“Kinderzimmer” by Ivan Gros, pregnancy and childbirth in a concentration camp – rts.ch

“Kinderzimmer” is a unique work. He recounts his own genesis in his first pages. In 2013, Ivan Gros, a literature specialist and engraver, met Mounette, whose real name is Simone Gournay, president of the Association of former deportees from the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, north of Berlin.

Mounette views the camp’s current facilities with skepticism. The new museum seems to say nothing to her: these inmate clothes hung like this, clean, without vermin in the seams, do not tell the truth… She perceives the running out of steam in the memory machine. She would like Ivan Gros to do something. But what?

She brings to her attention drawings of deportees, made at the camp. Drawing was an act severely punished: those who drew wanted to testify – at the risk of their lives. Show. And several hundred drawings have reached us. But for Ivan Gros, these drawings need a context. To give them their meaning and their measure, they must be included in a story.

To remember, you have to imagine.

Adaptation of a novel

In 2013, “Kinderzimmer”, a novel by Valentine Goby, was released. This fiction, constructed with great care from several testimonies, tells the story of Mila, a political detainee who arrived at the start of her pregnancy in the Ravensbrück camp. The “Kinderzimmer”, the children’s room, did indeed exist there: yes, women gave birth there. Babies were born there. Mothers breastfed there. A few of these infants, very few, survived.

Ivan Gros then decided to adapt Valentine Goby’s novel in the form of a graphic novel. Which he does in some 360 ​​plates. But his idea goes beyond adaptation: he will integrate more than two hundred drawings of deportees. To guarantee graphic unity, he copied them freehand: a work on the style in which he spent thousands of hours, looking for which way of drawing could incorporate the others.

The drawings of deportees are indicated by a small number which allows, at the end of the volume, to know the author of the original. In his own drawings, Ivan Gros does not refrain from expressionism, and even visions – a component absent from the drawings made on site: like impressive giant lice or an arm coming out of the mouth of a parturient, representing pain who wants to go out and which she must forcefully swallow back.

Imagine without getting lost

The author questions a lot about the accuracy of his approach. How to imagine, without getting lost in your own fantasies? How to capture the subject without usurping a little of its aura? How to graphically treat the nudity of bodies? On several occasions, we leave the story, and the author presents his questions. He does this through framed sentences, placed on the page like inscriptions, epitaphs.

Fill in memory gaps while avoiding fantasy.

These remarkable passages seek and find an ethics in the representation of the Nazi camps. They continue discussions led by other artists, cited: Claude Lanzmann, director of the film “Shoah”, for whom the interior of the camp cannot under any circumstances be the subject of a representation; Art Spiegelman, author of “Maus and Metamaus”, a work which reflects on the transmission of this memory.

Breaking with the prohibition of figuration certainly. (…) What remains to be tested is discernment, sensitivity and honesty.

A manifestation of hope

At the end of the volume, we find notes on the camp’s cartoonists. They bring the whole book back to the side of reality.

A few weeks after reading, Mila, the fictional protagonist, fades into the reading memory behind the reality that she carries through her story and her body. Because putting pregnancy and breastfeeding at the center of a concentration camp is putting the female body in an extreme and unspeakable situation at its center. While childbirth remains, despite everything, a possible manifestation of hope, experienced as such by the inmates.

Ivan Gros devoted ten years to “Kinderzimmer”. In the meantime, Mounette has died. The result is an impressive and important book.

Francesco Biamonte/ld

Ivan Gros, “Kinderzimmer”. Based on the novel by Valentine Goby, Editions Actes Sud BD. August 2024.

Do you like to read? Subscribe to QWERTZ and receive every Friday this newsletter dedicated to book news prepared by RTS Culture.