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Charlotte DelboCharlotte Delbo, (August 10, 1913- March 1985), was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French resistance. Biography Born in Vigneux-sur-Seine near Paris, Delbo gravitated toward theater and politics in her youth, joining the French Young Communist Womens League in the early 1930s. Later in the decade she went to work for producer Louis Jouvet and was with his company in Buenos Aires when German forces invaded and occupied France in 1940. She could have waited out the war with him in Argentina, but decided to return when Petain, leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime, established special courts in 1941 to deal with members of the resistance. "I can't stand being safe while others are guillotined," she said. "I won't be able to look anyone in the eye." Accordingly she returned to Paris and her husband Georges Dudach, who was already active in the resistance. The couple spent much of that winter printing and distributing pamphlets and other anti-Nazi reading material. On March 2,1942, police followed a careless courier to their apartment, and arrested all three. Dudach was shot on the morning of May 23 after being allowed to bid his wife farewell. Delbo was held in transit camps near Paris for the rest of the year; then on January 23, 1943, she and 229 other Frenchwomen imprisoned for their resistance activities were put on a train for Auschwitz. Only 49 returned; she wrote about this experience later in Le convoi de 23 janvier (published in English as Convoy to Auschwitz). The women were in Auschwitz, first at Birkenau and later the Raisko satellite camp, for about a year before being sent to Ravensbrck and finally released to the custody of the Swedish chapter of the International Red Cross in 1945 as the war drew to a close. After recuperating, Delbo returned to France. She wrote her major work, the trilogy published as Auschwitz and After ("None of Us Will Return," "Useless Knowledge" and "The Measure of Our Days,") in the years immediately after the war but held off on publishing even the first part until 1965 for political reasons. The final volumes were published in 1970 and 1971. A limited-edition English translation of the first volume was published in 1968; a full translation of the whole work was only published in the U.S. in 1995, ten years after the author's death. She wrote a play, Who Will Carry the Word?, about her experience as well as some other works; remarried and had a son, and during the 1960s worked for the United Nations and philosopher Henri Lefevre. Work While little-known by most readers, within the Holocaust-literature community Delbo is widely respected and her work is beginning to be assigned as part of most college-level courses on the subject. This relative obscurity is partly due to her work only recently having appeared in English translation; also due to the fact that the Holocaust-literature canon has tended to focus on writers such as Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel who have been in print for far longer. But it is her technique that has been the biggest hurdle to overcome. Like Tadeusz Borowski, another non-Jew sent to Auschwitz for resistance activities, she chose a less comfortable way of relating her experience than the more straightforward narratives of Levi and Wiesel. Her guiding principle was, as she regularly described it, il faut donner voir, or roughly translated when it occurs as a refrain in her work, "Try to look. Just try and see." She knew that ordinary language could not begin to convey what she had experienced, and drew on her theatrical background and contemporary literary trends to produce a more postmodern text built around short vignettes, poems both titled and untitled and narrative fragments replete with repetition and sentence fragments that feel more like spoken word. In the last volume, dealing with the survivors' efforts to reintegrate themselves into everyday French life, many sections read like oral histories told by individual survivors, not all of whom knew Delbo in camp. The end result has the effect of conveying the violence done to reason and orderly language by the horror of Auschwitz. "O You Who Know," a poem early in the trilogy, challenges the reader with the inadequacy of what they already understand: -
- O you who know
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- Could you know that hunger makes the eyes sparkle?
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- While thirst makes them dim?
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- You who know
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- Could you know that you can see your mother dead
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- Without shedding a tear?
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- You who know
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- Could you know how in the morning you crave death
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- Only to fear it by evening?
"Horror cannot be circumscribed," she concludes, and throughout the trilogy she regularly expresses doubt as to whether she can truly tell the reader what it was like, whether anyone can. -
- You don't believe what we say
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- because
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- if what we say were true
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- we wouldn't be here to say it.
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- we'd have to explain
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- the inexplicable
"I am not sure that what I wrote is true," she wrote in the epigraph to the first volume, "I am certain that it is truthful." Resolving those two statements makes reading Auschwitz and After an advanced reading experience that more are slowly discovering. Delbo, CharlotteDelbo, CharlotteDelbo, CharlotteDelbo, Charlotte
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