https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2976-6993
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ABSTRACT
In 1954, Jacqueline Saveria Huré, a non-Jew resistant deported to Ravensbrück in 1942, published Ni sains ni saufs [Neither Safe nor Sound] a work of fiction drawing in large part from her experience. Divided into four parts, the novel follows the lives of a group of female inmates, from their last days in the fictional camp of Graffenburg, to their liberation and ensuing return. In a pattern similar to other deportation novels by women, the narrative focuses largely on the women themselves, deliberately pushing the German perpetrator to the margins of the story. Told in a realist mode and focalised by an implacable omniscient narrator, the reader is spared nothing of the crude reality of communal life in the camp, and of the women's physical and moral debasement. This is particularly salient in the case of Mme Buze, incarcerated with her daughter, the tone being peculiarly scathing in its depiction of this maternal figure, portrayed not only as physically repulsive, but also as fundamentally stupid and narrow-minded.
Following a comprehensive contextualization of this relatively unknown text, the article proceeds to decipher the function of Mme Buze in relation to the novel's protagonist, Florence Mesnil. Drawing from Julia Kristeva's conceptualization of abjection, it argues that in the context of this deportation novel, the maternal figure serves both to denote the abject existential devouring that is deportation, and to delineate a symbolic unshackling leading to the protagonist's survival. It concludes by showing that given the central figure's inability to fully attain individuality, the text illustrates its author's generalized contempt, conservative nihilism, and conception of deportation as fundamentally nonsensical.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
France Grenaudier-Klijn is Associate Professor of French and French Subject Convenor at Massey University, New Zealand. A specialist of Patrick Modiano (1945-), she devotes most of her research to post-Holocaust fiction in French, with specific interest in the articulation of historiography and fiction in this context. Grenaudier-Klijn is also a specialist of Belle Époque French woman writer Marcelle Tinayre (1870–1948). She has published on contemporary French noir (Thierry Jonquet; Dominique Sylvain; Catherine Klein) and on contemporary French popular culture (Serge Gainsbourg). Currently completing another Modiano study, she will be co-editing a collective volume on the container motif in post-Holocaust fiction and art. Future projects also include a monograph on the fiction of Anna Langfus (1920–1966).
Her last monograph is: La Part du féminin dans l’œuvre de Patrick Modiano. Fonctions et attributs des personnages féminins modianiens. Paris: L’Harmattan, coll. « Critiques littéraires », 2017.
ORCID
France Grenaudier-Klijn http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2976-6993
Notes
1 Jacqueline Saveria Huré, Ni sains ni saufs (Paris: Robert Laffont [1954], 1965, 1978). Jacqueline Saveria Huré died in 2011. After the publication of Ni sains, she resumed her studies at the University of Dijon. In 1957, she published a dissertation entitled Les Combes de la Côte: étude physique (1957) (The Glens of the Coast: Natural Study). She returned to fiction writing with Mémoire de Marie, fille d’Israël (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1986) (I Mary, Daughter of Israel: A Fictional Memoir) and L’Homme de feu ou Amos, le prophète (Paris: Cerf, 1993) (The Man of Fire or Amos the Prophet). These last two ‘religiously inclined’ texts have been translated into English, Italian and Spanish for the former, and into German for the latter.
2 Ravensbrück opened on 15 May 1939 and was liberated on 30 April 1945. With 120,000–130,000 female inmates over the duration of the war, it was the largest women's concentration camp.
3 While clearly based on the author's personal knowledge, Saveria Huré's text exhibits markers unambiguously belonging to fiction: the protagonist does not bear the author's name, some place names have been invented, and coincidental encounters occur between the main character and secondary figures.
4 Micheline Maurel, Un camp très ordinaire (An Ordinary Camp) (Paris: Minuit, 1957).
5 Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz et après (Auschwitz and After) (Paris: Minuit, 1965, 1970, 1971).
6 ‘Mme’ stands for ‘Madame.’ It is equivalent to the English ‘Mrs.’ I have kept this designation throughout, in accordance with Saveria-Huré's use.
7 At the end of the two and a half-page long first chapter of the novel, one finds the following passage: ‘Heroes never have the runs.’ While here, one's belly takes up all the space. It gets bloated. It fills up with greenish goop, swells up, and empties in a rush. Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 11. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise indicated.
8 In her analysis of Holocaust literary memoirs by women, Myrna Goldenberg insists, for instance, on the fact that these texts ‘often describe extraordinary caring of one woman for another.’ Myrna Goldenberg, “Women's Voices in Holocaust Literary Memoirs,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 16, no. 4 (Summer 1998): p. 84.
9 See Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide: Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992), p. 168. Wieviorka gives the figures of thirty-seven and thirty-six for the years 1946 and 1947 respectively, for both men and women writers.
10 While Duras herself was not subject to deportation, she witnessed its devastating impact on her husband, Robert Antelme, an experience she reports in La Douleur.
11 Promotional blurb. https://www.decitre.fr/ebooks/ni-sains-ni-saufs-9782221209691_9782221209691_1.html
12 Pierre de Boisdeffre, “Un sens à la vie?,” La Revue des deux mondes (September 1979): pp. 687–8.
13 This is particularly noticeable through the inclusion of factual elements pertaining to language, topography, clothing, and more generally the regulations and routines specific to daily life in camps.
14 In one instance, the protagonist, Florence Mesnil, briefly considers washing her underwear but elects not to, given the serious health implications of wearing a wet undergarment. The passage is written with an obvious educational intent, as illustrated by the use of the expression ‘and this, for two reasons’ followed by a colon announcing a detailed explanation:
For three months, she has not dared take the risk, and this for two reasons: she no longer has any soap, and the freezing water does not wash well, but above all the rough fabric would not dry overnight, and it is too cold to go to work with bare buttocks. Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 56.
15 Roxana Ghiţă, “‘Witness Through the Imagination’: Gendered Perceptions of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath in Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl,” Gender Studies, vol. 15, no. 1 (2016): p. 241.
16 In the jargon of the camps, an Anweiserin, a prisoner helping the SS, is a forewoman of sorts, put in charge of a work Kommando comprising up to forty women on average. As an Anweiserin, Florence benefits from certain privileges:
Florence is allowed to remain idly by the railway tracks: she is an Anweiserin. Being an Anweiserin means using a shovel intermittently, being able to wander about on the site with no risk of landing in trouble and, since yesterday, being in charge of soup distribution. Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 17.
17 This location is not listed in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1939–145 nor in the Yad Vashem archives, nor does it appear in Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. In addition, had the location existed, the German spelling would have been ‘Grafenburg.’ My thanks go to Dr Konrad Kwiet, Resident Historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum, for pointing out this ‘spelling error.’
18 In their 1986 article on testimonial writing, Michael Pollak and Nathalie Heinich come to a similar conclusion:
The gap thus created between the identity of the deportee (at the camp) and that of the survivor (after the camp) appears too intimate a dilemma—even more so as time goes by – to be utterable within the framework of testimonial writing … . Such contradiction is solved by the transition to fiction, whereby the person is automatically transformed into a ‘personnage’ (character).
19 Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide, p. 435: ‘In the post-war period, it is undeniably the Communist Party which is at the helm with regard to the memory of deportation.’
20 Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 253.
21 As Pollak and Heinich have noted, political solidarity proper extended solely to fellow Communist party members. See Pollak and Heinich, “Le témoignage,” p. 8.
22 Many French historians such as Henry Rousso, Jean-Pierre Azéma, Pascal Ory, Fabrice d’Almeida have insisted on the impact of the Occupation on the very fabric of French society, and the internal conflicts, tensions and strife it has contributed to.
23 Interestingly, the novel evokes early ties between two of the inmates, Florence and Béatrice, who attended the same private Catholic boarding school as teenagers. Yet, the friendship does not alleviate the women's circumstances and ends precipitously with the brutal murder of Béatrice by an SS.
24 Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 44. This comment immediately follows a particularly nasty episode: Upon waking up, Mme Germain, one of the inmates, realizes that her tin has vanished, a fact with potentially devastating consequences. Having searched the Block, another prisoner, Yannick, locates the tin under Florence's straw mattress. The reader understands that Armande hid it there, in retaliation against Florence's threat of denunciation to the Ober (Senior Overseer). When one considers the gravity of such theft, the term ‘friends’ sounds peculiarly ironic.
25 Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 60.
26 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
27 Ibid., p. 2.
28 Ibid., p. 20.
29 Ibid., p. 3.
30 Ibid., p. 9.
31 Ernst van Alphen, “Skin, Body, Self: the Question of the Abject in the Work of Francis Bacon,” in Rina Arya and Nicholas Chare, (eds.), Abject Visions. Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 120–1.
32 Ibid., p. 120.
33 Elmer Luchterhand, “Prisoner Behaviour and Social System in the Nazi Concentration Camps,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry, vol. 13, no. 4 (1967): p. 245 and p. 255.
34 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3.
35 Ibid., p. 4.
36 Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 52: ‘Here smell speaks.’
37 Mary Condren, “Women, Shame and Abjection: Reflections in the Light of Julia Kristeva,” Contact, vol. 130, no. 1 (1999): p. 11.
38 Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 43.
39 Ibid., p. 14.
40 Ibid., p. 31.
41 Ibid., p. 33.
42 Ibid., p. 12, p. 19 and p. 85.
43 Ibid., p. 76.
44 Ibid., p. 39.
45 Ibid., p. 48
46 Ibid., p. 74 and p. 89.
47 Ibid., p. 101.
48 Ibid., p. 103.
49 Ibid., p. 100 and p. 123.
50 Ibid., pp. 126–7.
51 Ibid., p. 20.
52 Ibid., p. 99.
53 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 108.
54 Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 104.
55 For further information on the symbolic connection between the mother and the spider, see, for instance, Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
56 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 12–13.
57 It is tempting to think of Louise Bourgeois's iconic 1999 giant sculpture of a black spider named ‘Maman,’ through where the artist is exploring the subtlety and semantic richness of the trope. For a closer discussion of Bourgeois's ‘Maman,’ see Fiona Carson, “Uneasy Spaces: The Domestic Uncanny in Contemporary Installation Art,” in Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer, (eds.), Motherhood and Space: Configuration of the Maternal through Politics, Home and the Body (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 243–60.
58 On one occasion, Mme Buze's face is described as ‘sticky.’ Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 104.
59 Condren, “Women, Shame and Abjection,” p. 18.
60 Anne-Lise Stern, Le Savoir-déporté: Camps, histoire, psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 2004), p. 63.
61 Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 16.
62 Interestingly, the terms chosen here to describe Florence's physical features unmistakably evoke a spider-like creature.
63 Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 57.
64 Ibid., p. 57.
65 Ibid., p. 197.
66 Condren, “Women, Shame and Abjection,” p. 15.
67 When Léonie, Mme Mesnil's cook, enquires about life in the camp, Florence retorts: ‘Léonie, if you have any affection for me, never speaks to me about it.’ Saveria Huré, Ni sains, p. 232.
68 Ibid., p. 258.
69 Ibid., p. 229.
70 Ibid., p. 278.
71 Ibid., p. 264.
72 Utterly unable to understand her daughter's inability (or refusal?) to return to the bourgeois ‘cocoon’ of her youth, Florence's mother is taken ill and sent to convalesce by her domineering husband.
73 Ibid., p. 269.
74 Ibid., p. 58.
75 Ibid., pp. 85–6.
76 The author warmly thanks the reviewers for their constructive and generous feedback.