Le sel et le soufre (The Whole Land Brimstone), a novel published in 1960, was written in France and in French by a young Polish Jewish woman. A survivor, in extremis, of the Lublin ghetto, of a Nazi prison, and of torture, she hid herself under a false “Aryan” identity and was, for a few months, a liaison agent of the resistance. Having returned to her native city, she went into exile in France in 1946. She died there at the age of 46. That was in 1966.
This book is not a mere testimony. To the journalists who wanted to know whether she had really lived through these ordeals, who harassed her with indiscreet questions, she always answered with modesty and firmness, claiming to be the author of a novelistic construction and not of a document. This distinction was for her of capital importance. Not that she wished to hide anything whatsoever. She acknowledged the reference to what had been lived: “That presence behind the words is needed, so that the book may have its own life,” she said, for example, to Pierre Dumayet. She claimed a distance without which she could not have constructed a world, that is, a novel. For literature, she confided another time, was the only means “to render in words the horror of the Jewish condition during the war.”
This book stages the singular journey of a young woman caught up by the war, who comes back from it wounded and forever suffering; it expresses this suffering that finds no way out. It is a reconstruction of the past. While drawing on lived experience, it expresses a personal quest that goes well beyond a war narrative. Anna Langfus writes in the first person while displaying a distance from her character, from this Maria who bears the first name of her mother.
Literary analysis has shown how this architecture of a pseudo coming-of-age novel, clothed in a cold writing, functions “as a protective necessity, a mechanism of defense. (…) She is among the first writers whose fiction bears on the Shoah to give an account of the struggle that consists in finding the words and the tone proper to communicating to the outside world the tortured inner landscape of a survivor. As author, Anna Langfus abstracts herself enough from the event to be able to transpose it into fiction and, as critic, she distances herself from her own writing, commenting with penetration on this very process.”
The historical study we sketch here, by confronting Anna’s trajectory with that of her double Maria, confirms this distancing. We have at our disposal enough traces (archives and direct testimonies) to reconstitute the essentials of what happened to Anna and her close ones, and to bring to light the fictional work of the novelist. This casts no suspicion on the truth of what is reported — on the contrary. It informs us about the process of writing this novel and the ones that followed, and opens for us a new perspective on the work and the particular destiny of Anna Langfus.
Young Anna was obviously not prepared for this kind of destiny. Her parents wanted to make of her the head of an industrial enterprise. Innocent and dreamy, she is swept up in 1939 into five years of violence, ghettos, imprisonments, torture, murders; she is abandoned, then delivered up to solitude, to ghosts, and to raw wounds until long after the war. Now, Le sel et le soufre tells us of a young Jewish woman detached from the world, who holds on out of selfishness and love for her close ones, who survives not through heroism or political conviction, but almost in spite of herself. Besides pitiless narratives, the book presents us with a spoiled, cruel young girl, a melancholy being who, she says again, has “lost contact with the living.”
“Does that also hold for you?” Pierre Dumayet asks her in 1962. “Yes, a little,” she smiles. This “a little” is worth meditating upon. It defines the gap between the author and her character, the limits of a confusion. For the distraught Maria enters French literature as the very type of the survivor, wounded forever, incapable of taking up life again despite her multiple attempts. Condemned.
The author, no. At least, she is convinced of it. She tries to save herself through writing, by constructing a life turned toward “the living.” At 27, she leaves Poland for Paris, changes language, and remarries; she founds a family by giving birth to a daughter; she writes plays, five of which are staged, and above all three novels published by Gallimard. She immediately finds a public. Prix Goncourt in 1962, she seems to emerge from this war that had broken her.
The limit that this “a little” suggests is not immediately perceptible. It is not certain that Anna was aware of it; she probably struggled all her life to push it back. It is her wound. A suffering that had installed itself in her and in her body, as soon as the catastrophe fell upon her. When her childhood was destroyed.
What do we know of this idealized pre-catastrophe in the novel? She evokes it as a golden age, concentrating on a few intimate images, on the promises of the period, and evacuating the concrete world of the time. Born on January 2, 1920, in Lublin (Poland), Anna-Regina Szternfinkiel is the only daughter of a Jewish merchant family. They reside in the new Jewish quarter of Lublin, in an elegant house bought two generations earlier by grandparents who were doubtless rather religious and traditional. Their house looks out on a large commercial street where a population, mostly Jewish and of every condition, lives. Not far from her home, a tsaddik holds his court; there are the Jewish hospital, the great yeshiva of the Sages of Lublin, and the House of Jewish Culture of the Bund.
Anna lives there a protected childhood, with parents rather old for the time (35 and 31 at her birth), raised by a Polish nanny whom she calls Nounou. In her books and statements, Anna gives herself a bourgeois childhood; yet her family is more modest. Mosze, her father, is a small merchant, husband of Marja, née Wajnberg, a little richer. To be sure, they share with their large families the ownership of three contiguous buildings, but their income is limited, and if they wish to embourgeois themselves and emancipate themselves from this tradition, it is by investing in the future of their only daughter. They have her study at the best public Polish establishment in the city, they marry her to a richer young man, and they send her abroad to study engineering. Yet they experience economic difficulties from the early thirties, and a real social decline (they mortgage their property, and their income collapses).
The author Anna Langfus thus imagines her character on the basis of the promise (or the dreams) of her childhood, less of its social reality. She retains only a wonderstruck, highly selective memory. In the same way, she never evokes the Jewish environment and the misery of those streets she walks up each morning to go to the lycée. Numerous witnesses have depicted the atmosphere of this quarter, which could only have filled a young girl with wonder or intrigued her.
Now, in Anna Langfus’s texts, this quarter does not exist. She never speaks of it. She does not show it. The Jews have disappeared. She has retained only the family atmosphere of a vast apartment with a creaking parquet floor, a “small closed universe.”
As for the adolescent, she is much more brilliant and mature than the portrait of Maria as a naïve girl ravaged by the war would lead one to suppose. The schoolgirl, for example, distinguishes herself by her literary qualities and even publishes a few texts. Her academic results are brilliant. She knows French very early on, whereas, having become a prizewinning author, she cultivated the legend of the young Polish woman landing in France without knowing the language. All the witnesses consulted confirm the school archives: before the war she possessed a perfect command of French.
In 1936, she meets Jakub Rajs, a few months her senior. He is the son of a richer merchant, co-owner of a shop of sewing accessories. They are neighbors and begin to see each other regularly. They marry on October 9, 1938, then leave immediately for Verviers, in Belgium, to pursue engineering studies at the Higher School of Textiles.
“We both wanted to become textile engineers in order to better run the textile factory that our parents intended for us.”
There too Anna, the only young woman of her class, distinguishes herself by her dynamism and excellent results; she is even the best in the class in mechanics and physics, and among the best in mathematics.
After passing their first-year examinations, the two young spouses return to Lublin for a holiday, in… August 1939! They are caught by the war. Then begins the long ordeal of which Anna Langfus would, fifteen years later, make the matter of Le sel et le soufre.
The bombardments of the city and the arrival of the Germans are evoked in the first chapter of the book. On September 18, the German troops penetrate “into the city, without a sound, install themselves in the midst of men’s sleep.” The husband of the novel’s Maria is taken as a hostage in the dead of night, as about two thousand Polish and Jewish inhabitants were on that date, then released. In November, the streets of the city center are forbidden to Jews, and the Jewish shops marked with a Star of David; in December, it is the turn of persons who must wear the same star, first on the chest, then on an armband. The first labor camp is opened by the Nazis at the end of December.
In 1940, Jakub Rajs is employed by the post office of the Judenrat, and until the spring of 1941, the Szternfinkiels remain in their apartment. Then the Germans form an “open” ghetto, the boundary of which is delimited by the odd-numbered side of the street where Anna lives. Living conditions there are as difficult as in Warsaw or Łódź (the mortality rate, for reasons other than executions, reaches 12%); a typhus epidemic breaks out at the end of 1941. The Szternfinkiel family is officially dispossessed of its apartment in May and moves within the ghetto. According to the novel, they are assigned a two-room dwelling, then a single one: Nounou must leave them.
In the middle of the night of March 16–17, 1942, the mass deportations of the ghetto’s Jews to Bełżec begin. Up to March 31, of 26,000 Jews deported, 25,000 are gassed immediately, while the number of persons executed on the spot is estimated at 2,500. The 108 children of the Lublin Jewish orphanage, aged 2 to 8, are shot on March 24 along with their teachers in the city’s outskirts. Anna evokes this killing in one of her texts; it is not established that she witnessed it.
On April 17–19, the Nazis move the remaining Jews to a new quarter, in Majdan Tatarski, from which they have expelled 5,000 to 6,000 Poles. Only the holders of a “J-Ausweiss” are authorized to go there. Officially, this concerns 3,000 people; in fact 7,000 settle into what the Nazis present as a “model ghetto.” According to one witness, “everyone was hiding someone: his old mother, his old father, children orphaned by brothers or sisters already murdered.” On a list drawn up by the Germans in August 1942, we find Anna’s close ones among the “working” Jews of Majdan Tatarski: the mother and the two young sisters of her husband Jakub. We also find Aron Langfus, Anna’s future second husband, who is in fact a friend of Jakub’s elder brother. Born in 1911, an engineer trained in Prague, he is the son of an influential secular Jewish family in Lublin. He figures on the list with his first wife, Chaja Langfus (who will not survive), and his father Chaim Dawid Langfus (who will die at Majdanek). Were Anna and Jakub with them? We do not know. Anna declared that she made a short stay at the Majdanek camp; it may be that she worked for some time in an annex of the camp.
The German controls multiply under tragic conditions evoked several times in Le sel et le soufre. Is it at this moment, or earlier during the liquidation of the ghetto, that Anna loses several members of her family? The archives are incomplete: it is established that at the end of April 1942, her father’s sister is deported to Majdanek, where she died in 1943; that her children, five of Anna’s cousins, are shot on April 30, 1942; and that Anna’s father, Mosze Szternfinkiel, died in Lublin on April 30, 1942. This date and place of the father’s death are hardly contestable; they therefore do not correspond to those of Maria’s father, the novel’s character.
At that time the Szternfinkiel, Rajs, and doubtless Langfus families decide to leave Lublin, toward Warsaw, judged safer. It is difficult to establish exactly when, who leaves, and how. It is at the latest in the autumn of 1942. It is probable that they benefit from the help of non-Jewish Poles. They perhaps hid, for a time, in the countryside (Jakub’s mother does not arrive in Warsaw until May 1943). Jakub’s brother seems to have played an essential logistical role, notably for the obtaining of false “Aryan” papers.
We thus see that the experience of the ghetto, lived by Anna, covers at least 18 months in Lublin, to which must be added the first months of the occupation. In Le sel et le soufre, she evokes above all the Warsaw ghetto and the deportations of the summer of 1942. Her character is saved in extremis on the Umschlagplatz by a former classmate from Verviers, Mojsze Rakower, who has become a member of the Jewish police (she describes further on the death of this man as that of an insurgent of April 1943). It is not, however, established that Anna stayed in the Warsaw ghetto. Several scenes of the book could just as well unfold in the Lublin one. The author evidently condenses several lived situations. Maria hides on the Aryan side; she and her family are victims of the szmalcownik (“blackmailers”). Then she makes contact with the “resistance.” She benefits from false papers and becomes, for a few months, a liaison agent.
Everything leads one to believe that Anna and Jakub Rajs did indeed hide on the Aryan side in Warsaw, and that Anna worked with the Home Army (AK) for at least a few months. In 1957, in a letter to Michel Polac, she writes:
“I was joining a resistance network. This activity took me all across Poland in every direction, and also obliged me to hide for months at a time in forests. On several occasions I was arrested.”
She evokes these missions in her novel and situates them up to April 1943. In the résumés she submits after the war to obtain French nationality, she always writes: “1941–1944: in the resistance in Poland.” The courage demanded by this “courier” activity is underscored by Jan Karski, who pays homage in his book to those young women whose “comings and goings were of a nature to arouse suspicion,” “the average ‘life’ of a woman liaison agent did not exceed a few months.” We know, for example, that Anna narrowly escaped an execution at Lwów, during the winter of 1942–1943, thanks to the help of an Italian officer.
In April 1943, the Rajs couple is hiding not far from the Warsaw ghetto, on Sienna Street. Several testimonies attest to this, including her own: she says she was not far from the ghetto at the time of its destruction by the Nazis. That of Aron Langfus, deposited after the war before the Lublin tribunal, is more precise. He says he lived with Jakub’s elder brother, and learned how, in May 1943, the Rajs parents were killed. Following a denunciation, “the Gestapo arrived during the night at the house; all the Jews were shot in the courtyard.” Aron specifies:
“Thus died Bajla Perla Rajs and her husband. Jakub Rajs managed to escape. I know all this from Jakub’s brother, with whom I lived. He went the next day to see what was happening with his parents, and the neighbors told him that they had been killed.”
We have no information on the fate of Anna’s mother in Warsaw. In the novel, Maria’s mother refuses to be separated from her husband and returns to the ghetto, whereas we know that Mosze Szternfinkiel was already dead in Lublin. The death of Maria Szternfinkiel is recorded by the civil registry in 1946, dated May 31, 1943, in Warsaw.
The second part of Le sel et le soufre unfolds between the autumn of 1944 and the following spring. We have no precise indication about Anna’s activities between the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto (April–May 1943) and shortly before the city’s uprising, in August–September 1944, except that she did not take part in the fighting. The already cited testimony of Aron Langfus, however, ends with two precious pieces of information: “Jakub Rajs and his wife stayed until 1944 in Legionowo, where they were arrested and put in prison. Jakub Rajs was killed on December 27, 1944; his wife survived and told me about it.” This corresponds to the unfolding of the novel: the wandering described in chapter 5 at the time of the Warsaw uprising can be situated in this zone of forests on the other side of the Vistula, near Legionowo. Then, the arrest and the tortures by the Gestapo are situated at Nowy Dwór, not far from there. It is in this prison that Jacques, Maria’s husband, is shot, according to the novel. This corresponds to Anna’s testimony about Jakub’s death, reported by Aron in 1946. The date of December 27 leads one to suppose that Anna is not transferred to Płońsk until the end of 1944. According to her statements, she remained there until the arrival of the Russians in January 1945. She writes: “Apart from a young peasant woman, I was the only survivor. All the other prisoners had been executed.”
After the arrival of the Red Army, it is not established that Anna found herself, like the novel’s Maria, in Toruń. It is, on the other hand, probable that she crossed the devastated country on foot to return to Lublin.
Whom did she find again in her native city, and where did she live? The end of the novel shows Maria turned away by the new Polish inhabitants of her family home. This situation was very common. The novelist condenses it with the striking image of an empty trunk found in the cellar, “in the depths of the darkness.” One receives the shock and the despair of the survivors turned away by the antisemitic hostility perceptible at the end of the war. But this is not exactly what Anna lived through.
When she arrives, her house is occupied by Jewish survivors. She finds again Aron Langfus, who returns at the same moment from another journey, and she settles in at his place. It is probable that they grew closer to each other during this period (even if Aron officially declares, in 1946, another address). Such is at least the conviction of Henryka Heinzdorf, Aron’s niece, who was in their company at that moment. She thinks that her uncle “fell in love with Anna, and that he followed her when she decided to leave for France.”
Anna obtains, in May 1946, a “transit visa” issued by the French consulate in Warsaw, which allows her to reach France. And Aron, after a three-month stay in several displaced-persons camps, in Austria and Germany, enters in his turn “clandestinely,” on December 25, 1946.
Le sel et le soufre thus presents us with a narrative that differs in several points from the course of the events endured by Anna, which does not prevent it from being very close to what was lived. It is easy, by sticking here to the structure, to detect the novelist’s work. She preserves the essence of the experience, and evokes it in a novelistic sequence punctuated by the chapter titles, one that resembles an initiatory journey toward the territories of death. A descent into a foreign and sick world.
From then on, the work of Anna Langfus puts us in intimate contact with that figure who haunts our century, whom one avoids, whom one does not want to see, the survivor. The survivor of the multiple modern wars, of the great slaughters, of the exterminations and the gulags. And what is more, a woman, that is to say the victim par excellence, along with the children, of these latter wars. She stages this survivor in her nakedness and her isolation, in the midst of a society that overflows with violence, greed, hypocrisy, and treachery. A survivor certainly invisible, to whom one listens at best as a witness of the crime, rarely as a wounded being, forever suffering.
Less than a self-portrait, we are dealing with a painful relationship of the writer to this central character, the other “I,” her double. This relationship structures the whole of the work. The survivor Anna Langfus tries to pull through by writing. She makes of it an act certainly responsible toward her fellow beings, toward those who underwent the same fate as she and who did not return; yet she seeks first of all a salvation, “a liberation,” she says. One would still have to temper this supposed appeasement. A suffering is born of this tension. The writing and the remembrance she imposes upon herself are evidently great pains, moral and physical. The writer embodies her memory, suffers from it in her body.
Anna Langfus leads us into this rough and carefree world, such as she lived it, without launching into grand theories, without generalizing, without even saying everything — because too many details kill the detail. She asks how and why to survive, without answering, and she leaves us there, with a sort of irony, a detachment from self very disturbing for the reader. Yes, the narrator Anna Langfus can be cruel with her reader as much as with herself.