On this 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps by the Allies, from January 27 (Auschwitz) to early May 1945 (Gusen II), numerous publications revive the memory of the Shoah. Here are some of them, as exciting as they are tragic. Starting with The Girls of Birkenau (Les Arènes), by filmmaker David Teboul, the author, with Simone Veil, of the fascinating story Dawn at Birkenau (2019), For a documentary, broadcast in May 2024, he brought together for two lunches four survivors, almost centenarians, from Auschwitz-Birkenau, Isabelle Choko (since deceased), Judith Elkan-Hervé, Esther Sénot and Ginette Kolinka, well known to readers for her powerful statements (Return to Birkenau And A happy life). Teboul gives us today the written version of these live testimonies. Having remained silent for a long time, the survivors of the genocide are keen to speak, so they often interrupt themselves, sometimes vehemently. Before agreeing on the main thing.
Each case is unique. Judith was born into a bourgeois family from Transylvania, Isabelle was the daughter of Polish pharmacists, Esther, the daughter of a Polish shoemaker based in Belleville, Ginette, the only native of Paris, was also of modest means. Memory sometimes wavers, but everyone remembers experiencing hell (hunger, cold, thirst, the smell of crematoriums, beatings, dysentery, fear, dishumanity, etc.) of the death camp – Isabelle and Judith with their mother. Divided into chapters, Childhood, The Arrest, Arrival in Birkenau, Surviving, etc., the work reveals the astonishing freshness of mind of these survivors.
Saved by miracle
Hanged at Auschwitzit is under this shocking title that Sim Kessel (after having long “struggled against the obsession with memory”) recounted his incredible ordeal in 1970 at Solar, republished these days by Editions du Crieur Public. A shock is the autobiography of this “convict from Auschwitz” who will have spent a total of twenty-three months in camps, to which must be added a year in prison. Arrested in Dijon by the Gestapo in July 1942 at the age of 23, resistance fighter Kessel (and professional boxer) owed his survival, after months of abuse, to his… Jewishness. Instead of torturing him to death, he was sent for deportation via Drancy. Auschwitz-Birkenau, the coal mine of Jaworzno, the central camp of Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Gusen II… three times, he escaped the gas chambers. Twice included on the condemned list, he was saved by a miracle: once due to a lost file and the other, thanks to the “leniency” of a former SS boxer. “I, too, the broken nose. Between the two of us, the mystical current was established,” he writes. Then comes his sentence to the gallows for escaping: the rope breaks and his executioner Kapo, another former boxer, spares his life.
Sim Kessel hides nothing of the dehumanization of the prisoners, the opposition of nationalities, the struggles for a piece of bread, the coldness in the face of the dead or even the savage solitude which takes hold of him. His testimony, thrilling from start to finish, should be included in school curricula.
Incredible dialogue
Memories of the Shoah (Dupuis), too, is a work to meditate on in class. The journalist from World Annick Cojean won the Albert Londres prize in 1996 for a series of five articles published on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, the result of an in-depth investigation which took her from the United States (notably to the university from Yale, where surviving teachers had recorded the stories of survivors on video) to Germany, and this at a time when very little was still spoken about the Shoah. Now adapted into a comic strip with Théa Rojzman on the screenplay and Tamia Baudouin on the drawing, his report is reborn in a way that could not be more relevant. Accuracy of the cutting, finesse of the line, the album teaches, moves, fascinates.
“Talking heals, yes, but only if we are listened to,” explains Annick Cojean, an American psychiatrist, “the story not listened to is a trauma as serious as the initial ordeal.” Hence the silence of many survivors after the war. Years later, speech came, hesitant, painful. Then the journalist went to meet the children of the survivors, unconsciously traumatized by the Holocaust, and the children of the Nazis who, with the exception of a few (Edda Goering, Wolf Rudiger Hess), are ashamed of their relatives. Finally, she tells us about the incredible dialogue organized by an Israeli academic between descendants of the executioners and children of the victims.
Twelve months of horror
We will end this brief selection with The Cold Crematorium (Stock, 2024), first published in Hungarian in 1950, And never before translated into French. Its author, József Debreczeni, whose real name is József Bruner, was born in Budapest in 1905. Novelist, poet and journalist, he was deported in the spring of 1944 after the invasion of the country by Nazi Germany. He recounts his twelve-month journey of horror through what he calls “the Land of Auschwitz”, until the final camp of Dörnhau. He spent seven months, from November 1944 to May 1945, in this “cold crematorium”, where the Nazis sent exhausted prisoners.
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