Fabien Lacombe, France, biography

Summary

Fabien Lacombe was born in 1921 in La Flèche, Sarthe, France. Between 1936 and 1938 Lacombe studied in Germany in the university towns of Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and Tübingen, where he soon became acquainted with the awakening National Socialism. In 1942 he was arrested in France by the Gestapo and on June 20, 1944 he was deported to Dachau (prisoner number 73,611). From there he was moved to the external camps of Kaufbeuren and Allach, where in April 1945 he was freed. After his return to his French homeland he worked as a journalist in France as well as in Israel, Egypt, Iraq, and Greece. He then lived in Paris until his death in 1993.

Lacombe was the author of the documentary work Kaufbeuren: Kommando de Dachau from which his poem “The Week” originates. He wrote this poem at Christmas 1944/45 in Kaufbeuren. In 1989 he described the conditions under which it was possible to write this poem: “The guards’ surveillance was less strict at Christmas, and I had already created the life of a symbolic week in my mind and retained it in my memory. I wrote at night on paper or on the wood of my bunk in Kaufbeuren in pencil, which I stole from a ‘master.’” In his documentary work, he also reports how the poem was finally “written down and preserved on a dirty, increasingly more folded piece of paper.”

Fabien Lacombe characterized the significance of poetry during the extreme conditions of camp reality as follows: “Poetry was for me and my companions a way of safeguarding my culture from the barbarity of the Nazis. It was for me also a testimony, which I wanted to pass on to those who would survive….” And about the time after liberation, he added: “I have always retained a love of poetry, which means the love for freedom, in all the countries I've visited as a journalist….”