Skin and bones

by Georges Hyvernaud

A professor of literature at the ecole normale in Arras, Georges Hyvernaud (1902-1983) was called up at the start of World War II, and given the rank of lieutenant. He was captured with his unit in 1940. He was impounded in one Pomeranian oflag, then in another; finally, on January 20, 1945, he was released and together with other former prisoners made his way across northern Germany, on foot and in cattle cars. On his person, Hyvernaud carried notebooks filled with what shortly became La Peau et les Os, a narrative of his wartime experience. Excerpts were printed in the December 1946 issue of Sartre's Les Temps modernes. Roger Martin du Gard, in a letter sent to Hyvernaud a short while later, said that he could imagine no more hallucinating account of the moral degeneration of prisoners of war; in 1949, after the publication of the entire book, Hyvernaud received another letter, this one from Blaise Cendrars, who said that it had helped him "to understand the deep depression in which