Belene — The Island of the Forgotten
Белене — островът на забравените
Category: Socialist period in Bulgaria
Language: Bulgarian
This book is one of the first—if not the first—to be written about the Belene concentration camp. It was published in 1983 in Belgium, while the author was in exile, and remains to this day one of the most valuable eyewitness accounts of the Belene concentration camp. Thanks to his youth and resilience, Nedyalko Geshev remembers and recounts the facts, circumstances, and chronology of events with great accuracy. Nedyalko Geshev writes about the motives behind his two escapes from the concentration camp: “I didn’t feel guilty about anything. I was a victim of tyranny and couldn’t come to terms with the idea that I would have to spend a full eight years in camps and prisons.”