The review n ° 69-70 Do you know Sonia Mossé?Also read "Transit": the word of migrants Newsletter

Almost no one around me knows who Sonia Mossé is. I bumped into her by chance. Meetings sometimes seem predestined. She died nearly eighty years ago. There is something about Sonia that resists oblivion and that makes her so alive.

One day in September, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, I went alone to see an exhibition on the artistic friendship between Derain, Balthus and Giacometti. Among the paintings and drawings, several letters are exhibited. One of them catches my eye. Written in purple ink, it is riddled with cigarette burns. A few Stars of David are scribbled on it. I read the date appearing in the header. May 14, 1939. It's my birthday and the start of the war. This is a letter from Antonin Artaud. It is addressed to a woman, Sonia Mosse. He writes :

“(…) You will live dead. You won't stop passing away and going down. (…) I put a death spell on you and it will act anyway whether you know about it or not. »

Fortunately Sonia will never read it. At this time, Artaud was interned in a psychiatric hospital and his doctors intercepted his mail. Now that I know her better, maybe she would have found it interesting, or at least surreal. Anyway, a prophecy of death surrounded by stars of David mixed with cigarette burns in 1939, it troubled me.

Next to Artaud’s funeral spell, I read an excerpt from a letter from Sonia Mossé addressed to Balthus’ wife. It dates from November 1942, in the middle of the war.

“(…) I miss my friends who are not here – here people absolutely think about nothing but food, only talk about keeping warm, etc. – thanks to Picasso, I burned my bed by putting the electric hair dryer in it – we've only been talking about that in the neighborhood for a few days… I'm currently at Chez Lipp – and I would very much like the door to open. opens – and from the green curtain that “veils” it you emerge – very naturally… (…)”

Who are you Sonia Mosse? I "google" you. Then on the screen of my iPhone appears this very famous photo of Man Ray multiplied in the form of several small black and white squares. A young blonde woman, mysterious, with fine features, Sonia holds Nusch Éluard close to her. She seems to protect her. We feel a form of maternal tenderness or perhaps love, the border is light. There is in her, as in Nusch, this air of melancholy which seems to know.

The photo has been on the cover of many books about Man Ray. Everyone knows this picture. At least unconsciously. Google then offers me the site of the Shoah Memorial. Sonia Mossé died in deportation to Sobibor in March 1943. She was about to be twenty-seven.

I then set about reconstructing the fragments of his life. I start my research on the Internet. I read everything I find. I see that an anonymous Internet user tried, in vain, to create a Wikipedia page for him. Inadmissible, not enough relevant criteria or dedicated sources.

I then came across the blog of a certain Med M. He wrote a short article about it. Maybe he knows more. I contact him. We exchange our phone numbers. I call him. Med is very suspicious. He asks me what I intend to do, what is my project. This is the first time I've asked myself this question. Why am I so captivated by Sonia Mossé?

I explain to Med that I am a director but that I have no particular intention for the moment. I can't explain this slightly obsessive curiosity. It's magnetic. I mention the pretext of the duty of memory.

Without identifying myself, I try to understand the attraction. I lived my twenties in the same places as Sonia. I frequented the same terraces. I felt as free as her. My mother and my stepfather stuck me in front of the ten hours of Shoah by Claude Lanzmann at the age of twelve. It was more important than doing my homework. Although we are devout lay people, I was baptized in the church – surely by imitation. At a very young age, I felt concerned by the Holocaust as if it affected us directly. I learned much later that my mother was "Jewish" on her father's side. Russians, they fled the pogroms and immigrated to France. My mother's last name is Jewish, but previous generations rejected our origins. Ultimately, it could have been me, it could have been you.

Med lives in Besançon. He is a retired professor of literature, a specialist in the 19^th century. We will spend hours on the phone talking about Sonia. Is it really her in this photo with Picasso, in this painting by Balthus? What is his relationship to women? Was she Artaud's lover? I exchange passionately with a complete stranger. We call her intimately "Sonia".

My research on the Internet quickly proved to be limited and Med, despite our common curiosity, did not tell me anything new.

I make an appointment in the reading room of the Mémorial de la Shoah, in the Marais. That day, due to absurd sanitary constraints, access to the wall of names was prohibited. I can not wait. I hide and seek his name among the seventy-six thousand other deportees from France. I can't believe the number of engraved names that begin with the letter M. Entire columns of M. "Sonia Mosse, 1897". They forgot the accent on the É de Mossé and his date of birth is wrong. She was born in 1917, not in 1897. When she arrived at the Drancy camp, she may have given a false date of birth or perhaps the camp administrator, while working on the assembly line, noted it incorrectly. It is this false date that was engraved in the stone of Jerusalem.

It is written everywhere that Sonia died at the Majdanek camp, but that is another mistake. She was arrested with her half-sister Esther Levine, at her home, at 104 rue du Bac in Paris by the French Police. They were then interned in the Drancy camp, then Beaune-la-Rolande and Drancy again. They are both part of convoy number 53 of March 25, 1943 which will take them to Sobibor. At Sobibor, there is no selection. They are immediately gassed upon arrival. In their convoy of 1,008 people, including 118 children, are the victims of the roundup in rue Sainte-Catherine in Lyon and in particular Simon Badinter, the father of Robert Badinter.

By carrying out research on the Geneanet site about Sonia's genealogy, I contact the "user" who seems to have created her profile. Laurence Meiffret, researcher and curator, has been researching for ten years the women who accompanied the life of Antonin Artaud. Sonia is of course one of them. We call each other. I feel a bit futile in contact with a woman who has so many years of painstaking research under her belt. Laurence shares everything she knows, everything she discovered I should say. We discuss the idea of ​​an exhibition and we decide to work together, united by our common passion for this forgotten artist. Laurence lives in the Vaucluse, stronghold of the Mossé family.

Sonia Mosse is Jewish. His father, Cerf Emmanuel Mossé, lawyer at the Court of Appeal of Paris, is from Orange in the Vaucluse. The Mossé are an old Jewish family from France. "Jews of the Pope", they lived in the Comtat Venaissin and in Avignon since the XIII^th century. Together with the Alsatian Jews, they formed for several centuries one of the only two Jewish communities authorized to live in what is now France. Sonia's mother, Natasha Goldfain, is from Vilnius in Lithuania. We know little about him. She immigrated to France with her first daughter, Esther Levine, whose Russian father died during the Great War.

Sonia has always been free and independent. Very eclectic, she sails between several artistic circles. Artist, designer and painter, she participated in the International Exhibition of Surrealism in 1938 organized by André Breton and Paul Éluard alongside Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Man Ray. She seems to be the only female artist in the middle of this circle of men. Each artist creates an original work from a window mannequin. Sonia's is very successful. A blonde and naked woman, very elegant, is covered with a piece of tulle. A large black beetle is placed on his mouth, as if to prevent him from expressing himself.

She undertakes the decoration of a cabaret-theatre, Le Capricorne, run by Agnès Capri, where Jacques Prévert, Erik Satie and their circle of intellectuals will regularly go.

This account has convinced me Massachusetts is a bottom-tier dive bar state. I hate that but I accept it—how would… https://t.co/wWP29CEYgI

— Will Gordon Fri May 21 02:31:44 +0000 2021

A model for Derain, Balthus and Giacometti, she is also regularly photographed by Man Ray, Dora Maar and Otto Wols. She also evolves in the theater world in creations by Jean-Louis Barrault or alongside Antonin Artaud. She is close to Paul and Nusch Éluard, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Signoret, Pablo Picasso, Claude Mauriac, Robert Desnos and many others. To earn a living, she also designs jewelry for Hermès.

During the war, Sonia continued to be free and active. A little too surely. She does not change her habits. She did not register as a Jew, refused to wear the yellow star and continued to frequent the terraces of the Café de Flore, the Coupole or at Lipp. She is not religious, some do not even know that she is Jewish.

She could easily have tried to flee to Switzerland thanks to her many friends in the Resistance, but she refused to leave to stay with her parents who remained in Paris. They will get out of it. Sonia would have been denounced but the archives do not reveal anything. On the other hand, it is indicated that the French police did not expect to find Esther, Sonia's sister, when she was arrested. Two jews for the price of one.

It is terrible to evoke the biography of an artist in such a laconic way. However, it needs to be addressed. We are beginning to get to know the life of Sonia Mossé better, but we find few of her works, of what she produced as an artist. There are a few drawings, a few photos of her plastic works by Raoul Ubac and Man Ray, two paintings and of course all the works, numerous, where she "poses" for famous artists. We are looking for the rest, there must be some.

It was undoubtedly at her home that most of her creations were to be found, but on the day of her arrest, her apartment was sealed and all her personal belongings sold, thrown away or scattered like all stolen Jewish property. .

In the archives of the Paris Police Prefecture, I found some interesting documents. In 1947, Sonia's father, Emmanuel Mossé, filed a complaint against X for collaboration, occupation of an apartment and thefts. Complaints that have been registered with the Court of Justice. No legal action has been taken in these two cases. In 1950, he then submitted a request for the attribution of the title of political deportee for his daughter to the Ministry of Veterans Affairs and Victims of War. An investigation is opened on the conditions of arrest of the "non-returned". This is how deportees who have not returned from the camps are appointed to the ministry.

A report is then established. In the archives of the Prefecture of Police, there are two versions of the report. The original and the official. On the original, the draft, several words are crossed out, I left them as they are in the extract below. These crossed out words disappear in the official, the proper.

“The two sisters were said to be painters. Mossé and his sister received many visits and were considered somewhat eccentric and romantic around them. They were not otherwise noticeable and the information gathered about them, from the political and national points of view, revealed nothing unfavorable. With regard to the deportation of Mosse Sonia in 1943, like that of her sister apprehended the same day, everything suggests that the person concerned was arrested on the orders of the Germans, because of her Jewish origin, which her entourage always had ignored it seems. »

The report then quotes the interrogation of Mrs. Georges Baron, concierge of the rue du Bac building: “In 1943, on a date that I cannot specify for you at present, two French police officers woke me up between 6 and 7 a.m. to find out which floor Miss Mossé's apartment was on. The police went alone to the apartment of the two sisters with whom they left some time later. They all returned to Miss Mossé's home during the afternoon. When I left, my tenant said goodbye to me, saying that she was not ready to come back. Subsequently, the seals were affixed to the door of the apartment, a formality which was followed a few days later by the removal of the furniture and the belongings of the two women. »

And it ends like this: "Finally, we reveal, on the daily report of the cases handled at the Police Station, in the Saint-thomas d'Aquin district (7^th), on February 11, 1943, the following information: At 8:15 p.m., on the orders of the occupying authorities; IVG Service, are kept in custody at the post to be sent to the Depot: 1) Mossé, Sonia, born August 27, 1917 in Paris, single, designer, living at 104 rue du Bac. 2) Levine, Esther, Lydia, born August 5 May 1906 in Petrograd, single, draftswoman, residing at 104 rue du Bac, taken to the post by the Inspectors of the Service of Jewish Affairs. »

Sonia and Esther were indeed arrested by the French Police, by the Permilleux brigade precisely. It can be read on the depot registers and deportation sheets from the camps. In 1943, popular opinion began to be indignant at the many roundups that had taken place in previous years. To perpetuate racial repression, commissioner Charles Permilleux shows relentlessness. Responsible for Jewish Affairs, attached to the Judicial Police, he is responsible for arresting Jews in violation of German ordinances. All excuses are good. On the Beaune-la-Rolande internment form for Sonia, we can read “Reason for internment: Arrested on 11.2.1943 in Paris by the French Police for an offence. »

One day, I received an email from an archivist at the Shoah Memorial. I had spoken with her to update Sonia's deportation sheet on their site. She tells me that she was contacted by the Ratton-Ladrière gallery located on quai Voltaire in Paris. They seek to know more about Sonia Mosse. She asks me if she can put us in contact since I am a "specialist" in the artist. Of course I accept. I chat with a young man who tells me that he has found a drawing by Sonia in the gallery’s “cellar” collections. It is currently on display. It must have belonged to Charles Ratton, a great collector and art dealer of the interwar period.

The gallery owner invites me to come and see him. We go there with beating hearts, with Laurence, the real “specialist”. He explains to us that the drawing was immediately bought and removed from the exhibition at the request of the buyers. He goes down to get it. This is a large drawing, very moving, which looks like a self-portrait, A3 size, in Indian ink. Located in the center, a woman closes her eyes, absorbed in her dreams. She is surrounded on her right by a very skinny man who looks like Antonin Artaud and, on her left, by a more withdrawn woman who looks at us. The gallery owner whispers to us, very proud, that it was the Center Pompidou that acquired it.

Thanks to the writings, we manage to recreate a small part of its history. How will we do in a hundred years to look for the fragments of a life on a saturated Cloud? A cloud which, in my opinion, will have imploded.

There are the letters she wrote to Balthus, Giacometti, Beauvoir or Artaud. There are the letters that talk about her, that quote her, some autobiographical testimonies and there is especially the last letter. The final fragment.

Laurence hears, through a friend in common, of a man who is interested in Sonia Mosse because he is in possession of "an important letter". The man and the letter remain a mystery for several months. He ended up agreeing to meet us. Michel Scognamillo, co-creator of the Métamorphoses bookstore in Saint-Germain-des-près, is an expert in books and manuscripts. He is accompanied by the historian and writer Pierre Boudrot. The library-gallery publishes books and regularly organizes exhibitions.

Minuit au cœur, Au cœur de midnight is a memorial to literature at war. A box put together by Paul Éluard which brings together volumes published under the occupation by Éditions de Minuit, of which he became the literary director in the summer of 1943. The set is enriched with unpublished original pieces.

In these personal documents is a letter from Sonia Mossé addressed to Paul Éluard, which she wrote from the Beaune-la-Rolande camp. The letter is dated March 18, 1943, a week before he left for the Sobibor extermination camp. It is difficult to describe the emotion one feels when reading it. It is tragic and full of hope. Sonia gives drawing lessons to the children of the camp, she also does the portraits of some internees. She shares the verses of a fellow poetess in the hope that Éluard publishes them. This letter transports us for a moment to her, in a surreal reality, on the threshold of the unknown of the great departure, of the concentration camp hell.

I may be wrong, but I still believe that Sonia would be more recognized today if she had been a man. In addition to being a victim of her “racial” origins, she was a victim of her gender. In the course of my research, I crossed paths with many other women artists of that time. Like Sonia, they were quickly considered a simple muse, model, or "woman of". I am thinking, for example, of Nusch Éluard, Jacqueline Lamba, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim, Charlotte Salomon. While some are better known today, they gained recognition very late. The review Obliques is the first work which lists in 1977 the literary and plastic production of surrealist women.

Sonia left too young to build a substantial artistic career, but her journey is all the more fascinating. We are working with the Métamorphoses bookshop on the design of an exhibition in order to revive his memory, his work. Perhaps you have a drawing, a letter, a photo of her to attach to the building?