Jean-Yves Potel: Les Disparitions d’Anna Langfus (2014)

When people told her that the Prix Goncourt 1962 for Les bagages de sable (trans. The Lost Shore) would change her, the Polish Jew Anna Langfus’s reply – after suffering years of Nazi rule, years of torment, living in constant fear and watching many people casually slaughtered, having her husband and her parents murdered, her nanny dead – was simple: the Gestapo hadn’t changed her, so how could a few fleeting weeks of fame succeed?

This wasn’t in fact true about the Nazis not affecting her, as this extremely well-researched biography of Anna Langfus makes quite clear. It takes us through Anna’s relatively comfortable childhood in Lublin, Poland, through her education in Verviers, Belgium, and then spends some considerable time describing the torment that Polish Jews had to undergo during Nazi rule, the torture, the nonchalant mass murders, the creation of increasingly small ghettoes, the scarcity of food, the diseases: in a word, the hell of being a Jew in Poland under fascist rule.

And then after the war Anna couldn’t live in the cemetery that she saw as Poland, so left for France, to adopt French as her new tongue with her new husband Aron, also a Jewish Polish survivor. We don’t learn much about Aron, although we do of Anna and her struggle to master a new language, and learn to write creatively, aided by such friends as Maurice Finkelson, another Polish survivor, but one whose novels are now almost forgotten.

Anna Langfus didn’t have a great deal of success with her plays, although three novels – Le sel et le Souffre (1960), Les Bagages de sable (1962) and Saute, Barbara (1965) were all critically and popularly successful. Needless to say, all were about the Holocaust, surviving it physically, and attempting to survive it mentally, to live with the guilt of survival and the memory of the unspeakable atrocities.

Anna Langfus died of a heart condition in 1966 at the age of 46, leaving a husband and a daughter. She also left a small body of work which should be remembered for its importance, for the power it has to tell with such numbing detail exactly what happens when madness and madmen are allowed to take control of countries.

My Anna Langfus posts:
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Jean-Yves Potel: Les Disparitions d’Anna Langfus
Anna Langfus: Les Bagages de sable | The Lost Shore
Anna Langfus: Cimetière parisien de Bagneux, Hauts-de-Seine