52′, directed by Jean-Pierre Carlon.
Co-produced by France Télévisions.
With the support of the CNC, the PROCIREP, the ANGOA, the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, the General Council of Bouches-du-Rhône.
“The need to tell the story was so pressing that I started writing this book there, in that German laboratory, in the middle of the frost, the war and the indiscreet looks…” Primo Levi.
1945 organizes the forgetting of the deportation.
At the end of the first part of “Marseille, January 1943 – Operation Sultan”, we left the people rounded up, abandoned to their fate in cattle trains, leaving the Arenc station for an unknown destination. None of the deportees of these roundups would return alive. However, the roundups continued in Marseille until June 1944…
“Auschwitz, les mots pour le dire” (Auschwitz, the words to say it) brings us back to the survivors of the subsequent roundups: those of 1944 at the end of the horror of the death camps.
They were intoxicated with the desire to tell, the fever to testify, the one that would relieve the suffering. They all had the feeling that the mere fact of bearing witness could turn the world upside down, and this need to tell did not tolerate any delay. Yet, from the very first days, it seemed impossible to bridge the distance they discovered between the language they had and this experience that, for the most part, they were still pursuing in their bodies.
A world separates the one who speaks, still in pain, and the one who could hear him, a universe of difference that is difficult to cross.
The burning word comes up against the opacity, the inattention of another whose good will is not enough to conceive the unimaginable.
Then, it dissolves little by little in the indifference and in its impossibility to be heard.
DVD edition by Les Productions du Lagon and ClapOsud.
In addition to this DVD, there is also the documentary “Mamoune” (26 minutes), written and directed by Jean-Pierre Carlon, co-produced by France Télévisions.