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Slumbering in a drawer, a notebook of twenty drawings recounting life in the Alten Grabow prison camp was kept in a family home in Bénesse-lès-Dax, in the Landes.
In addition to this notebook, there were two small black coated canvas notebooks filled with diligent and careful writing.
These notebooks belonged to Henri Badetz (1893-1975) who recorded the story of his four years of captivity during the First World War. So many testimonies of a certain distress, but perhaps also a kind of fortune, in a war which was terrible.
Incorporated in Bayonne into the 49th Infantry Regiment, 11th Company, number 4356, wounded and a prisoner from the beginning, Henri Badetz experienced a particular war which spared him from experiencing the real daily "human butcheries" of the soldiers of 1914-18. This young man would spend the entire war in captivity, with two years in the prison camp of Alten Grabow, in Dornitz, near Magdeburg in Saxony, before he was sent as an agricultural worker to an estate run by a German woman who was a francophile and former student of the Sorbonne and the École des Chartes.
These touching drawings are all that remain of life in the camp, preserving both the freshness of an optimistic message and the memory of the collective nightmare of the prisoners, that of the years stolen by the vile war. Fortunately he lived a long time, while around him his brothers-in-arms, all gassed, died as a result of a war which had barely touched him and miraculously spared him.
These twenty drawings, accompanying short extracts chosen from the notebooks of Henri Badetz which describe life in the camps in meticulous detail and conciseness, constitute a moving testimony to the daily life of prisoners during the Great War.
These sheets reveal a true artistic talent. In their apparent naivety, in a manner which is reminiscent of the lines of a Pinchon (the inspired creator of Bécassine), Henri Badetz sets the moving scene for the theater of the prisoner.
• 17 x 22 cm
• 64 pages
• 30 illustrations
• ISBN: 978-2-91554-2677
Text in French only
YVES BADETZ est conservateur en chef du patrimoine au musée d’Orsay.
Il est l’auteur, aux Éditions Norma, de Maxime Old, Janette Laverrière, Marc Du Plantier.