Anna Langfus (1920-1966) was almost 20 when the German army invaded Poland. With her young husband, who was also Jewish, she did her best to escape the massacres. She endured the ghetto and the round-ups, near-starvation, betrayal, prison, torture, and hiding out in the forest. She participated in the Polish resistance movement. The war wiped out her entire family, and everyone she was close to. At the age of 26, she moved to France, where she began to write. All three of her novels were published by Gallimard: Le Sel et le soufre (The Whole Land Brimstone, 1960) describes war from the point of view of an ordinary young woman; Les Bagages de sable (The Lost Shore, 1962) and Saute, Barbara (Jump, Barbara, 1965), are about warsick people who are unable to rebuild their lives.
This book is both a historical and a literary exploration. The author is interested in how the experience of war and the Holocaust are transmitted. He shows how Anna Langfus didn’t simply bear witness, in the usual sense. Instead, she evoked the Catastrophe – and in particular, the Jewish survivors’ distress – from the inside. She was the first and remains one of the only French novelists to express the violence of that experience through fiction.

A biographical essay devoted to Anna Langfus, French novelist and Holocaust survivor who was born a Polish Jew, and who won the 1962 Goncourt Prize for Les Bagages de sable. Her work has been translated into over 15 languages.