An operetta in Ravensbrück

Challenge evil with laughter.

In 1943, Germaine Tillion, deported to Ravensbrück for acts of resistance, decided to continue the fight by resisting the destructive reality of this camp reserved for women. In an ultimate survival instinct, with her comrades, she writes there... an operetta. This unprecedented recourse to artistic creation, which moreover in one of its lightest and most playful forms, is a snub to totalitarianism and death.
The text stages a naturalist imbued with his person describing, during a conference of a cruel surrealism, this particular "species" of prisoners named "Verfügbar" refusing to participate in the Nazi war effort and for that assigned to the most arduous jobs.

A WORD FROM GERMAINE TILLION
"I wrote an operetta, a comic thing, because I think that laughter, even in the most tragic situations, is an invigorating element. You can laugh until the last minute."
Germaine Tillion 1907-2008. Ethnologist and French resistant entered the Pantheon in 2015.

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