After having read the work and met, within their class, an actress playing in “An operetta in Ravensbrück”, the 3rd A students of the public college of the Gorges de la Loire attended a performance of the work of Germaine Tillion, with a strong humanist dimension.
How does the word move into an act of resistance? How do literature and the performing arts resist? Deported to the Ravensbrück camp, Germaine Tillion wrote “Une operetta à Ravensbrück”, a work that could not be more singular in which five united prisoners fight for their survival, through laughter and song, fight against the barbarism of the Nazis who are determined to eliminate in them all traces of humanity…
A hymn to life
It was in the representation of this hymn to life, of this unprecedented testimony on the concrete reality of the conditions of detention at the Ravensbrück camp that the pupils of 3rd A of the Gorges de la Loire college took part this Tuesday, March 22 at Puy-en-Velay theater. We bet that they will keep from the performance of this veritable “musical tragedy” the feeling of having better understood how the enterprise of dehumanization of the Nazi oppressors was set up and how Germaine Tillion (originally from Allègre in Haute-Loire ), entered the Pantheon in 2015, used her pen, laughter and self-mockery to (sur)live and resist.
We would be well inspired to see how, in times troubled by war, artistic creation restores hope and a taste for life with the sole weapon: the joy of living…
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