Pierre Daix

Pierre Daix (born May 24, 1922 in Ivry-sur-Seine ; † November 2, 2014 ) was a French resistance fighter, journalist and writer . He was a friend of Pablo Picasso and the author of several works on Picasso and other artists. He also published articles and books about his experience as a communist and internee in the Mauthausen concentration camp .

Pierre Daix in the communist resistance

In 1939 Daix joined the Parti communiste français (PCF). In July 1940 he founded a secular student club of communist students, which served as a cover in the resistance. As a member of the communist resistance , he was arrested by the German occupation forces. He spent his time as a prisoner in Vichys, Fresnes and Clairvaux prisons . He was later transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp . Pierre Daix worked closely with the international underground organization of resistance fighters. He also saved the lives of many French in the resistance.

After the Liberation, he was appointed Head of Cabinet of the Ministry of Air, Armaments and Reconstruction by Communist Minister Charles Tillon .

Communist journalist after the war

After the Second World War he worked as a journalist. He wrote an article for Les Lettres françaises with the title "Pierre Daix, matriculation number 59807 in Mauthausen", in which he denied Soviet concentration camps and opposed the demand of the militant Trotskyist David Rousset for a committee to investigate the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union should judge. In 1950, Pierre Daix was the director of the communist daily Ce soir (“This Evening”), with a circulation between 80,000 and 100,000 copies.

In 1957, Pierre Daix published a letter to Maurice Nadeau in which he brought up the crimes of Stalin . He was editor-in-chief at "Les Lettres françaises" and from 1948 to 1972 he worked for Louis Aragon . In the 1950s he married Anne Villelaur, an employee of the "Lettres françaises". They divorced 13 years later. In 1963 he introduced A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn to French readers .

Break with the PCF

In 1974 he published the book “What I know about Solzhenitsyn” (Ce que je sais de Soljenitsyne) on the occasion of the publication of the “ Archipel Gulag ” and broke with the PCF after a disagreement with René Andrieu , the editor-in-chief of Humanité . In October 1978, in an article published in Le Point , "Hope has changed camp" (L'espoir a changé de camp) , he described how an earthquake would shake communism.

Prizes and awards

• 2012: Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor .

Web links

• Literature by and about Pierre Daix in the catalog of the German National Library