The Girls of Birkenau : the title of this book is curious, disconcerting. There is in the word “girls” a freedom, a carefreeness, a lightness that contrasts with the name of the camp. The four Jewish women interviewed by David Teboul in a documentary he directed and of which this book is a transcription were very young when they were deported. When David Teboul brought them together for two lunches to talk about their lives, they were almost a hundred years old. They argue a little, a touch of hostility circulates between them at times, so much so that the word “girls” regains its legitimacy. Not because the girls are inherently annoying with each other, but because what motivates their annoyance – one is more talkative than the other three – is insignificant compared to the events they survived and seems to belong, for us, wrongly, to a life without the camp. These furtive appearances of the negligible in the tragic are partly the price of these encounters.
Astonishment
David Teboul, at the origin of their discussions, is the documentary filmmaker who best filmed Simone Veil, notably
