I like photographers who don’t seem like it.
I like photographers who think before taking the photo and, essentially, after taking it.
One day, in Barcelona, ??the mother of the photographer Marc Javierre-Kohan gave him seven photos taken by his grandfather when the resistance drove the Third Reich out of his town, Enghien-les-Bains.
The combat took place on August 27, 1944, the day after Charles de Gaulle paraded through the Arc de Triomphe with Leclerc’s Second Armored Division: from the Champs-Élysées to halt at Enghien – just 15 kilometers north of the Arc de Triomphe – the last and desperate attempt by the Germans to reconquer Paris.
To touch the angel of memory, Marc took his camera in the summer and went to the village with the seven images. The story has a certain charm: in 1944, the grandfather photographed the remains of a battle fought 25 kilometers from the arms fair that in 2018 he would remove the net so as not to photograph the metal of future battles.
Dissecting the images archaeologically, Marc has discovered that the tank his grandfather photographed at 210 Route de Saint-Leu (today Avenue Leclerc) was a German Sturmgeschütz III Ausf G, destroyed among the Kommandantur’s communication cables. Which was eliminated by a Yankee-made Sherman TD M10 tank christened by its French crew with a sailboat name: Bourrasque (boisterous).
Marc has discovered that the owner of the tank destroyed by the battle at the intersection of the Rue Chesneaux with the Rue du Temple – another one of the photographs – was called Monsieur Calvet and that he died behind the lowered shutters of his i’m standing
Or that the tankers photographed in the Sherman M4A3 – registration number 95218 – had names. In the turret, all dressed up with his sunglasses, Lieutenant Morris-Albert de Montal. In the lower hatches were the driver Antoine and the assistant driver Morel. Inside were gunner Hainselin and loader Frebaut. The previous day they had fought another battle against German tanks and now they had to meet the American tanks to continue chasing the Nazis.
But it is in the last of the seven photographs, taken at the intersection of Rue Trousselle and Rue de la République, where the angel of memory loses its robe and becomes naked. There, next to the hairdressing salon, another Sherman – also named after a sailboat: Ouragan, hurricane – smashed another Nazi tank. His turret landed on the roof of a building. The dismembered bodies of the German soldiers ended up hanging from the trees, and the driver’s pieces were scattered over the scrap metal.
The hairdresser was destroyed by tanks from both sides. Eighty years later, there is no longer a trace of the armored head, but the hairdressing salon, with its rollers and wicks, is still open. In a war – I have noticed this with Marc Marginedas – beauty salons are one of the last things to fall, if they end up falling at all.
Marc Javierre-Kohan explains this return in a book of photographs, re-photographs and reflections that goes on sale today: 7 photos (publisher Carena). An introspection in which the most intense memory of the seven images is the silence of its author, Henri Kohan, the grandfather.
He disappeared at the beginning of the Nazi raids on Paris and was not heard from for more than two years, until shortly before his liberation. He never explained where he had been. “My grandmother didn’t recognize him when she opened the door and found him in front,” says Marc.
“They caught him on the subway. That’s all,” he said at home.
“The family never wanted to accept that they were Jewish”, adds Marc.
That’s all.
What is memory? It is that the main door of the hairdresser was boarded up after the war to erect a wall in recognition of Leclerc’s Second Armored Division.
Remember that the commemoration is not celebrated every year on the day of the liberation of Enghien, but on the first Sunday of September: the holidays, the pleasure, weigh more than the memory of the defeat, here, of the Third Reich.
“It’s a public ceremony without an audience,” Marc explains. “Cars pass by long”. The mayors of the region, with the tricolor band on their chests, sing La Marseillaise en el buit.
What is memory? It’s the hair salon that was there before the battle.
It is to get fantastic, or fantastic, where the German tankers flew dismembered through the air.
