The Mons prison

At 5.30 a.m., Mr. Dinsart, the prison's Belgian director, released the two hundred political prisoners still incarcerated. Not without offering them breakfast.

As during the First World War, the occupying forces used part of Mons prison to incarcerate those opposed to their authority. More often than not, the prison was simply a transit point for deportation to the Nazi concentration camp system. More rarely, detention may lead to execution on the spot. For example, Marguerite Bervoets and Cécile Detournay were incarcerated here in 1942. On May 22, 1955, a memorial was erected by public subscription on the initiative of political prisoners from the Mons region, to commemorate the entrance to Hitler's prison. The memorial shows most of the concentration camps to which some of the political prisoners who passed through Mons prison during the Second World War were transferred: Flossenburg, Buchenwald, Dora, Neuengamme, Dachau, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Mauthausen.