June 8, 1945

Robert Desnos (July 4, 1900 to June 8, 1945) was a French poet. He was a surrealist, a friend of Breton, though that friendship apparently fell apart because Desnos objected to communism. This drawing of a cat was made to accompany a child's poem Desnos wrote for the children of some friends in 1932.

Later, Desnos worked for the French resistance, feeding them information, making false ID cards, that kind of thing. The German gestapo picked him up on February 22, 1944. He lived over a year, in several German run concentration camps. The stories told of him there are almost unbelievable, so I won't repeat them. As incredibly brave as he seems to have been, an illness he succumbed to killed him weeks after the liberation.