Trauma and Meaning in French Concentration Camp Poetry (1943-1945)

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.

From 1942 to 1944, approximately 160,000 people were deported from France to concentration camps under the German occupation. Despite the horrific conditions, some political prisoners deported for Resistance activities, in addition to a small number of Jewish prisoners, managed to write poetry secretly in the camps between 1943 and 1945. Concentration camp poetry from over a hundred French prisoners survives to this day in archives, family collections, and published books. This book examines the poetry of eight French prisoners, as well as poems composed and shared within a group of friends in Ravensbrueck. Through close readings, it explores prisoners' efforts to identify transcendent meaning in their traumatic circumstances. Using poetic and rhetorical techniques and drawing on the long tradition of French verse, these poets interrogated the horrors of the camps, attempted to reconcile their experience of trauma with their spiritual and political beliefs, and, in some cases, uncovered salvific meaning in their tribulations.

This book offers a new perspective on French concentration camp literature, showing that in the camps themselves, some prisoners were already confronting their trauma in literature, employing the themes, narratives, and poetic techniques that would become so widespread in post-liberation testimonies. Poetry became a means not only to represent the atrocious events prisoners were experiencing but also, on occasion, to discover meaning and purpose within extreme suffering.