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Standing Torture

Written by Damien Schmit

Jean Daligault
Father Jean Daligault, was a priest born in Caen on June 8th 1899. His craftsman talent, his passion to travel and foreign languages, his preaching talent and his pastor’s skills already made him an atypical priest. But above all, Jean Daligault was a passionate painter, and had a passion for manufacturing sculptures.
When World War II began and France had been occupied a few months later, Daligault was 40 years old. He was a vicar in Villerville and refused the law of the Germans. He founded with
his friends in Caen and Paris the resistance network “Armée volontaire”. On August 31st 1941 Father Jean Daligault had been arrested by the Gestapo. Then began the most thrilling period of his life. He was first taken to Paris, to the prison of Le Cherche-Midi and interrogated by the Abwehr. As he simulated madness, he was transferred to the Sainte-Anne hospital for some time. From June 1942, the Germans gave no more news of Daligault to his brother René. This is a sign that he was now classified as “Nacht und Nebel”. Daligault was doomed to be transfered to Germany, as part of the “NN” procedure, the aim of which was to obscure the fate of the resistance fighters who risked being erected as martyrs by the population of occupied Western Europe. It was on 10th October 1942 that he arrived in Hinzert. All testimonies of survivors agree:
Daligault did not behave like an ordinary prisoner. Like many others, he lost twenty to thirty pounds in a few months because of continual mistreatment, hunger, cold, work, illness (he probably got tuberculosis). But he refused the tactics of survival in anonymity adopted by most of his comrades.
He was shot in his head in Dachau on April 28, 1945, the day before the liberation of the camp.

Lucien Wercollier
Lucien Wercollier was born in Luxembourg on July 26th 1908, where he died as well on April 24th 2002. He is considered one of the most important sculptors of the second half of the 20th century. He is best known for his monumental bronze and marble sculptures.
From 1924 to 1927 he was a pupil at the Ecole d’Artisans de l’Etat de Luxembourg, where he learned how to carve wood and stone and how to modelise plaster objects.

From 1927 to 1933, he attended the Académie royale des beaux-arts de Bruxelles (1927-1931) and the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris (1931-1933). In 1933 Lucien Wercollier returned to Luxembourg, where he became a teacher of artistic education, at the school where he had done his secondary studies, and where he resumed lessons with his father, who had retired.
After Germany’s occupation of Luxembourg in 1940, Lucien Wercollier refused to join the Kulturkammer of the Nazi regime, an organization whose aim was the political and ideological embedment of all artistic activity. This refusal made him lose the right to present his works to the public.
On September 1st 1942, following his participation in the strike movement against the forced recruitment of four Luxembourg age classes (1920-1924) into the German army, Lucien Wercollier was arrested and his wife and his two children were deported to a camp in Silesia. After two weeks in Luxembourg-Grund prison (from September 4th to 19th 1942), Wercollier was transferred to the Hinzert and later the Lublin concentration camps. In 1943, he joined his wife and his two children in the deportation camp in Silesia.
In June 1945, after the Liberation, Wercollier returned with his family to Luxembourg, where he again became a teacher at the École des artisans. Lucien Wercollier died in Luxembourg on April 24, 2002 at the age of 93. He was buried in the Notre-Dame cemetery in Luxembourg.

Concentration camp Hinzert
The concentration camp Hinzert is located approximately 25km from Trier. Prisoners have been mistreated by the SS. Instead of being called by their names, the prisoners had an individual
number. Foreign prisoners had problems to understand and to pronounce their numbers at the beginning, which was a reason why they were brutally beaten and punished. Hinzert was a so called “Lauflager”, which means, that everything had to be done in double quick. Furthermore, the alimentation was unsufficient. The daily ration of food consisted of 300-500g bread and half a liter of tea or coffee at the morning and at the evening and a soup at lunch time.
Apart from reports from contemporary witnesses and interviews, testimonials by artists, like little statues or drawings give us information about the everyday live in Hinzert. Two of them were French priest Jean Daligault and Luxembourgish sculptor Lucien Wercollier. By manufacturing wooden statues, which showed the everyday life of the camp, Daligault took enormous risks.
Daligault was starving even more than other prisoners in Hinzert. The inmates of Stube 7 kept a piece the size of dices from their bread rations, so Daligault could get something to eat.
Because his teeth had already been knocked out when he was interrogated in France, he had to mix the bread with water to be able to eat it. Lucien Wercollier, who, as a Luxembourgish prisoner, was still able to receive parcels from relatives, had another prisoner through Daligault who had access to the French barrack from his Christmas package in 1942. In return for the package, Daligault carved a wooden sculpture depicting two prisoners who had to stand
outdoors, back to back, tied to the ankles. This frequently used method of torture in Hinzert is called standing torture (Standfolter). This wooden sculpture is the object whose history is being told with this text. The dimensons are 10,8 x 6,2 x 2,2cm. Wercollier was able to hide this sculpture and save it from captivity. Wercollier later formed a copy of the statue made of iron. Since 2016 the statue is at the Musée National de la Résistance in Esch-Alzette.