The ethnologist sometimes places himself in an “interfield”, exposes himself to the discomfort of texts, photographs, art works. What is the “truth” of these works? To answer this question the article examines short stories by Irène Nemirovsky, a Jew exiled in France and dead in a concentration camp. As a writer she works with the language and paradoxically will be forced into silence. Four of her short stories explore family secrets and raise the question of the autobiographical content in the fiction. They show how the style of writing accentuates the effects of this silence and how the literary work is pervaded by the psychical and social effects of the unsaid.