“The Pain” was written in 1945, but is relevant to Israel, where 120 of its residents are kidnapped

Marguerite Diras was born in 1914 in Indochina, which was then a French colony. Her parents hoped to build their lives there but did not succeed. Her father returned to France and she was left with her struggling mother and brother. At the age of 15, Diras became the lover of a 32-year-old rich man who provided her with everything she lacked at home. She wrote about her poor childhood and the frequent violence she suffered from her family in the book “The Lover”, winner of the prestigious Goncourt prize. The book was adapted into an award-winning film.

Diras the girl left her family and moved to France. During World War II, she joined as a communist the “Resistance”, the French underground for the war against the Nazis, in which her husband Robert Antlem was also active. The Gestapo arrested him in June 1944 and he was sent to the camps, without knowing anything about his fate until the end of the war.

The book ‘The Pain’ (published by Maariv Library, 1987) is a collection of diary excerpts written by Diras during the waiting period, and at the center of it is the opening section ‘The Pain’. This part is a masterpiece of writing in a literary stream called “stream of consciousness”, which seeks to write everything that goes through one’s head without barriers, in continuous speech. She published the book only in 1986:

“I found this diary in two notebooks, in the blue cabinets in Beauval-la-Chateau. I don’t remember writing it at all. I know you did, that I wrote it, I know my handwriting and the details I’m telling, I see the place again, the train station Orsa, the travels, but I don’t see myself writing the diary…

Pain is one of the most important things in my life.”

Diras describes in her diary the emotional roller coaster that goes through those waiting for the missing, the moments of hope, the despair, the longing, the deceptive similarity between the description of the moment of return and the description of the most terrible of all.

The diary was written at the end of the war in April 1945, with the return of the prisoners and the missing to France, during the uncertain and unbearable waiting period. Diras spends these days between the sorting center for returnees, home, bed, and wandering the streets, all while frantically thinking about Rover’s fate:
“I go to the kitchen, drink water for the potatoes. I stay there. Leaning my forehead against the edge of the table, closing my eyes… the certainty came over me, the knowledge: he’s dead, he’s been dead for two weeks. It’s been fifteen nights, it’s been fifteen days, let it go to his soul in a ditch.”

While waiting, the news arrives about the atrocities of the Nazis:

“They are very many, the dead, really very many. Seven million Jews were exterminated, transported in cattle cars, then gassed to death in the gas chambers built especially for this purpose and then burned in the crematoria built for this purpose. In Paris they still do not talk about the Jews.”

Diras succeeds in her brave and uncompromising style in writing the terrible truth of those who wait, the helplessness of not knowing, thus becoming relevant to our time. Reading the diary and thinking about the abductees in Gaza turns our stomachs, but allows us a glimpse of the horror that the families of the abductees go through:

“The phone rang. The darkness wakes me up. I turn on the light. I see the alarm clock: half past five. Night. I hear: “Hello?… What?” It’s D, who is sleeping in the next room. I hear: “What are you saying? Yes, Rover L., it’s here.” Silence… I try to pry the phone from his hand, it’s hard, it’s impossible… D. lets go of the phone and tells me: “These are Rover’s friends, who came to Gumon.” She screams: “That’s not true. “… “They broke up two days ago, he was alive.” She no longer tries to pick up the phone. She’s on the floor, she fell.”

Reading the first part of the diary dealing with Antlem’s absence these days demands the presence of horror and not turning away from it. The second part of the diary describes Diras’ complex relationship with a Gestapo agent with whom she meets frequently, while hiding her membership in the underground. Her meetings with him were intended for espionage and were held in the heart of the “Gestapo scene”.

Diras was a playwright, screenwriter and director. The book contains fragments of short stories that she hoped to adapt for the stage. Her life was a saga of continuous suffering that led her to addiction to alcohol, but out of it she created immortal works. At the end of her life she lived with a guy 38 years younger than her, who fed her until the day she died.