Working Titles Excerpts
Torture (Working Title 7.1)
- By Jean Améry, translated by Emory Klann
WHOEVER VISITS BELGIUM as a tourist might happen upon Fort Breendonk, halfway between Brussels and Antwerp. The fortress was built during World War I. I don’t know what purpose it served then, but in the Second World War, during the short eighteen days of resistance by the Belgian Army in May of 1940, Breendonk was the last headquarters of King Leopold. Later, under German occupation, it became a kind of small concentration camp or, in the Rotwelsch of the Third Reich, a “reception camp.” Today it is a Belgian national museum.
At first glance, Fort Breendonk seems very old, almost as though it belonged to the remote past. Under the eternally gray and rainy skies of Flanders, its grassy domes and dark gray walls give it the look of a bleak engraving from the...