BOOKS | FRANCE | LITHUANIA

BOOKS

by Roland Binet  (De Panne, Belgium)

◊

L’Affleurement des Ombres (“The Emergence of the Shadows”) by Yvan Leclère, L’Harmattan, Mare Balticum, 282 pp.

◊

On July 1944, Convoy 77 left the internment camp of Drancy in France, three weeks before the liberation of Paris. The destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eight Litvaks living in France were deported, of whom only one survived the war. The association of the deportees of Convoy 77 would receive  the sponsorship of the French Presidency which commissioned schools in France and abroad to research and reconstruct their lives in France and their last days. The project was to “put adolescents in charge not of a sepulchral memory but of the reconstitution of life paths more than death paths.”

The project was initiated by a class at the French Lyceum in Vilnius before the Covid-19 epidemic, under the direction of Professor Yvan Leclère, author of a book, Soviet Hegemony. These enthusiastic students began a search on  the internet spanning several continents, lasting several years, to piece together why and how these eight Lithuanian Jews had gone to France, how they had lived there and how they came to become ensnared by the Nazis, and finally, sent to their death in Auschwitz. This book can be read as a journal — at times a thriller — that details, sometimes on a daily basis, what progress had been reached in discovering the whereabouts of the eight Lithuanian Jews and also of members of their families who had escaped capture by the Nazis or had been living abroad — and out of danger — at the time these eight were caught.

Continue reading