Traverser la cendre

During the extermination, those who are now dead rose up, they wrote, buried their stories, hid the books: their resistance in the face of dehumanization. To stay alive. Through words.

After the extermination, it's up to the witness to speak. He must make their traces visible, unearth their words, confront History, tell the naked facts. He is the one who speaks for the absent, the dead, the inaudible, the refused, the invisible.

Addressing, beyond the Shoah, to all those massacred, Michel Simonot questions the role of the witness, far from any pathos, and invites the dead to take part for themselves in what is being enunciated in a poetic fiction that follows the narrative and the raw exposition of facts.