Lieux de mémoire juive: Francine Christophe's Après les camps, la vie and Marceline Loridan-Ivens's La Petite Prairie aux bouleaux

This article is inspired by Pierre Nora's foundational concept of lieux de mémoire. Nora's multi-volume edited work of the same name inventories places, or sites, in which national memory or heritage is embodied: material places, but also abstract or intellectually constructed places.¹ Nora's focus was on the memory and heritage of France; mine will be on those of French-speaking Jewry. This choice is apposite for a volume devoted to space and place, since the history of the Jews since the eighth century BCE has been one of spatial dispersal from the spiritual homeland of Israel. The two primary texts treated below are both works by Jewish women of this diaspora who survived deportation to the Nazi concentration and death camps, but decided many years later to (re)visit them. The first text is Francine Christophe's Après les camps, la vie (2001), a book combining autobiography and testimony.² The second text, examined at greater length, is a film, Marceline Loridan-Ivens's La Petite Prairie aux bouleaux (2003).³ I will investigate these women's negotiations with space and place, along with their memorial investments. (There is now a substantial body of theoretical writing on space and place, a good overview of which is provided by Phil Hubbard's, Rob Kitchin's and Gill Valentine's edited volume Key Thinkers on Space and Place (2004). While the meanings of space and place are obviously cognate, for the purposes of this article I distinguish 'place' as a specifically named instance of 'space.' In this I concur with Hubbard's, Kitchin's and Valentine's observation: "place emerges as a particular form of space, one that is created through acts of naming as well as the distinctive activities and imaginings associated with particular social spaces.")⁴ Exegeses will be informed by theoretical insights from Jacques Derrida,⁵ Martin Heidegger, and Sarah Kofman.

Francine Christophe's Après les camps, la vie

As its title suggests, Francine Christophe's text recounts the life of the author after the camps. In April 1945, the twelve-year-old Francine was liberated from Bergen-Belsen, to which she had been deported at the age of nine. In this text the evocative power of place names is evident. For the author, certain place names such as Cimiez, Amiens, and Clisson ineluctably recall the war. Her text engenders a topography of memory, illustrating how memories are spatially situated and how connotations can be invested, albeit arbitrarily, in specific places. The following passage exemplifies such spatial mnemonics. Christophe's choice of bold font for the place-names fulfils the wish of a non-professional writer to emphasize and bear witness to the painful wartime memories by which those place names are now overwritten:

Cimiez, la première permission de détente de papa, retour de l'Est, amaigri et la figure défaite. Mais il est là!

Amiens, mon père et la retraite, la ville bombardée, la cathédrale debout au milieu des ruines. […]

Clisson, jolie petite ville. On y a regroupé tous les officiers de l'Armée Française avec interdiction de bouger, même s'ils voient l'ennemi! Et cet ennemi les fait tous prisonniers.

St Nazaire, pour moi, c'est le paquebot plein à craquer de blessés, qui les évacue vers l'An-gleterre. […]

La Baule, l'exode, l'entrée des Allemands, sur leurs motos reluisantes. On se tait.

Et le Loiret, ce joli département qui me force à penser aux camps de Pithiviers et Beaune-la-Rolande avant de penser à son miel blond et crémeux.

La Rochefoucauld, on m'arrête. Angoulême, on m'emprisonne, Poitiers, on m'interne, une litanie.

Drancy. C'est vrai, une ville porte ce nom!

Et les maquis de l'Ain, de Vendée, de Mayenne, de, de, de… il faudrait les enseigner comme on le pratiquait jadis pour les départements!

L'Alsace… Je viens de le dire, chaque fois que je franchissais la...