Arthur Haulot, Belgium, biography

Summary

Arthur Haulot was born in 1913 in Liége, Belgium. A journalist, writer, and radio announcer, Haulot was also chief of the Belgian General Commission for Tourism. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 on account of his membership in a resistance movement. In July 1942, Haulot was deported to Mauthausen concentration camp and later transferred to Dachau on November 9, 1942 (prisoner number 39,095), from where he was liberated in 1945.

Haulot was deputy spokesman for his compatriots on the International Prisoners’ Committee of the concentration camp of Dachau after liberation. He was among the few who were able to write while interned at Dachau. Between January 1943 and 1945, even though he was a Nacht und Nebel prisoner, fortunate circumstances in the hospital barracks allowed him access to writing material, which he used to keep a “camp diary”—even sometimes at extreme risk. This diary was later published under the title J'ai voulu vivre (1987). The poem included here, “Contrast,” comes from this diary. But Haulot also wrote many other poems during this period, which were published shortly after his liberation in Si lourd de sang (1946). In the introduction to this collection of poetry, he wrote: “I was and am a prisoner of that drama, in which I had a part….”

Following his return from Dachau concentration camp, Haulot resumed his position as head of the General Commission for Tourism in Brussels, edited the Journal des Poètes, and published more poems of his own. Later he became Vice-President of the Comité International de Dachau and lived in Brussels until his death in 2005. Arthur Haulot, too, had a clear answer when asked about what his time in the camp had meant for his subsequent life: “In truth, the time in the concentration camp has marked our entire lives and not just the years we spent behind barbed wire….” Both his poetry and his prose are in pursuit of a goal that Haulot constantly bore in mind, regarding it as the main lesson drawn from his experiences: “Whether writing or speaking, I am pursuing a goal: to pass on knowledge of the camps of the Third Reich. However, this is no act of hatred toward the German people. The young must be told that the human being is capable of everything: of the very best and the very worst….”