesser-known camp will be particularly appealing for YA researchers already familiar with Nazi-German concentration camps.

Visit the National Memorial Fort Breendonk website at http://www.breendonk.be/EN/.

Read the Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Breendonk.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on August 4, 2015. ARC paper and NetGalley. ( )

Reviewed for professional publication. ( )

James Deem's The Prisoners of Breendonk is not what one would call an enjoyable read. This historical document draws upon a wealth of primary and secondary sources to paint a bleak, sometimes hopeless portrait of human cruelty in a Belgian concentration camp during WWII. Deem, a practiced author and retired college professor, extensively researched this lesser known facility, which is generally left out of discussions including the likes of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The complex was small, yes, but its legacy stands as a testament to the depths of sadism and indifference which people can reach when backed my oppressive, nationalist, militarist, racist power structures. The book takes the reader through a history of the names, faces, and words of many of those who spent time in (and often died in) Breendonk. While the author does admit to some guessing of particulars for individual prisoners where direct citation were not available, he points to their shared experience enough to justify these extrapolations (3). With that being said, The Prisoners of Breendonk is a fascinating, horrifying in depth look at the rise and fall of this brutal Belgian concentration camp.

In keeping with the deadly serious topic being covered, Deem keeps to a mostly neutral tone throughout the book. This tone holds even when talking about gross human rights violations and occurrences such as murdered prisoners' causes of death being falsified on official documents to cover up the abuses taking place in the camp (79-80). More vivid and figurative language is primarily reserved for direct quotations taken from primary sources - such as the arrival of prisoners being characterized as being “vomited” from the vehicles delivering them to the camp (13) or when an overseer sneers, “A bullet costs too much for you; my fists cost nothing” before beating a prisoner to death (196). The stark contrast between the fairly monotonous prose and the shocking quotations lends some life to what sometimes comes across as an extremely heavy, even cumbersome, literary journey. Deem's writing isn't bad (far from it), but the gloomy, violent, unrelenting nature of the subject matter left me in need of something less depressing every time I sat the book down. I suppose, however, that this is the point, and that it would be rather troubling to not feel a bit downtrodden after reading a work like this.

The book is organized pretty much chronologically, starting with the camp's early use as a fort then moving to its designation as a “reception” camp under the Nazi regime, and ending with the closing of the camp. It makes sense to organize this way, as it seems the author was trying to fit as much information and human experience as possible into a fairly compact space. The end result feels a little cluttered at times, and, in chapters heavy with individual stories which amounted to brief snippets about each person and archival photos I felt almost like I was looking at a long line of people with whom I could never really relate (34-41). (Admittedly, this copy is an advanced copy, and the final , published work will likely have a more polished appearance, and many of the photos will likely be better positioned and colorized.) Possibly the single most interesting and humanizing features found in the pages of The Prisoners of Breendonk are copies of the original sketches by a Mr Jacques Ochs, who was assigned to draw many of the prisoners by order of the camp's commanding officer. These images run the gamut from realistic and saddening to arguably racist – showing a possible anti-Semitic slant which many of the non-Jewish prisoners shared (69). Ochs' drawings speak, in a surprisingly real way, both to the suffering faced by the prisoners at Breendonk and the prejudice at the core of so much of the suffering visited upon the Jewish people during WWII.

On the whole, this book was an amazing educational read. Though it felt bogged down, sometimes, by the neutral tone and morose subject matter, the work speaks, in a real way, to human depravity and perseverance. This book would be an excellent work to cover, at least in part, in a high school world history class during a WWII unit, and I will likely pick up a copy when it becomes commercially available. Furthermore, the topic itself, Breendonk, is often passed over in surveys of WWII, and the UNO Education library doesn't seem to have a single other book on this camp (though books on other concentration camps abound. I would highly recommend this work be included, when available. ( )