Michel del Castillo, a Franco-Spanish writer whose wrenching chronicle of a childhood spent in World War II concentration camps brought him renown on both sides of the Atlantic, died on Dec. 17 in Sens, a town in northern Burgundy. He was 91.
His death was widely reported in the French news media. No other details were immediately available.
Mr. del Castillo published dozens of novels, essays and works of autobiography in the four decades after his debut novel, “Tanguy,” appeared in 1957. (An English translation, “Child of Our Time,” was published in the U.S. and England the next year.) He went on to win several major French literary prizes.
But it was his first book, published when he was only 24, that made the most lasting impression. In 1958, reviewing it in The New York Times, the Holocaust scholar Richard Plant said it “begins where Anne Frank’s diary ended.” With its graphic account of privation, suffering and death in French and German concentration camps, Mr. Plant warned, it was “not meant for the squeamish.”
A lightly fictionalized story, it shocked reviewers and readers as a child’s-eye view of mid-20th-century Europe’s worst horrors — especially since the boy at the center of the story, Tanguy-del Castillo, had been abandoned by his feckless middle-class parents to face those horrors alone.
By the late 1950s, there had been other accounts of life in the concentration camps of Vichy France and Nazi Germany. But never before had the story been told from the perspective of a young boy who was not even in his teens when he was liberated.
The book was “a singular novelty: a painting of hell by a child whose physical and moral survival through these tortures is already miraculous,” Émile Henriot of the Académie Française wrote in a review for Le Monde in 1957.
The story came directly from Mr. del Castillo’s own experience. His father, a conservative French banker, had already abandoned the family when mother and child fled Spain for France in 1939, after Gen. Francisco Franco’s defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Mr. del Castillo later recalled that his first years were punctuated by the sound of bombs in besieged Madrid.
In France, Mr. del Castillo’s father denounced his wife, a journalist who had broadcast for the Republicans, to the French authorities. Like others in their situation, the young Michel and his mother were picked up and interned in Rieucros, a harsh French concentration camp in the mountainous Lozère region.
That was the beginning of Mr. del Castillo’s savage odyssey.
Some 2,000 women and their children, political refugees, were jammed into Rieucros, he recalled in a 1984 interview on the radio station France Culture; he remembered being cold, hungry and isolated. “I was hungry my whole childhood,” he said.
At the local school he was allowed to attend, the children made him “the scapegoat,” he said.
Worse was to come.
In “Tanguy,” Mr. del Castillo told of how, in the summer of 1942, his ill mother managed to escape from the camp after being hospitalized. She made plans to flee France, leaving her young son in the care of smugglers.
Mr. del Castillo described what happened next in the 1984 interview: “She felt obligated to leave me alone. I was 9 years old. I woke up, alone, in my room. The next five or six years, I have the impression of having been among the living dead. I was taken to Germany, stateless. There were millions of us. There were concentration camps. There were barracks. It was a kind of apocalyptic atmosphere.”
He continued: “It unfolded almost like a dream, because I stayed obsessed with the separation from my mother. I lived for only one thing: to find her again after the war.”
At the war’s end, he somehow made his way back to Spain, where he was almost immediately confined again — as the “son of a Communist” — in a harsh reform school where corporal punishment and hard labor were the norm. He escaped in 1949, and, thanks to a kindly police inspector in Madrid, he was sent to a Jesuit high school in Andalusia.
“It was an incredible liberation,” he said in 1984. “I have an enormous debt toward the Jesuits. They literally saved me.”
By then, he had discovered literature — in particular, Dostoyevsky’s “The House of the Dead.”
“It was a shock,” Mr. del Castillo said. “Everything that I was living that I didn’t understand suddenly became luminous. So I understood that in order to survive, I had to write.”
And that is what he did, for the next half-century. In 1950s Paris, his determination was further steeled by brief and unsatisfactory reunions with his parents, who were indifferent to him.
By 1959, Mr. del Castillo was an international celebrity. As the French writer and Nobel Prize winner François Mauriac, who appeared on television with him that year, put it: “He saw, with his child’s eye, evil. Evil in its most absolute form: the universe of the concentration camp.”
Michel Janicot del Castillo was born on Aug. 2, 1933, in Madrid, the son of Michel Georges Janicot, who worked at the Crédit Lyonnais banking office in Madrid, and Cándida Victoria Isabel del Castillo, a journalist.
After surviving the war, supported by his uncle, Stéphane Janicot, he earned a degree in literature from the Sorbonne.
A quick succession of novels followed “Tanguy” — including “La Guitare” in 1958, “Le Colleur d’Affiches” (“The Disinherited”) in 1959 and “Gerardo Laïn” (“The Seminarian”) in 1967 — although none achieved the acclaim of the first, and few were translated from the French.
He won the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s major literary honors, in 1981, for “La Nuit du Décret,” a police thriller that Robin Buss, reviewing it in The Times Literary Supplement of London, praised for its well-managed plot.” Mr. del Castillo also wrote highly regarded biographical studies of Francisco Franco and the French writer Colette.
Mr. del Castillo never married. Information about survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Henriot, in his Le Monde review, cited the philosophy of “Tanguy” in a quotation from the book:
“He didn’t believe in a world divided into two camps, he wanted nothing to do with hatred. Maybe he was a utopian. But he continued to love life and men with a savage desperation.”
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