THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – SHOULD NOT BE LOST
A child in hiding during the Second World War, with his father and grandparents murdered in Auschwitz, Jean-Claude Grumberg, born in 1939, had a lot to do to emerge destroyed from this long and methodical abomination. Instead, he began cutting cloth, no doubt out of atavism, and then replaced the cloth with words. We cannot judge the dresses that came out of her workshop, but instead we have read her texts, heard her dialogues, chiseled, elegant, bittersweet, with a devastating humor, painful and vital at the same time, obsessed by this ” stuff “ that cost him a father, 6 million brothers and sisters, and against whose fate he miraculously survived.
The most valuable of assets (published by Seuil in 2019, republished today with original drawings by Michel Hazanavicius) is the last of these texts, which adopts an unexpected distance from the event by choosing the form of a cruel story committed to hope. It tells the story of a girl thrown off a train and taken in by a pair of poor lumberjacks. The title of the work, which uses Nazi newspeak like a glove (the “goods” designated by the Jews destined for the industry of death), is quite illuminating about its spirit. Here, there are no Jews or Nazis, we speak the language of history, which evokes “cursed race” or the “train gods”.
Work on the pattern
Alerted by the emotion and attitude that emanate from this stylized story, seeing in it a way of approaching with the necessary fear and trembling an event to which his family history is no stranger, director Michel Hazanavicius – the same one who invented the universal – antidepressant Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, the hero of OSS 117 – turned it into an animated film.
Faithful to the spirit and letter of the text, the film is not just that. He transubstantiates it in the world of animation, with all the necessary sobriety, sensitivity and talent. Instead of delving into the refined narrative of the story – the girl found, the anguished argument of the sterile couple who takes her in, the jealousy and malice of the surrounding world, the factory of death, the unexpected return of a miraculous and unrecognizable father – Hazanavicius has the intelligence to work on the motive. They are few but they take up all the space. The Polish forest, dark, disturbing, wintry and yet saving. The train, like a blind, howling beast that keeps crossing it and destroying the world, screaming. The extermination camp, an elective site of human disfigurement against the backdrop of a transfigured Yiddish lullaby.
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