Primo Levi, Jean Améry et Anne Frank : Trois témoignages de l’estuaire de la mort
Primo Levi, Jean Améry and Anne Frank : Three Testimonies from the Land of the Dead

Summary/Abstract: The study focuses on two pieces of writing that dramatise ways of surviving and keeping one’s dignity intact in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Both Primo Levi and Jean Améry are Holocaust victims, survivors of Auschwitz, bearing their own traumatic experience. The third text bears witness to an external world horrified by Nazi forces, seen from the perspective of another detainee, that of a teenager who is experiencing the awareness of writing: Anne Frank writes her Journal, while hiding with her family and four friends, first from a juvenile need of confession but which will finally take the shape of a deeply revelatory and iconic illustration of the documentary power of writing. Dealing with a tragic life circumstance that haunts one’s mind in limit situations, it is the expression of a sense of ultimate, inner urgency, the need to immortalise in writing, and in so doing, rid oneself of a painful obsession; it is, at the same time, the expression of a stringent urgency to denounce horrible crimes against the very essence of the human being.

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