Ten days passed before the men were transferred to a prison camp in central France, where Benjamin gave lectures in exchange for Gauloises cigarettes. In a lean-to on the floor next to a staircase, he held editorial meetings for the purpose of establishing a literary journal. For Sahl, Benjamin’s stubborn commitment to the life of the mind—his belief that humanism could counter crimes against humanity—was its own kind of tragedy. “Never,” Sahl wrote, “have I been so conscious of the painful failure of a method, which in sympathetic unworldly innocence thought it possible to ‘change’ reality, but which remained only an interpretation, limping behind.”