In 2023, a family trip to northern Germany took me to the Ravensbrück camp site. I wanted to show my children a place that was familiar to me even though I had never set foot there. A place that my grandmother, Anne-Marie Parent, had described at such length to me and my brother. Every week, our grandmother spent a lot of time with us and in hindsight, it’s obvious that she needed to talk about a part of her life that she had never really recovered from, in her own words. When I was a child and teenager, she had often told me about the months spent there, as so many sufferings and trials. Annie, my brother and I called her that, regularly explained, simply and harshly, how it was the price she had to pay for standing up to tyranny and oppression. She was indeed what is called “a resistance fighter from the very beginning” and paid a high price.
On my return from this trip, I looked at the original handwritten documents that she had left behind when she disappeared in 1997. So, I came across some poems that I knew and that she had written during her captivity. They have been brought together in a collection called “Land of Distress”. This work received the Jacques-Normand Prize in 1945. But in the box of his old papers, there was also a brown sleeve that contained a few dozen pages yellowed by time.
I didn’t know that she had also written an account describing her arrest, the months she spent in prison in France and her deportation to Ravensbrück. And no one in my family knew about it either. The manuscript, visibly typed on his return to Paris in the summer of 1945, must have been handwritten under extraordinary conditions. It is with these astonishing conditions that this story that my grandmother was able to produce between 1942 and 1945, during her captivity, begins. She managed, with the same stratagems, to also write the poetry that earned her the Jacques-Normand prize after the war. Poetry that she made me read when I was twelve years old and that I have never forgotten.
I don’t know why she didn’t talk about this story, which she called “Resistance in the Chains,” or why she didn’t have me or my brother read it when she was so close to her grandchildren. When you know how much she wanted to keep alive the memory of these men and women who stood up to the invader, it is very easy to understand that I wanted to share this story that she wrote eighty years ago. It includes many elements that she had told me, but also details that I did not know and that years later recall the barbarity of these places now so peaceful but also the courage and humanity of these women who had nothing left but the hope of staying alive.
It’s a testimony that I find more important than ever. Peace has finally come between these European neighbours who were once guilty of the worst atrocities. He reminds us that this pleasant peace has a painful history, but that it is proof that there are no fatalities and that beyond differences and centuries of hating each other, peoples have finally found a peaceful path. For her, it was very different, and this text tells what tyranny and hatred lead to, told by a woman who never renounced her values, nor her love of letters and poetry, even in the depths of Nazi Germany, lost in the middle of a forest somewhere between Berlin and the Baltic Sea, in a gloomy camp where horror had no limits.
For French-speaking readers, here is below the complete and exact transcription of his original manuscript, written between 1944 and 1945.
