Biographies of Some of the Voices

René Blum (1978-1943), the younger brother of Léon Blum, who had been prime minister in France during the Popular Front (1936-37) was the director of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. He returned to France after the defeat in 1940 in order to serve his country. On December 12, 1941, he was one of 743 French Jewish professional men arrested in retaliation for actions by the French resistance against the German occupying forces. He was interned at Compiègne and Drancy before being sent to his death at Auschwitz in convoy 36.

The dialogue between the three Jewish men is adapted from the posthumous work Drancy 1941 by Noël (Nissim) Calef (1907-1968). Calef was interned at Drancy in 1941, then liberated thanks to the honorary Italian citizenship that had been bestowed on his grandfather. He later became a well-know novelist and screenwriter.

Several of the eyewitness accounts in the play come from the published report La Vie à Drancy (Life at Drancy) by Jacqueline Crémieux-Dunand. A Red Cross nurse, she was interned at Drancy in 1943 for 51 days before she could establish that she was not Jewish. During that time, she observed and documented the horrendous conditions at the camp, and, especially, the abject treatment of children.

The poet Max Jacob (1876-1945) is one of the key figures in French modernism. His friends included Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, and he was known for his kindness to children and young poets. In 1909 Jacob converted to Catholicism and in 1936 he left his long-time companion Jean Colle and went to live near a monastery at St. Benoît-sur-Loire. He was arrested there in 1944. Influential friends had obtained his release, but he died of pneumonia the day before he could be freed.

The voice of the narrator is mainly based on the work of Georges Wellers, a physician who later became a historian of the Shoah at CNRS, the prestigious French research institute. Along with René Blum, he was arrested in on December 12, 1941 and sent first to the camp at Compiègne and then to Drancy before being deported to Auschwitz on June 30, 1944. He was the first researcher to make a detailed analysis of the extermination camps. As a result of his research, Wellers concluded that at least 1,600,000 people were deported to Auschwitz, of whom at least 1,500,000 died.