The secret works of the prisoner who painted the Nazi horror

"Finally, this nightmare of hunger and death is over." Paul Simon wrote his first uncensored letter on April 12, 1945, the day after being liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp, located on the Ettersberg hill near Weimar in central Nazi Germany. "You cannot imagine what we have seen in this hell; naturally, I could not let you know in my previous letters," he detailed to his wife, Louise, his Chouquette tanto aiméeAlong with this letter, Simon also sent her some sketches, rescued from his memory, depicting scenes from a horrific everyday life. A cartload of corpses, a flood of desperately starving people, a man with no will to see tomorrow. Louise hid them in an old cloth-covered folder until her death on October 9, 2006, in a nursing home in Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort (Gard). "How many friends will never see France again? How many died in my arms…?" Simon lamented.

"My mother was always very careful to display my father's drawings and letters," says his son, François Simon, who at 76 has decided to give Paul Simon's legacy to the Museum of the Resistance and Deportation in Besançon. "Such comprehensive donations are rare," says Mathilde Cantenot, head of the Simon collection at the Museum of the Resistance and Deportation in Besançon. Louise never revealed the existence of the folder, not even to her son; she only showed its contents to her granddaughter, Lucie Simon, who became interested in her grandfather's time in the concentration camp at age 14 for a school project. Her grandmother showed her the last letter from his captivity, as well as some drawings, on the condition that she never reveal the existence of this material. Louise suffered at the thought that the persecution, the stigma, and the sadness could return simply by mentioning them. Her parents kept quiet about the past of the deportation, as if it had existed.

Ranks of the resistance

Paul Simon was born in 1912 in Brest, Brittany, in northwestern France. In his youth, in the 1930s, he was a socialist activist, especially in 1934, when the far right was proliferating in France. During those years, he became involved with the socialists, and it wasn't until he met a man known as L'Ancien (The Old Man), a member of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, that he joined the Resist group of the May Network of the Queen's Network against the Nazi occupation.

His cover as a radio salesman, used to smuggle information, was blown by the Gestapo, and he was arrested in April 1943. He was first taken to SS headquarters in Paris, where he was interrogated and tortured. He was then transferred to Fresnes prison, where he was also tortured. Later, he was sent to Compiègne, where he spent several months, and finally, in January 1944, he was deported to Buchenwald. "They tortured him during each of his internments and transfers," his son says.

Between 1937 and 1945, more than 250,000 people of various nationalities were interned at Buchenwald. Of these, an estimated 56,000 died from hunger, disease, mistreatment, forced labor, executions, and medical experiments. In its final days, with the Nazis retreating, the prisoners, organized into a clandestine committee, managed to take control of the camp on April 11, 1945, just hours before the arrival of American tanks."He made some pencil sketches beforehand, but the watercolors were done just after liberation, when he was finally able to express what was inside him, without danger or reprisals for himself or his comrades," François recounts. Each letter, sketch, and watercolor became a testimony and denunciation of torture and mistreatment, of powerlessness. All of them were drawn during his detention in the camp, established in July 1937, which served to imprison political and religious opponents, labor objectors, and homosexuals. The folder preserved the memory of Buchenwald.

During their internment, cultural activities were also held; the prisoners tried to promote them so as not to lose their sanity. A poem, also preserved by Louise, by Pierre Trinquesse, a companion of Simon's, explained how in 1945 they put on theatrical performances under appalling conditions. On the back of some of the watercolors, Simon wrote: "Made at Buchenwald." "My father, being very ill, returned by ambulance and arrived at Le Bourget on May 8, the day of the signing of the peace treaty," François recounts. "At first, I will seem changed to you, aged, sad, and I will love silence above all... I will try to keep an eye on myself," Paul recounts. Upon entering France, Paul weighed only 39 kg for his height of 1.83 m. Shortly afterward, he was declared a severely disabled war invalid.

Return of the Living Dead

François Simon studied medicine, in part, as an unconscious consequence of what his father experienced. A victim of tuberculosis, his father spent long periods in the infirmary at the Buchenwald concentration camp—the Revier—a barracks for sick or dying prisoners. There, he was treated by a French doctor, Victor, who had been deported like him. Vic Dupont, a member of the French Resistance. In the absence of antibiotics, tuberculosis was fought with brutal methods. Dupont performed an artificial pneumothorax on his father and a thoracotomy, during which three ribs were removed to collapse the infected lung. "I don't know under what conditions this could have been done; it would have been terrible," Simon comments. These extreme treatments managed to save his life in an environment where medicine was not a priority and where the Nazi authorities were conducting experiments.

Decades later, in the 1970s, after a car accident, his father was rushed to the hospital with a pneumothorax caused by old internal adhesions. Fate would have it that he was admitted to the department of Dr. Vic Dupont, then a non-hospitalary doctor in Paris. François Simon, unbeknownst to him, was doing his medical internship at that very hospital. Only later did he learn, through a clinic head, that his tutor was the same man who had saved his father twice, at Buchenwald and in Paris. Even so, he didn't dare engage in direct conversation with Dupont about his father. "He didn't say anything about what he had experienced. It was, so to speak, a secret among comrades," François explains.

A necessary silence

François Simon was seven or eight years old when, at a family meal in the 1950s, he asked his father about his deportation. It was the first time he had ever done so, and the scene took place in the kitchen. His father, usually silent, agreed to talk and began to recount the horrors of the concentration camp. But when her son was crying, his mother forbade him to speak of it again.

During a vacation in Castellón de la Plana, when François was 14, some family friends revealed the truth to him. "Do you know you're Jewish?" they asked. When he returned to France and questioned his parents, his mother, uneasy, simply replied: "You were born in Paris." His mother, Louise, also born in Paris in 1910, was the daughter of Romanian Jews. His maternal grandmother had been arrested in September 1942 and deported to Auschwitz, as had his mother and aunts. The family lived in Le Bourget, the epicenter of the deportation of Jews to France.

"When I asked why they had never told me anything, my mother confessed: she was afraid things would happen again, that you would suffer humiliation, abuse, or racism at school," he explains. Although François had years to ask questions, especially as he reached adulthood, he never dared. He had internalized the unwritten rule of not bringing up the past. "I regret, of course," he says, "not having done it, not having known more." His father died in 1981, at the age of 69, without speaking about the subject again.

François understood that the right place for the family documents was not a hidden folder, but the Museum of the Resistance and Deportation in Besançon. "These drawings are not purely documentary," explains Cantenot. "They are also a translation of the deportee's feelings, their vision of the deportation." "They are a concrete representation of what they experienced and a perception of the violence and horror they experienced," he adds. Furthermore, Cantenot emphasizes that often the works produced during deportation "are all that remains of a deportee who did not survive." In the case of Paul Simon, his collection allows us to trace his entire life, "his participation in the Resistance, deportation, liberation, and life in the postwar period." "This is a story that is part of the larger story. In these times, it is good to remember that there were people who fought against barbarism," concludes François.