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This year marks the centenary of the birth of the great French surrealist poet, Robert Desnos.

   Born in Paris on 4th July 1900, Desnos would encounter and become involved in some of the most important intellectual, artistic and political events of the first half of the 20th. century.

   As a young anarchist with a passion for literature, Desnos discovered Dada in 1919, and by the early 20’s he had begun to experiment with automatic writing and writing whilst under hypnosis. Renowned for his ability to fall into a trance at will and declaim poetry, Desnos was a natural born surrealist and in 1925 André Breton wrote, ‘Surrealism is the order of the day and Desnos is its prophet.’

   In the late 1920’s Desnos did not accompany many of his fellow surrealists into the French Communist Party. A strong individualist, Desnos began to forge his own way and was excluded from the surrealist group at the end of 1930. Involving himself with not only poetry but also journalism, film criticism, radio broadcasts amd a flirtation with psychoanalysis, Desnos nevertheless had time to commit himself publicly to left-wing causes. A fervent anti-fascist he worked notably on behalf of Republican Spain, writing amongst other things a cantata in memory of the murdered García Lorca, whom Desnos had met in 1935.

   Yet if, in life, Desnos met and was uplifted by much that is good, adventurous and idealistic in the human spirit, in his death in one of Hitler’s concentration camps, he was dragged through the gutter of all that is evil.

   At the outbreak of the Second World War Desnos enlisted, only to be taken prisoner of war after a humiliating 250 kilometre retreat on foot. Once released, he coolly decided upon the best ways of fighting the Nazi occupation, and in September 1940, he joined the staff of Aujourd’hui, a daily newspaper that attempted to speak as openly as possible under conditions of extreme censorship.

   Desnos wrote a regular column pointedly called Interlignes –Between the Lines – utilising the book review as a means of attack. Reviewing, for example, a book by the known communist Louis Aragon, he concluded: ‘Read it. You will see on which side you will find talent, honesty of thought and the French genius.’ The notoriously anti-semitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline was, however, mercilessly reviled, rebuked and ridiculed.

   Using a variety of aliases Desnos also worked with a number of clandestine periodicals, but he used more than his own pen in the struggle against the occupiers. As a journalist, Desnos was able to acquire a pass that allowed him access to the streets at night, which greatly facilitated his work for the Resistance in counter-espionage. A co-conspirator André Verdet recalled that, ‘it was thanks to Desnos that we obtained a detailed map of an important part of the German defence wall along the Channel coast.’

   Every day Robert Desnos courted danger. He had made serious enemies. Not only Céline, who had ominously written that Desnos’ literary criticism amounted to ‘Death of Céline! Long live the Jews!’ but also Pierre Pascal, editor of the pro-Nazi l’Appel, hated Desnos. Following Desnos’ scathing review of Pascal’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe, the enraged fascist denounced Desnos as an ‘anti-fascist, judaicised, communistic surrealist.’ The warning was clear. Robert Desnos was a marked man, and on 22nd February 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo.

   After a lengthy period of interrogation Desnos was one of 1,700 prisoners deported by train on 27th April, destination Auschwitz. In the middle of May the convoy was redirected to Buchenwald. With Desnos was his friend, André Verdet, who wrote: ‘I’ll never forget Robert Desnos consulting the lines of his palm, telling me with a smile, “the war will soon be over. There won’t be long to wait ...” Then, after a silence, suddenly grave, “Yes, I prefer not to contradict my star, even if it leads towards death”.’

   In early June 1944 Desnos was part of a group of 185 men sent to Flöha camp in Saxony, where they were put to work making parts for Messerschmitts. Fellow inmate Henri Pfihl remembered: ‘Flöha? A little town in Saxony, cheerful, full of flowers ... Having known the four crematoria of Auschwitz ... we thought that our poor lot was about to improve. Alas ... It was then that I met Robert Desnos ... I spoke to him several times and was struck by his great erudition and intelligence. The poet had travelled, read and, above all, observed a lot; his conversation was particularly interesting ...’

   The prisoners of Flöha had other reasons for admiring Desnos, Protesting against being sadistically deprived of his meagre rations, Desnos was brutally kicked and beaten. ‘We watched,’ says Pfihl, ‘anguished and powerless ...’ That afternoon Desnos refused to return to work. ‘That evening we learned that Desnos had received 25 lashes across his buttocks without a whimper of complaint.’

   But this was also the time when he was allowed to write to Youki, his beloved wife. ‘I’m happy to have a wife like you,’ he wrote on 4th June, ‘and friends that I can rely on.’ His letter of July 15th began: ‘Our suffering would be intolerable if we could not consider it as a passing sickness ...’ Camp rules determined that every letter be written in German, hence the pathos contained in the last of his four letters, dated 7th January 1945: ‘And for you ... the whole of my love which will arrive greatly chilled by the journey and translation.’

   Germany was losing the war. In the middle of April 1945, as allied troops approached, Flöha camp was evacuated. Many of the prisoners, debilitated by over-work and under-nourishment, could not endure the forced march into Czechoslovakia, and died either from exhaustion or the beatings inflicted by their exasperated guards. The remainder, Desnos among them, arrived at the camp in Terezin(Theresienstadt) on 8th May.

   There is a photograph of Desnos at Terezin, one of those haunting photographs that never lose the power to shock. A photograph of emaciated, shaven-headed prisoners in striped uniforms, existing barely this side of death. Desnos, whose appearance had once been so strikingly individual, is unrecognizable. Only the caption to the photograph picks him out for us. A year in the hands of the Nazi brutes had eventually deprived him of his individuality, plunging him into the terrorised anonymity of a beast of burden.

   Yet in Terezin Desnos was to experience a brief resurrection.

   After Germany’s capitulation in May 1945 the fortress and town of Terezin became transformed into an immense hospital. Those who had survived Hitler’s camp now had to struggle against disease: typhus, dysentry and tuberculosis were rife. Aléna Teresova, one of the Czech nurses who tended the sick, has left a brief but haunting memoir.

   ‘There were too few of us to tend to their needs and the work was neither simple nor easy. We began to forget that any other life existed except days and nights tending the sick with only a few hours sleep on a paper matress.

   ‘In a neighbouring barracks there was someone with a name that took Teresova back to the pre-war years. ‘ ... A certain Desnos who, when asked if he knew the French poet Robert Desnos, replied, “Yes! Yes! Robert Desnos, the French poet, it’s me! Me!”

   ‘Like the others Robert Desnos was emaciated, exhausted, his large eyes sunk deep in their sockets, his long beautiful hands already alien and dead on the blankets. But his eyes burned with something other than fever and his lips smiled with astonishment ... He expressed his joy at ceasing to be animal with a number and becoming Robert Desnos again, the poet ...

   'In the days that followed we did all that was in our power to ease his physical and mental sufferings ... One day I brought him a poor rose, a solitary witness to beauty ... He loved that flower ... '

   Although Desnos had no doubt that he would return to France, typhus proved too strong for him. He died at 5.30 on the morning of 8th June, 1945, less than a month short of his 45th birthday. That solitary rose brought by Teresova was cremated with him.

   A few months later the ashes of Robert Desnos were returned to France and interred in the cemetery of Montparnasse on October 24th 1945. There were speeches, obituaries, eulogies to be added to those he had earned during his life, but the last words, of course, remain with Robert Desnos himself, the poet.