Gitta Mallasz succinctly indicates at the end of the Dialogues with the Angel that Hanna - the voice of the Angels - and Lili died of exhaustion in a lead-laden carriage packed with seventy-five unfortunate women on an interminable journey from the north to the south of Germany, from Ravensbrück to Burgau. Sixteen days in February 1945, under the Allied bombs, hell for these women stripped of everything, shivering, their feet in excrement. Hanna and Lili had no graves, but a young woman was there to accompany them until their last breath: Eva Danos. To flee the Nazis, this young Hungarian hid in 1944 in the uniform factory of Katalin directed by Gitta Mallasz, attended some of the final dialogues, then voluntarily accompanied Hanna and Lili to the deportation camps and boarded the fateful train with them... The only survivor, Eva went through other camps and hospitals before convalescing in a German military hospital, where a Benedictine monk advised her to write down her experiences.
This story, originally written in Hungarian, was published in French on 12 January 2012 by Albin Michel under the title The last convoy. This is a unique document. As far as we know, there is no other record of what went on in these convoys, the ultimate instruments of Nazi torture, where the victims fought among themselves, thus becoming their own torturers. It is not an easy read, even if tiny gestures and words indicate that there was still some humanity in this merciless universe.

Sixty-seven years separate the writing of the book and its publication in French, almost the time of a lifetime. Resolutely positive after the war, Eva did not dwell on her past. She rebuilt her life in Australia after a stay in France, where, in order to bear witness to the cruelty of Nazism, she had her story published in a newspaper in the Haut Doubs region, Le Pontissalien. It was at her family's insistence that she took up the text again, translated it into English and published it on her own account at the end of the 1980s. Then Robert Hinshaw, international publisher of Dialogues with the angel, will publish it in English and in German and will write, in the afterword of the French edition, the portrait of this extraordinary woman.

Francoise Maupin

The last convoy by Eva Langley-Dános, foreword by Patrice van Eersel and Françoise Maupin, afterword by Robert Hinshaw, translation by Françoise Maupin. Editions Albin Michel (203 pages, €16).

A presentation of the book will take place on Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 7 p.m. at forum 104 (104 rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris), with the participation of:

• Françoise Maupin, translator of the book and co-author with Gitta Mallasz, from The Dialogues as I experienced them,
• Marguerite Kardos, President of Adda,
• Robert Hinshaw, editor of the English versions and Germans and author of an unpublished afterword on the life of Eva Danos,
• Patrice Van Eersel, author on La Source blanche, the astonishing story of the Dialogues with the Angel.