Notebooks from wartime are what Marguerite Duras called the four densely written school notebooks that she kept for a long time in her legendary blue cabinet. The records from the years 1943 to 1949, marking the beginning of her writing career, possess a unique charm. Here, one can already find the central themes of her life and later works: childhood and youth in Indochina; the ambivalent relationship with her mother and her two brothers; the relationship with a Vietnamese man, which she later explores in her most famous novel, The Lover. Marguerite Duras documents the agonizing wait for her husband, Robert Antelme, who was interned in Buchenwald, recounting his return, their separation, her involvement in the Resistance, the death of her first child, and the birth of her son Jean.