Pierre Fertil

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Pierre Fertil (born February 10, 1923 in Moisdon-la-Rivière , Loire-Atlantique department ; † March 11, 2015 ) was a French painter and anesthetist .

Life

Fertil came from a rural family, his father was a baker.

After graduating from high school in 1943, Fertil prepared in Poitiers for the entrance exams to a teacher training college. He had no permanent ties to the Resistance , but he worked with an employee of the Poitiers city council to produce false identity papers. He benefited from his artistic talent. When Fertil learned that the Gestapo suspected him, he gave up his education in early 1944 and left Poitiers.

At the end of June 1944, Fertil was on the way to his parents, who lived in Plonévez-Porzay , a small village at the beginning of the Crozon peninsula in the far west of Brittany . The entire region, which represented the westernmost outpost of the area occupied by the Germans and which also contained the large port and naval base of Brest , was of great importance for German occupation and war policy.

After a sabotage by the Resistance, the Wehrmacht carried out raids. In the small village of Plonévez-Porzay, where many villagers had gathered in the square in front of the church for a funeral, the Germans arrested ten people, including Pierre Fertil.

Together with around 1,000 other prisoners, he was transferred to the Bahrsplate satellite camp in September 1944 . There the prisoners had to work for the Deutsche Schiff- und Maschinenbau AG ( Deschimag ), which belongs to the Krupp concern and which manufactured parts for submarines. Pierre Fertil worked as a lathe operator.

At the beginning of April 1945 the clearing of the Neuengamme satellite camps began . The sick prisoners, including Fertil, were transported by train to the Sandbostel prisoner of war camp near Bremervörde , where a reception camp for concentration camp prisoners had been set up in a separate part of the camp, to which over 7,000 prisoners from various satellite camps of Neuengamme concentration camp were brought were. The conditions in this camp were murderous: the prisoners hardly got anything to eat or drink, there was a typhoid epidemic , from which many prisoners fell ill and died every day. The Sandbostel reception camp only existed for about three weeks. British troops reached the camp on April 29th.

Pierre Fertil was lucky enough to meet a French prisoner of war from Brittany in Sandbostel . This helped Fertil to escape from the concentration camp reception camp to the prisoner of war camp, where Fertil was looked after and cared for by the prisoners of war. However, Fertil had already contracted typhoid at this point; at the time of his liberation he still weighed 36 kilograms. In May, the sick Fertil was repatriated to France and recovered from the consequences of the deportation after several hospital stays with his parents in Brest.

After his recovery, Fertil began studying medicine and became a doctor and anesthetist. In Nantes he was part of a team of specialists in cardiac surgery. Fertil retired in 1992.

Works of art

When Pierre Fertil retired, the demons of the deportation returned to him and he began to draw what he had experienced in the concentration camps. Fertil also painted events that he had not experienced first hand: the fire in the barn of Gardelegen , the tragedy in the Baltic Sea in which 7,000 prisoners died, who were crowded in the ships Thielbek and Cap Arcona , by the bombs of the Allies or in the ice cold water. Most of the time, Fertil destroyed his works shortly after their completion. It is thanks to another former inmate of the Bahrsplate subcamp who was friends with Fertil that he no longer destroyed his pictures, but showed them in public. This first happened in November 2007 in Caen . This was followed by other exhibitions, including in the summer of 2010 at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Notice de personne “Fertil, Pierre (1923-2015)”. BnF Catalog général - Bibliothèque nationale de France. Retrieved August 21, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Fertil, Pierre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French deportee, medic and painter
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Moisdon-la-Rivière
DATE OF DEATH March 11, 2015