On a wintry day in Bordeaux, France, I took refuge from the rain inside a cosy bookshop stacked to the ceiling with books. Place Gambetta, Bordeaux’s iconic square framed with majestic 18th-century limestone façades, was under construction. ‘It’s always like this,’ the owner told me with a disparaging glare. I was not sure if the comment was directed at the rain or the construction. Inside, I browsed the shelves, soaking in the titles one by one. A book cast among thousands caught my eye: La vie à en mourir: lettres de fusillés (2003). It contained farewell letters of those shot by Nazi firing squads during the German occupation of France in the Second World War.

I picked it up, opening the pages slowly and carefully as if I held in my hands a fragile treasure, like ‘this butterfly wing’ which the 19-year-old Robert Busillet, executed for his role in an intelligence-gathering and sabotage network, bequeathed to his mother ‘en souvenir de moi’, to remember him by. I flitted through the pages, reading flashes of a letter here, longer passages there. As someone who studies war, I am no stranger to the theme of killing and dying. But this experience was different.

Last letters are unlike any other type of writing I have ever encountered. They are of a singular ilk because they peer into the souls of those confronting imminent and inescapable death. Different from everyday letters, diaries, memoirs, political tracts or philosophical treatises, because of the urgency that shapes the act of writing. The authors know there will not be another chance to say what must be said.

Each last letter is uniquely personal, yet there is a universal feel to them, almost as if they paint a naked portrait of the human condition. To read them incarnates the phrase penned by Michel de Montaigne. ‘If I were a maker of books,’ he wrote in the 16th century, ‘I would make a register, with comments, of various deaths. He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.’

Dawn breaks on your final morn. A prison guard hands you a blank sheet of paper and a pen two hours before your execution by Nazi firing squad. The customs and traditions of the time – sometimes, but not always, respected by the Nazi authorities – permit the condemned a final act of communication: the last letter. To whom do you write? What do you say, knowing this is the last chance to say it?

It’s not just the heroic resistors whom the Nazis executed. One could be killed for far less. In the autumn of 1941, the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich – the military commander who controlled Paris – enacted the ‘hostage code’, whereby all those in a state of incarceration are considered to be political hostages. In the event of a ‘terrorist attack’ – an act of armed resistance against the occupier – these political hostages could be executed in reprisal. In other words, those arrested and imprisoned for, let’s say, writing or distributing illegal tracts and newspapers, protesting in the streets, or even listening to news from forbidden radio sources such as the BBC were, effectively, handed death sentences-in-waiting.

I’ve read hundreds of last letters, written by armed resistors and political hostages alike. One day, I sat down to catalogue the ways in which the soon-to-be executed communicated to their loved ones the macabre news. It was an uncomfortable, but deeply moving, task.

‘Be courageous, ma chérie. It is no doubt the last time that I write you. Today, I will have lived’

‘I can give no longer any further testimony of my affection than this letter,’ began Robert Beck, the head of an active terrorist organisation, according to the Gestapo. ‘Colvert will never again see his Plouf, nor his little Plumette. He is leaving for a big big journey,’ he added, softening the blow for his children.

Jacques Baudry, who had resisted the Nazis since his high-school days when he organised protests and marches, later participating in armed attacks against the occupiers, was rather blunter in his letter to his mother: ‘They are going to rip me from this life that you gave me and that I clung to so.’

Huynh Khuong An, a young high-school teacher arrested for possessing anti-fascist propaganda and related clandestine activities, was plucked from the cistern of political hostages one sunny October day. Writing to his lover, he implores: ‘Be courageous, ma chérie. It is no doubt the last time that I write you. Today, I will have lived.’ This turn of phrase, so simple grammatically speaking, is deceptively philosophical because it captures the interval that separates the writer from the reader, the one who will have lived from the one who lives on. Death was no longer on the horizon. The moment was decided, imminent and irrevocable.

To read the letters is to take a journey inward, deep into the world of emotions at the very frontier of living and dying. In one’s final moments, superficiality cuts away, revealing something meaningful and deep about the human condition. From Montaigne:

The last letters communicate what this something, at the bottom of the pot, is.

One of the most powerful theories to explain how humans face up to their own mortality was hypothesised by the American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying (1969). When an individual learns of their impending death, they navigate among five stages of grieving, trying to come to terms with their own mortality: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Kübler-Ross observed terminally ill patients with a limited time horizon. For those killed by the Nazis, that interval was often condensed to the time allotted to write a letter.

The last letters........

© Aeon