Un dramaturge français, Armand Gatti, face au camp de concentration et à l'univers concentrationnaire

Abstract

Captured in the French maquis in 1943 at the age of seventeen and deported to a German concentration camp to work in diving-bell on the sea floor under a brutal kapo, Gatti decided that the risk of being killed in an escape attempt was preferable to certain death in the diving-bell. He succeeded in escaping from the camp but was never able, as he frequently says.even today, to "get out of the camp”: "his dead”, as he calls them, are with him all the time. A long series of plays from the early 1950s up to the present day testify to his permanent mental "imprisonment", and each play is centered on a difierent aspect of the experience and his reaction to it. According to Gatti, nazism which created the camps was not an "historical accident", but a single aspect of the system oi oppression which exists the world over whatever the place or time. He frequently refers to the "numerous parallel societies which are hardly distinguishable from the concentration camps”. The first of these in his experience was the shantytown of Tonkin to the north of Monaco where he was born and spent, with his parents, the early years of his life. His subsequent transition from Tonkin to a German concentration camp was "not a very radical change" for him. It set him face to face from the outset with the "concentration camp universe” of which he writes with acumen when his subject is not directly a camp, the last about which he has written so far by name is AUSCHWITZ.