«The »silent years" constantly question

Les lettres romandes du mardi - Alexandre Wälti

When a sixty-one-year-old woman looks back on her twenties, specifically the years 1942-1943, she is also talking about Swiss history. When that woman is Yvette Z'Graggen, writer and journalist, then the exercise can still enrich public opinion today. If it exists, of course. The enrichment, on the other hand, comes at the end of the story. The silent years, is certain.

Read also: «Yvette Z'Graggen, a pioneering woman»

There is no question of a historian's work. This is neither the intention nor the pretension of this woman of letters, an emblematic literary figure of the twentieth century.^th century. Rather, it's a work of memory, an attempt to rediscover the intimacy of the time and to bring it into resonance with the concerns of a young woman geographically at the center of the conflict and physically isolated from the bloody events of the Second World War. An urgent desire to question the reader, to lead her to consider the less glorious episodes of Switzerland during a period of uncertainty.

Rigor, simplicity, while avoiding dryness. Say enough, but not too much. Find not only the right word, but the one that suggests it. Leave room for the reader's imagination, think of the reader and treat him or her as a partner. Conceive the story as a dialogue, not as that overly subjective monologue I used to lose myself in when I was nineteen.

Dark years

This starting point clarifies Yvette Z'Graggen's intentions. The silent years offers the reader a sincere, human immersion in a gray area of the Swiss Confederation. A constant back-and-forth between three different situations: the writer's present at the time of writing in the 1980s, her youth, which she evokes in a very free manner, and the perspective of a journalist trying to recover intimate and factual memories of the 1942-1943 period. The book also highlights a fundamental question: what information reached the interior of the country during the Second World War?

Yvette Z'Graggen has painstakingly scoured the archives of the late daily newspaper Switzerland and also drew on the questions posed by Zurich-born Alfred Häsler in his book Switzerland, land of asylum?. It should also be noted that she wrote her book «in reaction» to the film La Barque est pleine by Markus Imhoof. In it, the filmmaker describes the refoulement of thousands of Jews at Switzerland's borders. The writer parallels the articles in the newspaper, the observations in the book and her daily life at the time.

Read also: « Eldorado, from Giovanna to today's migrants».»

Despite my best efforts to put it out of my mind and move on, I couldn't let it rest. Once again, the war that had poisoned my youth was catching up with me, questioning me. I saw again Jozefa's gaze in the sinister Auschwitz corridor, the barriers of the border bridge being raised, all these events that had brushed past me without my being involved in any way. And in my mind, two questions were becoming increasingly clear:

«If I had wanted to, could I have been informed about what was happening to the Jews? Could I, if I had wanted to, have realized that Switzerland was carrying out refoulements, sending people to their deaths?»

To find out, there was only one way: to consult back issues of the newspaper I was reading at the time. Have the patience to go back through them one by one, pick out any articles and, if there were any, try to find out why I hadn't remembered them.

A book of love and reflection

In retrospect, Yvette Z'Graggen writes about the lightness of her bicycle rides across Switzerland, her refusal to accept social conventions, her almost guilty indifference to the «ladies of the Grand Hotel Brissago» - in reality Jewish refugees - during her vacations, the daily life of the young woman she was when all the border countries were embroiled in the global conflict and, finally, the discovery of love and carnal pleasure in a wartime context. In particular, she describes in greater detail two relationships she had with Germans, opting for the human rather than the uniform. She also dwells at length on the image of a Switzerland above suspicion, welcoming, in which she lived in peace.

Three points of view on the period in question are superimposed: that of the journalist, that of the writer and that of a woman. The whole forms a narrative somewhere between novel, memoir and essay. The reader is invariably questioned by the journalist's rigor and carried away by the novelist's breath. The emotional coexists easily with the factual, and the style is at times reminiscent of reportage while using the narrative codes of the novel.

A book - as you will no doubt have gathered - whose message still resonates today, even shouts out, and whose approach, despite the obvious change of era and context, is still thought-provoking. A slightly serious book. A book that revisits the carefree days of the past through the window of reason. Like a forgotten, rusty, dented youth swing that has stood the test of time, despite the tragedies, and is now back on its feet after a painful journey through the desert of oblivion. A book, finally, that demonstrates the poetic power of Yvette Z'Graggen's stories.

November is a month I love. Those big, gray, mist-laden clouds crossing the sky, trailing along the crest of the Jura, clinging to the trees from which the last leaves are peeking out. The pungent smell of the earth, this transfigured lake, transformed into a beautiful, angry Nordic sea... From all this emanates a melancholy that transforms, deep inside me, into a kind of exaltation, a state of poetry. It seems to me that I'm dying with nature, and that there's an exceptional intensity in these last moments. That everything I've known before is gathered there, within reach of my senses, all past sensations, even those of early childhood, reunited there, in these days that are slowly slipping into winter. Never like in November do I feel how much I love life, how worthwhile it is to try to catch it in the net of words, so that something remains of it, traces, like an echo of our footsteps.

It was during this month of November 1942 that the war turned, but we didn't know it yet. Italian troops arrived on the borders of the canton of Geneva. The free zone was wiped off the map. France's martyrdom had only just begun.

Write to the author : alexandre.waelti@leregardlibre.com

Photo credit: © Alexandre Wälti