New books in the cottage library!

Published by ecombelles.admin on 12 January 201612 January 2016

Several books (in french) have been added recently to our library.

Read in 2015, all are related to the death camp 70th birthday of death camps liberation. Talking about the Holocaust (or Shoah, meaning ‘destruction’ in hebrew), these books are very emotional and quite demanding, because stories seem hard to conceive, beyond humanity. They recalled us of our visiting Auschwitz camp during the Summer 2013. We were near Cracovie, a magnificent city in Poland.

Three books were written by Charlotte Delbo : “Aucun de nous ne reviendra” (None of us will return), “Une connaissance inutile” (Useless konwledge) and “Mesure de nos jours” (The measure of our days). They were first published on 1970-1971 as “Auschwitz et après” (Auschwitz and after). These short books tell us about life in the camp, return to France and the attempts of resiliency.

Another is by Marceline Loridan-Evens : “Et tu n’es pas revenu” (But You Did Not Come Back), published in 2015.
Beyond hardly qualifiable tales about life and work in the camps, these books insist – at various levels – that in the camps a very strong friendship can protect and save, as the very personal memory work which opens unlimited perspectives.

The last book, by Antoine Choplin, “Une forêt d’arbres creux” is of very different nature: it tells us about art in the camps.
Without terrifying stories, it speaks about the life of jewish architects and drawers in the camp of Terezin (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia, where their work was to build… crematory ovens!
But no violence there. Many impied and unsaid things.
Terezin was a trap for the Jews, Terezin was the image the nazis wanted to show, especially to the Red Cross. But architects and drawers, sketched the life and death in the camp, without nazis knowing it. Thus they managed to release the images out of the camp.

To know more about it, please refer to this site about the drawings from the Theresienstadt ghetto.

Here we are for serious reading and news of our already well-supplied library!