Anna Langfus (born Anna-Regina Szternfinkiel; 2 January 192012 May 1966) was a Polish-French author. She was also a

Holocaust survivor Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accep ...

. She won the

Prix Goncourt The Prix Goncourt (french: Le prix Goncourt, , ''The Goncourt Prize'') is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". The prize carries a symbolic reward o ...

for ''Les bagages de sable'' (translated as "Bags of Sand"), about a

concentration camp Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...

survivor.

Early life and career

Born Anna-Regina Szternfinkiel in

Lublin Lublin is the ninth-largest city in Poland and the second-largest city of historical Lesser Poland. It is the capital and the center of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 336,339 (December 2021). Lublin is the largest Polish city east of t ...

on 2 January 1920, she was the only child of Polish-Jewish parents.''Anna Langfus.''
Ośrodek Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN When she turned 17, she married Jakub Rajs, and they traveled to Belgium in 1938 to attend the Ecole Polytechnique de Verviers. They intended to become textile engineers so that they could manage her parents' factory. In 1939, they traveled back to Poland for a vacation, but soon it was occupied. The couple and their parents were forcibly sent to the

Lublin Ghetto , location = Lublin, German-occupied Poland , date = , incident_type = Imprisonment, forced labor, starvation, exile , perpetrators = , participants = , organizations = SS , camp = deportations to Belzec exter ...

and then the

Warsaw Ghetto The Warsaw Ghetto (german: Warschauer Ghetto, officially , "Jewish Residential District in Warsaw"; pl, getto warszawskie) was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. It was established in November 1940 by the G ...

. She escaped the Warsaw Ghetto with her husband, and they survived by using false identities, later joining the Polish Resistance. They were arrested and tortured by the

Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...

, who killed Jakub Rajs by gunshot. She was sent to multiple prisons and labor camps, while her parents were murdered in a

Nazi extermination camp Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...

. She was held at a political prison in Schröttersburg (Płock) until the country was liberated in March 1945. From 1946 to 1947, after moving to France, she was a mathematics teacher at a Jewish orphanage near Paris. After marrying Aron Langfus in January 1948, who graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

as an engineer, the two of them had a daughter, Maria, in 1948.

Literary career and death

Langfus took a course that influenced her to write plays for the theatre. She began to write in French during the 1950s, and her first play ''Les Lepreux'' (''The Lepers''), which was written in 1952 and performed in 1956, is unpublished. Langfus' novels are about the "war, destruction, and loss after the Holocaust" with her own life experiences interwoven into the fiction. Her 1960 novel ''Le Sel et le Soufre'' (''Salt and Suffering'') is about the war in Poland, the Lublin Ghetto being destroyed, and the main character's family being murdered. The novel's main character is Maria, a young woman who escapes with her husband. Maria's husband was murdered, and she later endures imprisonment and torture. The 1962 novel ''Les bagages de sable'' (''Bags of Sand''), a sequel to the 1960 novel, also has Maria as the main character. This novel won the

in 1962. In the novel, Maria travels from Paris to Poland so that she can "resurface", but she deals with much despair due to thoughts of her dead relatives. Langfus' third and final novel, ''Saute, Barbara'' (''Jump, Barbara''), was published in 1965 and follows a Polish man who escapes from Germany with an abducted girl that he names Barbara. Langfus used a male narrator in ''Saute, Barbara'' as an attempt to distance the novel from her personal life. Langfus died on 12 May 1966 from a stroke at the age of 46, while she was in the process of writing another novel. She died in

Sarcelles Sarcelles () is a commune in the northern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the centre of Paris. Sarcelles is a sub-prefecture of the Val-d'Oise department and the seat of the arrondissement of Sarcelles. In the south of the commun ...

, a suburb of Paris.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Langfus, Anna Prix Goncourt winners Jewish escapees from Nazi concentration camps 20th-century Polish Jews Lublin Ghetto inmates 1920 births 1966 deaths Home Army members Polish emigrants to France French schoolteachers