Scan barcode
eriknoteric's review
5.0
Building on the canonical text "The Men with the Pink Triangles" by Hans Heger, Pierre Seel's account of being deported from Alsace, France and sent to a concentration camp because of his homosexuality by the Nazis is a stunning reminder that discrimination against the gays started before the Nazis and continued after them.
After watching his lover be brutally murdered in a concentration camp, Seel recounts his journey being forced into military servitude and then being forced further into the closet by his Russian and then French liberators. Unlike so many of the other liberated people from the camps, the homosexuals were the one class of people that never received reparations, and much of Seel's memoir is recounting the struggles he had keeping the horrors of what happened to him in the camp to himself, afraid that if he spoke of them, or even the reason for him being sent to the camps, he would face social backlash and legal arrest (all the way through the 80s).
So few books have been written on the experiences of the gay men who were sent to the Nazi concentration camps because for so long our society forbade these men from speaking about their experiences. For this reason we must cherish those few stories we have so that we acknowledge and never forget.
After watching his lover be brutally murdered in a concentration camp, Seel recounts his journey being forced into military servitude and then being forced further into the closet by his Russian and then French liberators. Unlike so many of the other liberated people from the camps, the homosexuals were the one class of people that never received reparations, and much of Seel's memoir is recounting the struggles he had keeping the horrors of what happened to him in the camp to himself, afraid that if he spoke of them, or even the reason for him being sent to the camps, he would face social backlash and legal arrest (all the way through the 80s).
So few books have been written on the experiences of the gay men who were sent to the Nazi concentration camps because for so long our society forbade these men from speaking about their experiences. For this reason we must cherish those few stories we have so that we acknowledge and never forget.