Résister, c’est quoi, sinon survivre ?

Fernand Devaux (1922-2018), a young worker and Communist activist, was arrested and interned by the French government in 1940. In July 1942, he was deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz, from where he returned in 1945. After his retirement, he became involved in passing on the memory of the deportation to younger generations. The last survivor of the “convoy of 45,000”, he died on he passed away on May 30, 2018.
As part of the 2017-2018 project, during which my cantata Je reviens de l’enfer was premiered, I had the opportunity to meet Fernand Devaux, then to share the emotions of the entire team at the time of his death, measuring the extent to which his personality and his testimony had left their mark on those who came across him: trade unionists, memorial associations, school audiences.
This work is therefore not only an extension of the artistic creation process with a memorial aim, but also in the immediate context of the interrupted encounter with the man.
Based on a text written by the author Valentine Goby with students from the Joliot-Curie secondary school in Stains (93), the work aims to evoke both Fernand Devaux’s working-class and militant background and his survival in the concentration camps, placing his journey in the wider perspective of deportation, a barbaric tool of dehumanization serving the monstrous aims of Nazi ideology and the totalitarian state.
Pierre Chépélov