Max Jacob dies in Drancy camp
A queer poet, friend of Picasso and Cocteau, dies in Drancy camp, shortly before deportation to Auschwitz.
On 5 March 1944, the French poet and painter Max Jacob dies in the Drancy transit camp near Paris. He is sixty-seven, weakened by pneumonia, and his name is already on the list for the next transport to Auschwitz.
Jacob was born in Brittany into a Jewish family. As a young man he moved to Paris, where in Montmartre he shared a room with the still unknown Pablo Picasso. He soon belonged to the inner circle of the avant-garde, a friend of Apollinaire, Modigliani and Jean Cocteau. His collection "Le Cornet à dés" (The Dice Cup) is still regarded as a milestone of the modern prose poem.
Jacob was homosexual. Among his friends he made little secret of it, but he was often at odds with himself about it. After a vision of Christ, he converted to Catholicism and hoped faith would help him rein in his desire. This contradiction accompanied him all his life.
He spent his last years in seclusion in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, near a Benedictine abbey. For the occupiers, despite his baptism, he remained a Jew. His siblings were deported and murdered. In February 1944, the Gestapo picked him up after early mass. Via the prison in Orléans, he was taken to Drancy.
His friends pulled every lever. Cocteau wrote a petition for clemency that reached the German embassy through intermediaries. But the hoped-for release came too late.
Max Jacob was persecuted not because of his homosexuality but because of his Jewish origins. His story nevertheless shows how many forms of exclusion could be concentrated in a single person. Shortly after his death, Paul Éluard spoke openly of a poet murdered by the Nazis. France later officially honoured him as a "poète mort pour la France" (poet who died for France).