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- Who ever try to pass this point, will be
shot. That’s what the sign at the gate of Breendonk fortification
says. No one didn’t try. The sign is from the wartime, when the
Nazis turned the fortification into a interigation centre and a
concentration camp. The fortification that the Belgians had build to
protect them, turned into their nightmare.
- The Breendonk fortification which was build a hundred years ago, was
suppose to protect the Antwerpen, which is located 40 kilometres from
the fortification. When the First World War broke out, the weapons were
so effective, that the walls were practically useless and during the
Second World War, the meaning of different fortifications was even less,
except for the occupiers.
- The corridor inside the thick concrete wall makes a few turns and then
opens up into a large cell. A hook is attached to a rope that’s
hanging from the ceiling, shackles lie on the floor and below the hook,
is a groove which looks a bit like a ditch and it ends into a floor
drain. The ceiling also contains a electric flex, ready for use. A table
which contains different instruments, stove and a fireplace. It must
have taken a few moments even from an experienced smith, to figure out
how the thumbscrews are suppose to work.
- The interrogators left the door open, so that the others would also
hear the scream. Here, the horses were given a name and prisoners
received a number. In every door, a tourist ask from himself, that do I
really like to know what’s behind the door? Or to wonder, that for
what purpose that odd looking piece of equipment was build for? And what are
the guarantees that this place wont ever again be opened? The workshop
of the smith is the last place where the tour takes us and it reveals
another life story: This is what the man look liked, who made all of the
torture equipment.
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The mission of the museum, is to turn the numbers into names and people,
what ever is left of the humanity. At the same time in the same country
in Brussels: Europe is again thinking about it’s protection. How far
to the east should we now expand? And what kind of walls should we now
build to protect ourselves?
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