Les bagages de sable (Anna Langfus, 1962)

Anna Langfus is a forgotten writer; to the extent that she’s remembered at all, it’s as the recipient of the Goncourt prize of 1962, for Les Bagages de sable. She was a refugee from the second world war, who grew up in a Jewish family in Lublin, Poland. She survived by adopting the identity of a non-Jewish friend, Maria. After war’s end, she felt unsafe during the anti-Jewish public sentiment in Poland and made up her mind to leave for France. There she started writing plays and managed to publish three books, somewhat based on her own experiences, 1960, 1962 and 1965. Bagages de sable is the second one of these books. The title means luggage of sand, which strikes me as a good image. When it was translated to English in 1965, it got the title “The Lost Shore”.

It is about a young woman displaced from another country, to France. She meets an older man with whom she enters an affair. It is never mentioned what country she is from, or what she has lived through, but there is a palpable sense of a wound or a trauma in her past. In this way, I believe it is quite an innovative book, where she touches upon themes later explored by the likes of Georges Perec, and China Miéville in This Census-taker.

I have a pet theory where female holocaust survivors who wrote about their experiences often wrote three books, and that this was a kind of exorcising of their trauma. The first book about their childhood, the second of their time in the camps and the third about their life afterwards. I don’t think Langfus really fits that mould, but she was one of the earliest survivors to write about their experiences. Along with Piotr Rawicz (also originally from Poland) and Elie Wiesel (who wrote in Yiddish) she was among the first survivors to deal with their survivorship in literary form in France, and among the first of any country, really.

She is not entirely forgotten, however. The fact that she was awarded the Goncourt Prize (France’s highest literary honor) helps to slow her descent into obscurity. There are also memorial plaques in France and in Poland, as well as a community library bearing her name, in Sarcelles, Paris. Recent years has also seen a Facebook group created to commemorate her work. If she hadn’t died suddenly in 1966 maybe she had been able to write more books. She was in the process of writing a book while she died, according to her biographer Jean-Yves Potel, who wrote “Les disparations d’Anna Langfus” in 2014, a book which sparked renewed interest in Langfus and her writing.

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This is the second time I write about a holocaust survivor in the Year club. I previously wrote about Herman Sachnowitz in 2021.