Dynamics of Subjectivity in the Letters of Jewish Internees From the Drancy Internment Camp During the Second World War

The Drancy Camp and Correspondence (1941–1944)

Originally conceived as a modern housing complex, the Cité de la Muette in Drancy was transformed by the Nazi authorities in the spring of 1941 into a Judenlager and later an Abwanderunglager. The Drancy camp, known after the war as “the antechamber of death,” was a transit camp, the hub of the deportation of Jews from France. Between March 1942 and August 1944, approximately 63,000 of the 76,000 Jews deported from France passed through Drancy, most of them bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau (Broch, 2016; Peschanski, 2002; Poznanski et al., 2015; Rajsfus, 1991; Wieviorka & Laffitte, 2015).

According to Wieviorka and Laffitte, “at Drancy, people are killed very slowly by extreme malnutrition, which destroys even the healthiest people both physically and psychologically” (Wieviorka & Laffitte, 2015: 49) [our translation]. Drancy has become a major reference point in French social memory, symbolising the implementation of the “Final Solution” and state collaboration (Peschanski, 2002), while acts of civilian rescue coexisted with these policies (Sémelin, 2018).

The demographic composition of the Drancy internment camp was characterised by an exceptional degree. The camp population included Jews from a wide range of national, regional, and cultural backgrounds, among others, notably Polish, Russian, Hungarian, German, Algerian, and French communities. Foreign Jews constituted a substantial proportion of the interned population, with Polish Jews forming the largest national group among them.

Alongside this diversity, the camp was marked by remarkable social heterogeneity. Georges Horan described the interned population as an unprecedented juxtaposition of social classes and professions. Among others, intellectuals, lawyers, scholars, writers, politicians, respected merchants, speculators, traffickers, gamblers, criminal figures, and corporate administrators all coexisted within the same confined environment.

Linguistic diversity constituted one of the most immediately visible features of the camp (Yiddish, Hungarian, Spanish, Russian, and Turkish, among other languages). Benjamin Schatzman writes that one’s first impression upon entering the camp was the feeling of no longer being in France, owing to the multiplicity of languages spoken among the internees (Poznanski et al., 2015).

The internment conditions at the Drancy camp and the subsequent development of correspondence, as described by historians (Poznanski et al., 2015; Wieviorka & Laffitte, 2015), can be divided into three main periods:

A Historical Reading of the Drancy Letters

The themes of wartime correspondence have already been examined by historians working in French, English, and German (Balint, 2023; Cronier, 2021; Dauphin, 2002; Debruyne & van Ypersele, 2011; Doetzer, 2002; Gilbert, 2022; Halberstam & Halberstam, 1995; Hurtubise, 1994; Klacsmann, 2017; Knight et al., 2025; Lamprecht, 2001; Lorenz, 1998; Saltiel, 2017; Vidal-Naquet, 2014). Several French authors (Lehr, 2019; Poznanski et al., 2015; Sabbagh, 2019; Wieviorka & Laffitte, 2015) have carried out focused studies on the Drancy camp, and in some cases specifically on letters written from the camp, offering important historical insights.

Sabbagh (2019), each letter tells its own story even before it is read. Together, the letters form a “true account” of history as seen from below. They were written upon waking, as night fell or in idle moments. Some, which Sabbagh calls “midnight letters,” were written in the darkness of sealed cattle wagons. Others were found, thrown from the train, written in pencil in the half-light. These last letters sum up all the others. Terrible, sometimes without any illusions, they are nonetheless imbued with hope, life, and love for those who remain.

Most of the letters are written in French, both by native speakers and foreign internees (Sabbagh, 2019), as required by the authorities in order to facilitate postal control and censorship (Wieviorka & Laffitte, 2015). However, this French is often influenced by a Yiddish mother tongue, or written phonetically, sometimes in a very dense hand. Some handwriting, careful and calligraphed, can switch abruptly into jagged lines: “Not a single piece of writing can resist, from the worker to the great poet – all falter in the expression of incomprehension and fear” (Sabbagh, 2019, p. 24). The media are varied: pages torn from spiral notepads, exercise books, fragments of coloured paper or packaging. As paper is scarce, the formats remain very small (Sabbagh, 2019).

The themes addressed are varied. Letters contain everyday words, words of love and express deep uncertainty about the future. Some letters evoke the brutal conditions of deportation. Several suggest food deprivation (Sabbagh, 2019). Families often receive lists of items they are expected to send: toothpaste, soap, sugar, chocolate, which help to maintain reserves and keep alive the hope of survival. Some letters even describe tasty dishes enjoyed in the past (Poznanski et al., 2015, p. 119). Censorship prohibited any mention of the camp conditions (Wieviorka & Laffitte, 2015). The vigilance of the censors prompted internees to write explicitly while concealing requests to their families. Sometimes, a word written later on, such as “SAUSAGE” and “BREAD,” served as a signal to alert others to the internees’ hunger. Conversely, coded phrases, for example, “Jean needs treatment” meant: get a medical certificate to get me out (Sabbagh, 2019).

The historiographical examination of the Drancy letters thus highlights the plurality of their forms and contents, as well as the emotional density and material constraints that run through them. By considering these writings in the conditions in which they were produced and the strategies of expression they employ, this synthesis provides the necessary framework for understanding what the contemporary analysis of these documents involves. It is precisely upon this approach that the LettresCamps research project is based.

Historians have already identified several psychological tensions emerging from both the material form and the content of letters written by Jewish internees. In particular, the progressive shrinking of handwriting – described as “micrographic writing” – reflects the increasing scarcity of paper and the tightening constraints of internment. Likewise, the physical supports themselves, ranging from official postcards to hastily written notes on makeshift paper, testify to the precarious and improvised conditions under which these texts were produced. At the level of content, recurring themes further illuminate the lived reality of the camps: material deprivation, expressed through requests for food and basic items; the evocation of imagined meals as a temporary relief from hunger; explicit references to suffering; and, at the same time, forms of compelled optimism intended to protect relatives from distress. Family concerns also structure much of the correspondence, particularly reflections on children and practical arrangements in anticipation of release or deportation. Even in the so-called “last letters” written during deportation, efforts to reassure loved ones and sustain hope persist despite the proximity of death. Thus, taken together, and beyond their documentary value, these letters also had a marked psychological function, offering brief moments of relief, nostalgia and mental escape from the violence of camp life.

Despite these important insights, letters produced during the Shoah remain a relatively underexplored corpus from a psychological perspective. It is within this gap that the present study is situated. By bringing together historical, psychological and methodological approaches, this project seeks to explore the subjective experience of the internees as it emerges through their letters.

Access to Sources and Corpus Composition

The LettresCamps project, initiated in May 2022 within XXX: the Centre d'Histoire des Sociétés, des Sciences et des Conflits (the Center for the History of Societies, Sciences, and Conflicts) of the Université de Picardie Jules Verne. It stems from a close collaboration between researchers primarily from the fields of psychology, methodology and contemporary history.

The sources studied consist of letters written by individuals interned as Jews at the Drancy camp during the Second World War. These documents are preserved in two sites of memory: Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris and Mémorial de l’Internement et de la Déportation in Compiègne. The 79 boxes of the collection coded CMLXXXVI, held at the Paris Memorial, were fully digitised, after which a random sample of three hundred letters was established in order to conduct an initial investigation and an exploratory analysis (Dureuil et al., 2026; Laimou et al., 2026a, 2026b).

The 300 letters analysed all originated from the Drancy internment camp and span the years 1941 to 1944: 52 letters from 1941 (all written by men), 139 from 1942 (92 by men, 39 by women, one jointly written by two women, six by mixed-gender couples, and two by male adolescents), 108 from 1943 (62 by men, 33 by women, nine by mixed-gender couples, and four by male adolescents), and a single letter from 1944, written by a woman. In terms of their status, 228 letters were official and therefore subject to censorship, 63 were clandestine and uncensored, and 9 were written and thrown from deportation trains. The distribution of recipients further reflects the social fabric of the correspondence: spouses (103 letters), families (60), parents (61), children (33), friends (25), siblings (16), extended family (12), unidentified recipients (13), and intermediaries (2) (Laimou et al., 2026a, 2026b).

Among the 300 documents analysed, censored postcards constitute the largest category, representing 141 items in total. Eighty-five items correspond to censored letters that were not postcards. The corpus also includes 63 clandestine letters, 9 letters thrown from deportation trains, and 2 documents for which it was not possible to identify the exact material format.

Methodological Foundations of the Work and Approach

The analytical work was carried out by three independent groups, each using methods commonly employed in the study of subjective experience. All analyses were conducted according to the double-blind principle, ensuring methodological rigour. The methodologies specific to each group, together with their detailed results, are presented in-depth elsewhere.

The first group conducted a descriptive thematic analysis aimed at identifying the main themes present in the corpus (Mathé et al., 2026). This non-theoretical approach resulted in a comprehensive mapping of emerging themes, forming the initial basis for the study. The second group focused on the recurring theme of food (Laimou et al., 2026b) in order to examine how they reflected the psychological state of the authors. The third group combined a thematic analysis with a study of the psychological processes perceptible in the specificities of writing (Laimou et al., 2025, 2026a, 2026b). This approach made it possible to qualitatively reconstruct the internal dynamics of the authors by simultaneously integrating the content and form of written expression (textual density, paragraph organisation, the variety of registers used).

Thus conceived, the project lies at the intersection of methods derived from psychology, combining historical contextualisation and the consideration of the subjective dimension of letters. The analysis presented draws on all the approaches described above and is primarily based on a synthesis of the overall thematic analyses and cross-cutting observations from the corpus as a whole. It therefore builds on the common elements identified by the research groups. It should be noted that, although the theme of food occupies an important place in the letters, its detailed treatment is the subject of a separate article (Laimou et al., 2026b); the results presented here only include the contributions necessary for a general understanding of the corpus.

We have chosen in this article not to present the results in the form of a typology and a series of fixed categories, but to come as close as possible to what the letters themselves suggest. Rather than artificially separating the themes, we have sought to allow to emerge from the interweaving of the extracts, a narrative that brings together individual experiences into a common story. This is why the analyses resulting from the different areas of work have been reorganised here in the form of an account of experiences in the camp, constructed from extracts. This mode of presentation aims to convey, in a mosaic of fragments, the way in which the internees recount their experiences in their letters.

The following pages do not seek to reconstruct an exhaustive chronology, but rather to trace a path through the letters that allows us to come as close as possible to the subjective experience of internment at Drancy, as the internees wished their relatives to perceive and imagine it.

Subjectivity: Relational, Processual, and Situated Approaches Under Conditions of Constraint

Within the field of psychology, subjectivity has been approached in multiple ways. Contemporary perspectives increasingly converge towards a rethinking of classical conceptions of subjectivity as a stable, internal, and autonomous entity. Instead, subjectivity is understood as a dynamic, relational, and historically situated process shaped by the social, political, linguistic, and affective conditions in which it unfolds.

Dreier (2023), drawing on and further developing the conceptualisations of Holzkamp (2013), who argued that attention should be directed not towards the individual per se but towards the world as it is lived by them; reaffirms the necessity of considering a “situated human subjectivity in social practice” (Dreier, 2023, p. 1304). He calls for subjectivity to be understood as an ever-moving process that manifests “in a subject’s situated trajectory of participation and conduct of everyday life from his or her first-person perspective in nexuses of social practice” (2023, p. 1315).

Similarly, Jüttemann (2011) situates subjectivity within a historical framework, examining both the psychological phenomena that produce culture and the ways socio-cultural environments act upon the subject. Subjectivity can therefore no longer be understood as an intrinsic property of the individual, but as the product of practices, interactions, and mediations.

For Blackman et al. (2008), subjectivity is not a stable internal entity but a process of “becoming” distributed across assemblages in which bodies, affects, technologies, and materialities intersect. In this perspective, the subject is not the sovereign origin of its own experience, but a subsidiary component or an epiphenomenon resulting from material and discursive practices. Subjectivity becomes a material and technical accomplishment, rather than a closed psychological system. In this perspective, the subject functions as a surface effect of social and historical vectors, rather than as the autonomous starting point of subjectivity.

Venn, 2020a, 2020a, 2020b emphasises the historical and relational constitution of subjectivity, while foregrounding the role of narrative in organising experience. In contexts of trauma, however, narrative coherence may become fragmented. Venn argues that survival in situations of abjection involves the possibility of “telling one’s story,” an act through which the past is not merely recalled but reworked. In this sense, the transition from “subalternity” (a condition of domination and voicelessness) to “agency” occurs when the subject succeeds in re-emplotting the fragmented elements of their past, thereby reclaiming authorship over their own life. Narrative thus becomes the medium through which a damaged identity is not only repaired but transformed, enabling the subject to reorient themselves towards the possibility of a different future.

According to Passerini (Smith, 1988), subjectivity is not merely a psychological category but also a historical phenomenon and a cultural form inextricably linked to the dynamics of class and power. This subjectivity emerges through a continuous negotiation between personal and historical time, where narrators often balance a linear sense of change against a state of atemporality to preserve their identity. Consequently, textual ruptures, such as silences, exaggerations, and self-censorship, serve as critical markers of conflict, revealing moments where individuals struggle to narrate painful experiences that have not yet been fully mediated by collective interpretation.

These perspectives may be further specified through two complementary theoretical approaches. A Foucauldian perspective emphasises the historical constitution of subjectivity through relations of knowledge and power. As Gros (2017) notes, subjectivity is formed within a dynamic interplay of truth and normativity. “Subjectivity is what comes to be composed within a play of truth (Knowledge) and a given type of normativity (Power)” (p. 93). In contexts such as internment camps, imposed regimes of veridiction contribute to processes of dehumanisation. Yet practices such as letter writing may simultaneously function as technologies of the self, enabling individuals to negotiate, rework and sometimes resist these conditions. In this sense, the subject appears as an active producer of subjectivity, constituted through and against the effects of power.

A Lacanian perspective foregrounds the constitutive role of language in the emergence of the subject. Subjectivity appears through inscription of the “I” within the symbolic order, produced through processes of naming, address and relation to the Other. “The effects of language are always mixed with the fact … that the subject is subject only from being subjected to the field of the Other” ¹ (Lacan, 1964/1998, p. 188). At the same time, drawing on Freud, Lacan emphasises the role of the body and the drives, showing that subjectivity unfolds not only through language but also through embodied processes that may be symbolically elaborated. In this regard, writing, particularly letters addressed to significant others, may constitute a privileged space where linguistic inscription and drive expression intersect, enabling forms of subjective elaboration that exceed mere biological need.

Taken together, these approaches suggest that subjectivity is historically constituted, relationally mediated, and continuously negotiated through language, narrative, embodiment, and social practice. Even under conditions of extreme constraint, subjectivity does not disappear entirely but persists in fragile and reconfigured forms, sustained through situated practices, relational engagements and symbolic processes. Such perspectives are particularly relevant for understanding the letters written from Drancy, where writing may be understood simultaneously as a relational act, a means of psychic continuity, and an attempt to preserve a minimal sense of self under conditions of persecution and dehumanisation.

Writing in Drancy, Writing Drancy: On Reading the Letters

Before reading the following section, the reader should bear in mind that these writings emerged within a context of urgency, constraint, violence, and radical uncertainty, all of which profoundly shaped the forms of writing, the choice of words, and the modes of expression. Every letter required internees to monitor their words, circumvent censorship, protect their relatives, and also find clandestine means of getting letters out of the camp. They cannot fully account for the actual conditions of life within the camp. Rather, they must always be understood within their historical context and read alongside other testimonies.

Writing officially therefore meant writing under the gaze of an anticipated reader who was not the addressee: the censor. This situation did not simply restrict content; it also shaped the psychic position of the writer, who had to maintain the bond with relatives while controlling, displacing, or disguising what could be said. Clandestine correspondence created a different, but no less constrained, situation. It could allow more direct expression, yet it also exposed the writer and relatives to danger. Clandestine letters were not free from self-censorship. Internees could minimise their suffering in order to protect their relatives, or because discovery remained possible. The distinction between official and clandestine correspondence should therefore not be understood as a simple opposition between constrained and unconstrained expression. Rather, both forms reveal different configurations of constraint.

The last letters written in Drancy before deportation constitute a particularly striking illustration of the extreme conditions in which these writings were produced. They were composed at the end of an already highly advanced process of dehumanisation, after searches, family separations, anxious waiting, and repeated humiliations. It was within this atmosphere of fear and despair that internees wrote one final time to their loved ones.

Notes thrown from deportation trains were written on any available support, often in extreme conditions, inside sealed cattle wagons. Their transmission required considerable effort and ingenuity: deportees had to write hurriedly, find a way to push the paper through a crack or opening, and hope that it would be found by a civilian or railway worker willing to forward it. Many such messages were undoubtedly never recovered or never reached their intended recipients.

This historical context is essential for psychological understanding. The difference between writing for a censor, writing secretly, and writing from a sealed train does not merely concern the route of transmission; it modifies the conditions of address, the degree of risk, the anticipated reader, and the possible forms of subjectivity expressed in the text.

Under the effects of trauma, omnipresent humiliation and constraint, the meaning of words itself becomes displaced. These conditions alter the function of discourse, sometimes to the point of producing the opposite of what appears to be explicitly stated. Herein lies an essential difference between these letters, written under urgency, shock, and constraint, and testimonies produced after the war within a process of reconstruction and retrospective narration. These writings must therefore be read with caution, not only because of external censorship and self-censorship, which compelled internees consciously to alter their discourse or resort to coded language, but also because of the effects of trauma itself, which permeate the writing through contradictions, silences, and displacements of meaning.

Thus, the statement by an internee claiming that he remains “in excellent spirits, except when he sees women having their children torn from them” powerfully illustrates this contradiction: the coexistence, in the same sentence, of a protective instinct and an acute perception of horror, testifying to the psyche’s struggle to survive the unbearable. This is where a key difference lies between this type of testimony, written in haste, under duress and in a state of shock, and intentional testimony, often formulated after the war, during a period of reconstruction and meaning-making.

Readers must remain aware both of the difficulty of such an undertaking and of the limitations of the tools available to us as researchers in accessing the exact psychic reality of the person writing. Faced with documents so heavily charged with suffering, we sought to privilege an approach attentive to the direct resonance these letters leave within us, rather than pursuing an ambition of total understanding.

A Mosaic of Life in the Camp Through Letters

The letters provide a poignant glimpse of life in the camp, as it was experienced, felt and, above all, recounted by those who were interned there. Rather than constituting a unified or homogeneous collective narrative, these extracts ² are approached here as a constellation of singular voices, each rooted in a specific subjective position. Read together, they reveal recurring motifs and shared conditions without presupposing identical meanings or experiences. ³

Gathered like scattered fragments of expression emerging from a common historical and material context, these letters form a mosaic of moments which, when juxtaposed, allow for a broader understanding of life in Drancy. What emerges is not a continuous narrative, but a plural and situated configuration of experiences, marked by both convergence and irreducible singularity. This approach makes it possible to move from individual accounts to a form of collective intelligibility, while preserving the specificity of each voice.

The notion of a “collective” dimension employed here does not imply the existence of a homogeneous or unified experience shared identically by all internees. Rather, the collective emerges from the convergence of individual enunciations, which, when considered together, reveal shared constraints and comparable ways of articulating experience. The repetition of certain themes does not indicate sameness of meaning, but points instead to structures of experience shaped by the conditions of the camp. The “collective” therefore lies not in a uniformity of experience, but in the articulation of singular subjectivities within a common structure of constraint and address.

Writing as a Battleground in the Struggle for Psychological Survival: Suzanne’s Letter

At the end of this exploration of correspondence as a space for psychological resistance and a collective framework for survival, it becomes possible to measure how much each letter, beyond its documentary value, engages in a complex subjective experience. where expectation, communication and maintaining the bonds are closely intertwined. This general framework takes on a singular resonance when we turn to individual writings, where these processes appear in their most embodied form.^104,105

Suzanne’s letters offer a particularly striking example: written under the pressure of an announced departure and in the absence of news from the outside, they acutely expose the tensions, struggles, and survival mechanisms made possible through correspondence. What emerges collectively in the corpus is here condensed into an intimate experience, offering a close-up view of a subject striving, through writing, to maintain a bond and resist psychic disintegration.

On reading Suzanne’s letters, we can identify with the sender’s state of expectation and anxiety, and the reader may find their own thinking muddled. The letters give the impression of a very strong condensation and an inevitability of which the subject is at times aware. Suzanne’s discourse oscillates between multiple, often contradictory registers. Expressions of hope, declarations of courage, reproaches, demands, moments of despair, and sudden admissions of helplessness coexist within the same textual space. These shifts testify to intense internal agitation and to the difficulty of maintaining a coherent narrative when confronted with an unnamed but omnipresent threat. Subtle shifts in revolt, varying degrees of emotional expression, moments of stupefaction and confusion all blend together in the same piece of writing, giving a heterogeneous character to the narration. Several recurring motifs structure the letters. Lexically, the letters oscillate between everyday practical vocabulary and moments of raw affective exposure. These terms often appear suddenly, without preparation, disrupting the utilitarian tone of the surrounding text.

The textual organisation of the letters is marked by the absence of structuring devices: there are no paragraphs, very few punctuation marks, and sentences often extend far beyond conventional syntactic boundaries. This uninterrupted flow seems dictated by the material constraints of the postcard, but it also conveys a sense of urgency and the impossibility of suspending the flow of thought (absence of pauses). Thoughts follow one another rapidly, without organisation, as if the act of writing were driven by the fear of interruption or the collapse of thought itself. Writing becomes a race against time, a last space in which something of the subject can still be deposited.

The syntax itself frequently verges on collapse. Clauses are juxtaposed rather than subordinated, and logical links are often implicit or missing altogether. This structure reflects a mode of thinking dominated by immediacy. At times, the reader encounters sudden shifts in topic, moving from the absence of parcels to instructions, from administrative details to existential despair, without transitional markers. These abrupt transitions are textual traces of an oscillation between practical survival concerns and overwhelming affect.

Temporal markers in the letters provide insight into the text’s dynamics. Suzanne repeatedly situates her writing in relation to an imminent future (“I am leaving on Monday morning,” “that will be for another day”) while simultaneously clinging to hypothetical projections (“I hope to see you again 1 day,” “I will come back soon”). The future is thus split between an anticipated catastrophe and a fantasised return. This temporal instability produces a fractured experience of time, in which the present moment is saturated by anticipation and dread, and the future oscillates between hope and annihilation.

The repeated use of imperatives concerning her son, reveal an effort to preserve her maternal function through delegation: “make him the little overcoat, I left the fabric in a big cardboard box.” Unable to protect her child, Suzanne entrusts these acts to others, attempting to sustain her role symbolically. The reference to the fabric left in a cardboard box to make a coat is particularly striking: the material object becomes a substitute container, a tangible extension of maternal care projected into the outside world. Suzanne returns again and again to the injustice of being separated from her child, framing it as something unimaginable (“I’d like to write more but I’ve run out of ideas at the thought that I’m going so far away from my little boy and from everyone” “I thought this only existed in novels”). This comparison to fiction underscores the surreal nature of her lived experience, as if reality had exceeded the bounds of representation.

The letters also bear the marks of psychic overload. At several points, Suzanne explicitly comments on her own mental state: “my head is not right,” “I feel completely numbed”. These meta-discursive moments signal a fragile awareness of psychic collapse. In one instance, the associative chain breaks abruptly: “I would like to write more, but I can no longer think, at the thought of leaving so far away…” The letter reflects on its own limits. Writing becomes reflexive, but this reflexivity does not lead to elaboration: it merely acknowledges a limit, a point at which thinking becomes impossible. The thought of separation overwhelms the capacity to think, producing a rupture. Similarly, the word affolé [panic-stricken], a word that has a common origin with folie [madness] appears almost isolated within the sentence, detached from its syntactic context, as if language itself were momentarily insufficient to contain the affect it seeks to express.

Hope and despair coexist in a precarious balance. The idea of reunion – frequently evoked functions as a temporary support. Suzanne imagines returning, working, reuniting with her family, even as the reality of deportation repeatedly intrudes and undermines these projections. This restores continuity, only to collapse under the weight of the real. Writing thus becomes the site of a constant oscillation between holding on and letting go.

Suzanne’s letters make it possible to observe subjectivity at the point where it is both most threatened and most insistently maintained. They expose a subject caught in the very movement of psychic confusion, attempting through writing to preserve a minimal continuity of thought, address and maternal position. The fragility of subjectivity appears here not as its disappearance, but as the form it takes under extreme pressure.

The disorder of the writing is therefore not merely formal. The absence of paragraphing, the scarcity of punctuation, the rapid accumulation of requests, fears, memories, and instructions all testify to a subject struggling to hold together what the situation is pulling apart. The letter becomes a space where psychic life is deposited before it can be fully organised. Suzanne writes in fragments because the experience itself is fragmenting. Yet the very act of writing prevents this fragmentation from becoming total. Even when thought falters, the address remains.

Suzanne’s subjectivity persists because the letter is directed towards others. Her words are gestures of relation. She asks, entrusts, instructs, begs, reproaches, hopes. Through these acts, she continues to occupy a place in relation to her child and to those who may care for him. The repeated imperatives concerning her son are particularly important. Unable to protect him physically, she attempts to continue mothering. The request to make him a coat from fabric left in a cardboard box transforms an ordinary object into a material relay of maternal care. The fabric becomes a fragile extension of her presence, a way of acting at a distance when direct action has become impossible.

In this sense, writing becomes a battleground for psychological survival. On one side, deportation, separation and uncertainty threaten to dissolve the coordinates of the self. On the other, the letter allows Suzanne to reassert, however precariously, a position: she remains a mother, a woman who remembers, hopes, organises, and addresses others. Her subjectivity survives not as inner coherence, but as relational insistence. Even when she writes that her head is no longer right, or that she can no longer think, the statement itself remains addressed. The collapse of thought is named to someone. This naming does not repair the rupture, but it prevents it from being entirely silent.

The coexistence of hope and despair further reveals this precarious form of subjectivity. Suzanne imagines return and reunion even as the reality of departure repeatedly breaks into the text. These projections are temporary psychic supports. They allow a future to be imagined at the very moment when the future is being destroyed. The letter thus holds together incompatible temporalities: the imminence of catastrophe and the possibility of return. Subjectivity appears in this unstable interval, in the effort to continue projecting oneself beyond the present without being able to believe fully in that projection.

What Suzanne’s letters show, then, is that subjectivity under extreme violence does not persist as stability, clarity or narrative mastery. It persists in fragile acts: addressing, asking, delegating, remembering, hoping, and attempting to organise what remains possible. The writing bears the marks of psychic overload, but it also constitutes a resistance to psychic erasure. At the limit of thought and language, Suzanne’s letters show a subject still struggling to remain in relation to her child, to her family, to a future, and to herself.

Discussion

The need for continuity and the maintenance of a self-narrative in this extreme context is based on the subject’s ability to relate to themselves, particularly through commitments such as promises, which demonstrate fidelity to the self, a “narrative identity” (Ricœur, 1990/1995), that is, the possibility for an individual to understand themselves by weaving a narrative that connects their experiences, emotions, and transformations.

Under extreme conditions, such as those imposed by internment and deportation, this addressed dimension grants the letter a particular status. It becomes a fragile yet concrete space of encounter, one of the few remaining sites where relational continuity can be maintained. Within this space, writing fulfils essential inner functions: it temporarily stabilises elements of subjectivity and preserves traces of the bond with the loved other, even as these ties are constantly threatened, weakened, or instrumentalised by the genocidal system. Although profoundly precarious, this process allows something of the subject’s psychic continuity to persist, enabling individuals to endure, for a moment longer, the violence of camp life.

Drawing on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s reflections on beauty, Fine (1986) emphasises the importance of considering the relationship to literature and to beauty within the camps: “memory of that beauty did indeed help to preserve and fortify the humanity of those sentenced to the subhuman existence of ‘the concentration camp universe” (p. 88). In our view, this function can be observed in the recollection of the familiar as it is expressed through the letters.

For Paul Ricœur, there is no subject without a narrative: the “I” is recreated and reconfigured with each utterance. The letters written by internees are precisely such places for the actualisation of the “I.” With each letter sent, through the habits evoked, the emotions expressed, the promises made, the hopes maintained or disappointed, and the familiar addresses, the subject carries out this work of self-refiguration. Writing thus becomes a means of preserving an inner continuity and maintaining a presence to oneself in a context where everything threatens to dissolve it.

From this perspective, the writings reveal themselves as a narrative, moments which, when assembled, provide access to a plural understanding of the experience of internment. Our analysis highlights internal states such as guilt, the attempt to bring order to the arbitrary, and feelings of betrayal, as well as strategies for inhabiting a space of confinement by paradoxically transforming it into a recognisable, almost familiar place. It also reveals forms of intellectual escape, where internees mobilise memory, literature, or the imagination to break through the oppression.

Through the alternating acts of waiting, writing, and receiving, correspondence establishes an internal and external rhythm, supporting thought and the ability to contain emotions that are ready to overflow. Waiting, here, is not passivity: it protects the subject from a collapse induced by the harshness of confinement.

Writing and waiting to receive thus become different facets of the same act of survival: writing to address, waiting to contain, receiving to repair oneself as much as possible. The rhythm established by correspondence provides a temporal and relational reference point. Even when disrupted or suspended, it reveals how much the letter, as an object of sensory encounter, was part of a shared experience. Correspondence is thus part of a collective movement in search of balance, a condition for psychic survival. In the camp, the letter becomes an act of collective resistance, supported by the group, a means of fighting against the dehumanisation. The position of waiting, of hoping for news on a piece of paper, is akin to maintaining contact with the other, both symbolic and sensory. It enables a fragile but essential capacity for endurance, preventing the subject from sinking into the void of thought to which the processes of dehumanisation. By waiting for a written trace of the other, the object link is maintained in their absence. When words falter, it is the very materiality of the act of writing that takes over, inscribing on paper a resistance to erasure. Writing and reading thus become a way of continuing to exist in the thoughts of the other.

By enabling the use of language in regular postal exchanges, letters establish a form of rhythm, of waiting and of maintaining familiarity. They thus become a way of inhabiting – une manière d’habiter – in the sense that Lefebvre (1970/2003) attributes to this term: a way of being in the world, both connected to others and rooted in the lived body, that is, in sensory experience. Even in the most extreme conditions, the human being seeks to inhabit the world, to create meaning and connection. Letters mobilise the familiar, maintain relationships with others, with language, culture, and community. They contribute to the creation of a rhythm, a cycle of exchanges and expectations that structures lived time and recreates a possible daily life, based on habits (Stock, 2004). In the camp, the repeated actions of writing, sending and receiving, as well as the evocation of old or new habits, establish a rhythm that marks the duration and gives shape to lived, inhabited – one could say, in-habited – time. ¹⁰⁶ These elements reintroduce reference points in the present, both in the content of the letters and in the temporal organisation of exchanges. Writing therefore allows the internees to inhabit their lives in a different way: through correspondence, they recreate a symbolic space where existence can still unfold, between memory, connection and creation. As Lefebvre writes, if we do not give human beings, as an offering and a gift, an opportunity to live poetically or to invent poetry, they will create it in their own way (Lefebvre, 1970/2003).

Goldberg (2017) shows how autobiographical writings produced during the Shoah bear the marks of a profound disruption of subjectivity. Traumatic experience, he argues, does not simply affect the content of what is narrated; it destabilises the very conditions of narration by fracturing narrative identity and disorganising the chronology of lived time. The subject is confronted with a kind of void in which even the reality of past experience becomes uncertain. Within this process, Goldberg identifies a shared anxiety among deportees: the fear of forgetting, or of losing one’s memories. He conceptualises this dynamic through the notion of “symbolic death” (2017, p. 249), referring to the erosion of the subject’s capacity to say “I,” to mobilise language, and to draw upon cultural and familial references.

Yet Goldberg’s analysis does not lead to the conclusion that subjectivity disappears entirely. Rather, he shows that certain forms of the “I” persist, albeit in altered and fragmented ways: the “I” that cries out in suffering, the “I” that questions, and the “I” that documents. “Ultimately, it is the act of narration that enables and even constitutes the emergence of the screaming/documenting/questioning I” (Goldberg, 2017, p. 256). These forms do not reconstruct a unified narrative identity or a coherent life story; instead, they emerge through the act of enunciation itself. What remains is not a narrative continuity, but what he calls “life-story fragments,” whose significance lies less in what they recount than in the fact that something is still being said.

Our analysis of the Drancy letters both confirms and extends this perspective. Like Goldberg, we observe that the external violence of persecution does not remain outside the subject but penetrates and overwhelms the inner world. The conditions of internment saturate temporality, disrupt thought, and weaken the subject’s capacity to sustain a coherent relation to self and to others. However, the letters suggest that this process is not without resistance. More specifically, they highlight the role of address in sustaining what remains of subjectivity. When writing is directed toward a loved other, it opens a fragile relational space in which the subject is not entirely reduced to the violence of the camp.

In this sense, the persistence of enunciation described by Goldberg appears here in a particular form: an addressed enunciation. Through the addressee, the writer can, however briefly, re-situate themselves within a symbolic and affective bond that exceeds the closed universe of the camp. This does not restore narrative identity, nor does it undo the process of disintegration. Rather, it allows for a provisional holding together, sometimes lasting no more than a few lines, sometimes only a few words. Suzanne’s letter offers a particularly striking illustration of this dynamic.

Our study suggests that the act of addressing another – especially a loved one – plays a central role in maintaining the fragmented forms of the “I.” It is through this outward-directed enunciation, anchored in the desire of the other, that a fragile continuity between past and present can still be articulated. Indeed, many internees continue to evoke shared memories, familiar habits, affectionate nicknames, and even projections into an uncertain future. What persists, then, is not a unified subject, but a relationally sustained subjectivity, momentarily reconstituted in and through the act of writing to another.

These personal narrative supports, ego-documents, ¹⁰⁷ can be understood not simply as testimonies of lived experience, but as situated practices through which subjectivity is actively produced and negotiated under conditions of extreme constraint. These writings reveal how subjects engage with and make sense of their lived world from a first-person perspective embedded in concrete nexuses of social practice. Rather than reflecting a pre-existing inner identity, such documents show subjectivity as an ongoing, situated trajectory shaped by participation, constraint, and relational engagement. These ego-documents inscribe the subject within broader socio-cultural and political processes, illustrating how psychological experience is both shaped by and contributes to historically situated forms of life.

In this sense, correspondence produced during the Shoah does not merely document events but constitutes a relational and material site in which subjectivity is enacted and sustained. Primo Levi’s reflection on the urgent “need to tell” underscores the intensity with which narrative becomes a vital practice: the act of writing, particularly in the form of letters, functions as a means of holding together a threatened sense of self by articulating experience in relation to others.

This process can be further understood through Couze Venn’s concept of narrative refiguration. In contexts of trauma, where identity is fragmented and the continuity of experience disrupted, the act of telling one’s story becomes both cathartic and transformative. Writing enables a retranscription of memory, through which the subject reworks a violent and disjointed experience into a meaningful narrative. In this sense, correspondence can be seen as a practice through which individuals move, however precariously, from a position of subalternity, marked by domination, dispossession, and voicelessness, towards a minimal form of agency, by re-emplotting their experience and reclaiming authorship over their own existence.

By recounting daily life and addressing an absent other, the writer constitutes themselves as a speaking and living subject, producing what Foucault describes as an “immediate and almost physical presence” through discourse. In this sense, the letter becomes a space where subjectivity is composed within, but also against, the forces that seek to annihilate it.

Finally, the fundamentally dialogic structure of letters reinforces their specificity among ego-documents. Correspondence is oriented towards another whose anticipated response shapes both the content and the form of the text. Unlike diaries or memoirs, letters are inherently relational, constituting a space of interaction where meaning and selfhood are co-constructed. In situations of extreme isolation, this addressed dimension takes on a quasi-material quality: the letter becomes a substitute for presence, a fragile yet vital thread maintaining the bond with others and with oneself.

These perspectives suggest that subjectivity, even under the most extreme conditions, does not disappear but persist in reconfigured and precarious forms. Through situated practices such as letter writing, individuals maintain a minimal yet significant relation to themselves and to others, demonstrating that subjectivity is not a fixed entity but a relational, historical, and processual achievement continually negotiated at the intersection of power, language, embodiment, and social practice.

Conclusion

The analyses we have conducted, which draw on a combination of methodologies, extend the existing work by delving deeper into the emotional, relational and identity dynamics perceptible in the texts. Rather than revisiting contextual data, our approach focuses on the lived experience as manifested in the letters: emotional nuances, forms of address, everyday perceptions and persistent attempts to preserve a continuity of the self despite the constraints.

The dialogue between historical knowledge and the analytical methods of psychology deepens our understanding of the letters. It allows us to go beyond the reconstruction of contextual elements (camp organisation, communication methods, material and political constraints) to show how, in this coercive setting, internees used writing to maintain connections, express their emotions, engage in symbolic resistance, and preserve an inner space. This work thus encourages us to consider the interplay between psychic and historical facts. The former unfolds in relation to the socio-historical context and take on meaning and effect by drawing on it. The lives of the individuals, down to the most intimate of their experiences, can thus be inscribed in it. At the same time, interest in subjective experience forces us to consider objects that have been little considered until now. Interest in self-narrative pushes us to no longer seek only to describe events and their causality, but also to consider events as they are experienced by individuals (Mazurel, 2023). Articulated in this way, these perspectives highlight the fact that these letters are not only documentary sources: they constitute acts of psychological resistance, testifying to the desire to remain a subject despite the dehumanisation at work. They reveal the efforts to think, love, hope, transmit, and continue to exist in an extreme context. In this respect, they may align with the function of art in the camps as described by Moou (2016), namely a function of “spiritual resistance,” although for our part, we prefer to speak of subjective resistance.

The main interest of our approach lies in the possibility of reading this corpus as a narrative of interiority, attentive to the modulations of expression and attempts to interpret reality. By bringing these nuances of expression to light, the analysis reveals the constant effort to remain human, to express oneself and to connect with others. It thus allows us to move from a history centred on the conditions of internment to a history of the interned subject, their inner resources, their fragility and their strategies for emotional survival.

By firmly linking the historical context to the subjective dynamics perceptible in the texts, this work helps to restore to the internees what internment sought to abolish: their inner freedom, their capacity for thought, their identity, their humanity. Finally, it opens up new perspectives for the study of writings in captivity, highlighting the value of these sources for understanding resistance, that inner mobilisation made possible by writing in situations of extreme constraint. This work also shows how a “maybe,” that of hope, remains present in the face of the inexorable certainty of death, which unfolds in an administrative dimension, coldly organised, and produces the relentless genocidal operation. In this respect, with Derrida (1993/2006), we can affirm that the letter allows us to keep alive the possibility of the à-venir [the “to-come”], ¹⁰⁸ as a manifestation of a form of freedom that is embodied in the unpredictable and inherent in the eternal potentiality of power.

Our study extends beyond a simple scientific contribution or a debt towards those who confronted with barbarism. It stems from a deeper necessity, an inner imperative arising from our engagement with the letters themselves: the need to articulate, insofar as we were able, what this encounter with the correspondence deposited within us. At times, we felt ourselves to be the recipients of these letters; at others, the intermediaries carrying their words towards future generations. We found ourselves in an almost constant search for legitimacy regarding the position we had chosen to occupy, within this historical aftermath and at the heart of one of France’s darkest zones of memory. It was a modest journey through time and through the camp, yet one whose echoes continue to resonate long after the reading has ended.