Supported by SNCF, this publication by Éditions Créaphis, released in 2017, brings together the Journal d’un interné. Drancy 1942-1943 (« Diary of an internee. Drancy 1942-1943 ») and the drawings and prints of Georges Horan-Koiransky. Introduced and annotated by historian Benoît Pouvreau, it reproduces the artist’s typescript in full and sets his testimony alongside the history of the Drancy camp and, more broadly, that of the persecution and deportation of Jews in France.
The work of Georges Horan-Koiransky (1894-1986), born in Saint Petersburg and interned at the Drancy camp between 1942 and 1943, is an exceptional testimony to the persecution of Jews in France during the Second World War. Through his drawings, prints and diary, he offers a personal view of daily life in the camp and of the conditions of internment for those held there.
Created from his experience of internment, his drawings show the Drancy camp, its organisation, its buildings and the life of its internees. Published in 1947 under the title Drancy, seuil de l’enfer juif (« Drancy, threshold of the Jewish hell »), these prints are among the earliest graphic testimonies devoted to the camp. Their republication in 2017 makes it possible to rediscover this work and to set it alongside Georges Horan’s personal account.
In his diary, written and annotated in the weeks following his liberation, Georges Horan looks back on his experience of internment and describes precisely what he observed at Drancy. This account, unpublished for a long time, notably sheds light on the summer of 1942, a period marked by the intensification of arrests and deportations of the Jews of France, and a particularly important moment in the camp’s history.
Through this publication, texts and images speak to one another, bringing to light a rare body of work and preserving the memory of a site that has become one of the main sites of Holocaust memory in France.
Georges Horan-Koiransky, Journal d’un interné. Drancy 1942-1943, Éditions Créaphis, 2017, and Le Camp de Drancy, seuil de l’enfer juif. Dessins et estampes, 1942-1947, Créaphis/Ministère des Armées, 2017.
