1 March 2005
Bruce Jackson
Charles Désirat, 1907-2005
Charles Désirat, lifelong political activist and co-author of Sachso, the moving and horrifying book of personal recollections byFrench deportees to the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camp, died February 14, 2005, in Cahors, a small town in south central France.
Désirat had been a militant communist before the war, for which the French police imprisoned him in January 1941. He soon escaped. He was recaptured and in 1943 was sent to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen. Incarceration in one of the Nazis' extermination camps was no reason to stop the work he'd been doing outside: he led the Resistance group within the camp until he and the few other survivors were liberated by a unit of the 47th Russian army on April 22, 1945. He returned to France and was reunited with his wife, who had been a prisoner in Ravensbruck.
In August 1945 he organized the association of former French prisoners of Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen—L' Amicale des anciens déportés d'Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen et de ses kommandos. In 1964 he helped create the more inclusive Comité international du camp d'Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen. He was that organization's president for thirty-five years. He was also director of Secours populaire, an important French relief organization.
Somewhere along the way the French government decided it was better to honor him than to lock him up: they made him an officier in the Legion of Honor and awarded him the Croix de Guerre (with palm), Medal of the Resistance, and Medal of the Deportation.
Sachso was published in Jean Malaurie's great Terre Humaine ethnography series in 1982 under the collective authorship of "Amicale d'Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen." It has sold 80,000 copies.
The word "Sachso," the collective authors wrote, had been part of their ongoing resistance to German authority, their defiance of those who would annihilate them. "Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen is the only concentration camp which the French deportees baptized with a diminutive: Sachso. We very much hope that the reader of these pages understands why. Sachso confronts Sachsenhausen: it is the human confronting the beast, it is material and moral solidarity against the S.S. system of annihilating the prisoners. Sachso confronts Sachsenhausen: it is resistance in the face of Naziism, it is life finally stronger than death."
I met Charles Désirat in 1996. Jean Malaurie had invited a few Terre Humaine authors to take part in a panel on the Terre Humaine series at the Etonnants Voyageurs book fair, which that year was in St. Mâlo, a small port city on the Brittany coast, not
far south of Mt. St. Michel and the invasion beaches in Normandy.
Malaurie is one of the world's great explorers: he's done primary work in the Sahara and the Arctic. He's best known for his book about Greenland Eskimos and the impact on their culture of the U.S. Thule airbase with which he began Terre Humaine, Les derniers rois de Thulé, published in English as The Last Kings of Thule. (The second book in the series was Claude Lèvi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, another classic.) Malaurie recently published a magnificent book of photographs from his Arctic explorations and a four-volume memoir, Hummocks.He had also invited to St. Mâlo Patrick Declerk, a psychiatrist whose Les Naufrages (about the clochards, the street people of Paris) was soon to come out in Terre Humaine. My two books in the series were about criminal life in the U.S. (Leurs prisons, a translation of In the Life: Versions of the Criminal Experience) and getting by on death row in Texas (Le Quartier de la mort, a translation of Death Row, written with Diane Christian). Charles Désirat's book was about surviving almost three years in a German extermination camp thirty-five kilometers outside of Berlin. Jean Malaurie's idea of a travel book, I thought at the time, was a good deal less glamorous and voluntary than the idea entertained by just about every other publisher at St. Mâlo that year.
Malaurie introduced me to Charles late in the morning of our second day there. The three of us walked a while on the stone pavement above the beach. Malaurie took us to lunch at a pleasant place and later we went to the Terre Humaine panel. There may have been a few other Terre Humaine authors there, but it didn't matter because Malaurie did most of the talking.Afterwards, there was a screening of the documentary film Diane and I had made about men waiting to be executed in Texas. We couldn't get a copy of the version with a dubbed French soundtrack that had been broadcast on French TV, so they projected the original English language version and Patrick Declerk provided a running translation for the entire film. Much of the film is in demotic English, and a lot of it is mumbled in noisy prison rooms. There was an overflow crowd so they screened the film a second time, and Patrick again translated the soundtrack on the fly. It was an astonishing performance.
Jean, Charles and I watched the first screening, after which Charles said, "Prisons are alike."The next day he and I had lunch together in the big room the conference organizers provided for authors who weren't being taken to local restaurants by their publishers or by publishers hoping to get them to jump ship. At one end of the room were two huge tables covered with massive trays of Channel oysters. There were other tables—ignored by almost everyone—covered with platters of teensy sandwiches. Charles and I talked about how we'd wasted a grand opportunity by having lunch with Jean Malaurie in that fancy restaurant the previous day. Writers can always have lunch with publishers in fancy restaurants, but how often can they have an unlimited supply of that day's Channel oysters?
We filled plates with a dozen oysters each, then sat down at a table. A waiter immediately delivered a bottle of white wine, after which we ate our oysters, drank the wine, and talked about prison. When we were done with the oysters I said, "Another plate?" He nodded. I got us another dozen each. We continued talking our way through the second plate of Channel oysters. After a while I said, "De plus?" Some more? He shook his head. He told me they were excellent but at his age he couldn't manage any more. (I now know that he would have been 88 when we had that lunch, though he looked and acted nothing close to it.) I fetched another dozen. When I sat down with the plate he said, "Quel homme!" I said it had nothing to do with being "quel homme." Rather it was about the rarity of such oysters where I lived and the excellence of them now. He grinned as I finished the third dozen, then we finished the wine and walked around St. Mâlo talking about things until it was time to board the bus that would take us to the train station.
We talked all the way on that trainride back to Paris. Cahors, he told me, was a beautiful town on the Lot river; it dated back to Roman times. I should come and visit, he said. We could talk, and it was a good place to read and walk and think and write. There was a room with a bed that was fine for me and fine for me and my wife if we didn't mind being close in a bed. I said we didn't mind. In that case, he said, you should bring her, too, and she could also read and walk and think and write. I said I would certainly do that. When we reached Paris he went to another track where there was a train that would take him home and I got a cab to my hotel.
Over the next few years we exchanged cards at holidays, and every time I wrote him I promised to visit. Every time I went to France I thought about finding a few days to run down to Cahors, but never quite managed to do it. A few years ago Diane and I were at a conference at Versailles after which we had two or three free days and I thought we might do it then, but we went to Paris instead, to the usual places, doing the usual things.
A few weeks ago, I was in Paris for several events around the fiftieth anniversary of Terre Humaine, which now comprises eighty-five books, including the American classic that Malaurie made the centerpiece of the anniversary, the book that defined and abolished Postmodernism before the academics came up with the name: James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Monday evening, February 14, there was a reception at Bibliothèque Nationale de France marking the opening the following day of a large exhibit about Terre Humaine that would be up all spring. The next night President Jacques Chirac hosted a reception in the Winter Garden of Elysée Palace for about 75 writers, editors, filmmakers and heads of French cultural organizations honoring Malaurie and the Terre Humaine writers. I thought I might see Charles Désirat at the two receptions. It hardly seemed possible that nearly a decade had passed since we'd talked on the train back to Paris from the coast and I tried to cook up a good reason why I'd never visited him in Cahors in all that time, but I couldn't think of one. It didn't matter: he wasn't there.
On Wednesday, Malaurie took me to lunch at Le Café Marly, at the end of the Richelieu wing of the Louvre, just off rue de Rivoli. He suggested I start with the oysters. We ordered, then he began talking about where Terre Humaine would go next. "What we've done thus far," Malaurie said, "is just breaking the ice. Terre Humaine is a great family of authors. We must decide what the family shall do now." His cell phone went off. He looked at the caller ID on the phone's screen, took the call, and mostly listened.
He closed the phone and said to me, "Charles Désirat has died."
He was quiet for a moment, then called someone at Le Monde and dictated the obituary they would run the following day. He told the reporter that for his entire life Charles Désirat bore witness for tolerance, peace, and reconciliation.
When he was done he said to me, "He was one of my closest friends. You two would have liked one another and had good conversations. It's unfortunate you didn't know one another."
"We did," I said. "You introduced us in St. Mâlo in 1996. We ate oysters there and talked on the train all the way back to Paris. He invited me to visit him in Cahors but I never did. Every time I've been in France since then I meant to, but I never got around to it."
"Too bad for you," Jean said. "He was a great man. He never gave up. He cared. You should have gone to Cahors."
So I should, but I didn't, and now I never shall. Some things you can't make up or fix. That is the lesson death affirms every time: something specific is absolutely over. All your reasons or justifications for things not done are trivial in the face of that most absolute and irreversible fact of all.
It is always that way, isn't it? There are always promises unkept, conversations not finished, words not said, deeds not done. Other than the timing, there's nothing surprising about death. There's no way we're going to beat it, no way we're going to escape that final perfect silence, no way there will not be things still not done.
That's how things are, just as the stars and the rain and traffic and shoes and the sea are how things are. Charles Désirat was a man to whom terrible things had been done, yet he remained all his life full of joy, optimism, care and love. He went through hell and he lived long and he thought that life, finally, was stronger than death, and that what mattered was to keep on fighting until the inevitable end, and never to forget. Who needs more than that? Who can hope for more than that?
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.