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La Littérature inouïe :
Témoigner des camps dans l’après-guerre
Preface by Guido Furci
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2022
Upon their return home from deportation, the vast majority of Nazi camp survivors were neither listened to nor read. In fact, of the hundred or so testimonies published in France and Italy in the wake of the Second World War, those that are known today can probably be counted on one hand.
This book brings us back to the immediate post-war years and gives voice to the survivors who promptly and painstakingly wrote down their memories, driven by an irresistible urge to bear witness. Going beyond the simple observation of the unspeakable, which is often too easily associated with the “impossibility of saying,” we discover the remarkable multiplicity of linguistic and literary techniques that survivors used to convey a part of their concentration camp experience to their reader.
As we enter a new era of political turmoil in the 21st century, this work is an invaluable study of the numerous methods employed to express experiences of the extreme.
Book review by Brigitte Stepanov, Holocaust and Genocide Studies,
vol. 36, no 3, winter 2022, pp. 443-445.
Book review by Graziella De Matteis, Memories At Stake, no 19, Fall 2023, p. 59-60 [in French].
Book review by Kate Ferry-Swainson, French Studies, vol. 77, no 3, July 2023.
Book review by Cécile Rousselet, Francia recensio, no 2, July 2023 [in French].
Book review by Eva Raynal,
Acta Fabula, vol. 24, no 3, March 2023 [in French].
Book review by Cécile Rousselet, L’Intermède, published online on
February 28, 2023 [in French].
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Environmental Violence and Natural Symbolism in Chava Rosenfarb's The Tree of Life: An Ecocritical Approach to Holocaust Memory”
Environment, Space, Place, vol 15, no. 2, Fall 2023
Future prize-winning writer Chava Rosenfarb was seventeen years old when she was incarcerated in the Łódź ghetto. In 1972, she published The Tree of Life [Der boym fun lebn], a fictional chronicle of that experience of the Holocaust. In this three-volume epic novel, Rosenfarb narrates and interlaces the fates of ten Jewish families from pre-war Poland in 1939 to the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944. The "Tree of Life" is revealed to be the name given by the "ghettoniks" to an iconic cherry tree that stands in the shared backyard of a group of apartment complexes inhabited by many of the protagonists in the ghetto. Far from being an anecdotal presence, the cherry tree becomes the center of Rosenfarb's reflections on the impacts of the environment on one's physical and mental health.
In this article, The Tree of Life is analyzed from an ecocritical perspective to examine the interconnections between genocidal intent and environmental precariousness. The purpose of this article is to explore the links between genocide and ecocide within the framework of literary memory, while appreciating the relevance of Chava Rosenfarb's representations of the Holocaust to our era of renewed ecological awareness.
“Le commentaire de Jean Cayrol pour Nuit et Brouillard d’Alain Resnais : Au confluent du témoignage et de l’intermédialité”
Intermédialités/Intermediality,
no 36, Fall 2020
This article examines poet and deported Resistance fighter Jean Cayrol’s contribution to Alain Resnais’ documentary Night and Fog (1956) by combining literary, testimonial, and intermedial approaches. Using this classic film as a case study, the article analyzes the interaction between text and image as a way of questioning, through each medium and by a combination of the two, the possibilities and limits of the communicative experience of the extreme.
“Mémoire musicale et réappropriation orale à Ravensbrück : Présentation d’une base de données intermédiale sur Le Verfügbar aux Enfers de Germaine Tillion”
Co-written with Rémy Besson
Intermédialités/Intermediality,
no 36, Fall 2020
In Ravensbrück in the Fall of 1944, hiding in a packing crate, ethnologist Germaine Tillion (1907–2008) wrote an “operetta-revue” that revamped the lyrics of period melodies to help her fellow prisoners resist through laughter. Could this fundamentally intermedial work be used to analyze musical memorialisation and song-based resistance processes that originated in concentration camps? This was the mandate adopted by the “Mémoire musicale et résistance dans les camps” interdisciplinary research project. Following a brief explanation of the Verfügbar aux Enfers, this article presents the outcomes of the research and summarizes the two resulting collective publications. It also addresses the media challenges of the last phase of the research project: creating a database and a virtual exhibition that allow users to consult, listen to, and watch the musical sources of the operetta-revue – thus pushing the boundaries of traditional paper publications.
“L’intertextualité dans Le Verfügbar aux Enfers et d’autres témoignages concentrationnaires. Une comparaison entre les périodes d’incarcération et d’après-guerre”
Revue musicale OICRM, vol. 3,
no 2, 2016
Germaine Tillion’s Le Verfügbar aux Enfers is an astounding work of art, which is due both to the context in which it was written and to its content. Though musical quotations are manifest in this “operetta-revue,” a rich intertextuality can also be perceived and will be examined. In order to better understand the particular nature of Le Verfügbar aux Enfers, a comparative analysis will be necessary. This article will study the presence of intertextuality in concentration camp texts written during two distinct periods, that of the imprisonment and that of the immediate post-war. This contribution will first explore a fundamental difference between those two periods: the reader’s identity. The article will then consider how this characteristic influences the intertextual process of those texts, which results in important transformations from one writing period to the other.
“Transmission and Actualization of Memory in Nazi Camp Testimonies: The Role of the Reader”
The Lincoln Humanities Journal, vol. 3, 2015
This year, 2015, marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Now seven decades in the past, this war, and everything about it, is slowly settling into History. Today, we approach the subject from a different perspective than in 1945. Do people today believe that the lessons that we thought had been learned from World War II still concern us? Can we still approach the subject of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps and absorb a profoundly human lesson? Can we still understand and relate to the people behind the testimonies even though they belong to another era? I believe we can, and that is why the reader of the Nazi camp testimonies has a very important task. This article will address two aspects of the role concentration camp testimonies can play today. The first part will focus on selected elements revealed by those testimonies. The second part will examine the reader’s role today.
Newspaper Articles
“Quand l’extrême rappelle l’utilité de la littérature”
Le Devoir, “Page Idées,”
January 27, 2015
On January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in the year that marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp by the Red Army, and in the context of funding cuts to arts and culture in Quebec and Canada, I propose here to draw a correlation between two subjects that may at first glance seem unconnected.