Living Memory: Representations of Drancy

Abstract

The enthusiastic reception granted to Suite francaise, Irene Nemirovksy’s recently discovered novellas of the French experience of defeat and German Occupation, and Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), recounting World War Two through the eyes of an SS officer, a work for which this American writer won France’s highest literary prize (the Prix Goncourt), is evidence of continued interest—in France, and even worldwide—in imaginative engagement with a historical period that now lies more than half a century in the past. Yet in French literary fiction and fiction film, there is, for the most part, silence on one topic, despite numerous official commemorations and days of remembrance: the arrest and deportation during the Occupation of nearly 76,000 Jews, including 11,400 children—most of whom passed through the concentration camp at Drancy, just outside Paris. Suite francaise does not mention Jews at all,1 and Les Bienveillantes focuses on the protagonist’s participation in Hitler’s eastern campaign. France appears mainly as a backdrop to his personal life.2