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Charlotte Delbo From Women in European History

A wiki page by Denver Barrows

Based on Charlotte Delbo's autobiographical trilogy from: Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Print.

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Charlotte Delbo was a French writer known for her disturbing recollections of her time in Auschwitz retold in her three-part collection of prose and poems Auschwitz and After. Delbo’s recollections paint a haunting picture of life in Auschwitz and describe a story that few could even imagine. She represents a unique order of Auschwitz inmates because she was not detained because of her religion or race but rather her political opinion and her role in the resistance movement during World War II (specifically in France). Returning from horror proved almost as difficult for Delbo as living in it. She wrote the three parts of her novel, “None of Us Will Return,” “Useless Knowledge” and “The Measure of Our Days” in the years following her return from Auschwitz, however she waited nearly two decades to publish the first part because she felt it was impossible to convey the greatest atrocity in the history of humanity in her own simple, but profound words. Although Charlotte Delbo struggled to publish her life’s greatest work, she persevered past personal hardships and universal ignorance to offer humanity a piece of her life’s puzzle in the painted words of Auschwitz and After, asking that the future of humanity entrust themselves with the responsibility to never let these ungodly actions occur again. Delbo levels the field in Auschwitz and After, describing her time in a unique construct not confound through race, religion, or gender because to Delbo her experience was universal and it was humanity that suffered as a whole not just in Auschwitz, but also after.

Before the War

Charlotte Delbo’s early life was sparked by an interest in politics and theater that transformed her life. She was born near Paris in Vigneux-sur-Seine on 10 August 1913. In 1932 she joined the French Young Women’s Communist League, an organization focused on educating people on the ideas of communism and working to spread the idea throughout France. In 1934 she met and married George Dudach, who was also an active communist.

After their marriage, Delbo spent a short period as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, but left her studies to pursue her passion for theater becoming the administrative assistant of Louis Jouvet, a renowned French writer, director and producer. Delbo traveled with Jouvet throughout South America and she was in Buenos Aires, Argentina when, in 1940, France was invaded and subsequently occupied by German forces. Instead of waiting in Argentina with Jouvet for the war to end, Delbo decided to return to France in 1941.

After the German’s took control of France, Marshall Philippe Pétan was granted virtually unlimited powers by the National Assembly on 10 July 1940 and named President of the Council. Once he had gained this ultimate authority, Pétan established exclusive courts in 1941 to deal with members of the resistance and soon after one of Delbo’s close friends Andre Woog was put to death. She told Louis Jouvet that her reason for leaving was because she “can’t stand being safe while others are put to death. I won’t be able to look anyone in the eye.” And so she returned to France and rejoined her husband, who was already active, in the resistance movement.

French Resistance and Arrest

Upon arriving back in Paris, Delbo immediately got involved with the resistance movement doing all she could do denounce the Nazi regime that had not only taken over her country but moved to destroy an entire race. Much of her time was spent distributing anti-Nazi memos and pamphlets hoping to counteract the clouding of innocent minds by the Nazi propaganda and fear-instilling order. It is important to note that Delbo rose as a prominent female figure in the resistance movement and played a vital and unique role as a woman. Both Delbo and her husband became involved with Georges Politzer who was active communist; the French police arrested all three on 2 March 1942 on a charge of distributing anti-German leaflets in Paris. The French turned them over to the Gestapo, who imprisoned them. Her husband was killed on 23 May 1942 after saying goodbye to Delbo as she was shipped off to a transit camp in Paris.

Convoy to Auschwitz

On 24 January 1943, Charlotte Delbo and 230 other Frenchwomen, the majority of which were members of the resistance movement (very few were actually Jews), were put on a train from Compiegne to Auschwitz. Delbo recounts much of this journey in her novel, Convoy to Auschwitz, which is a collection of assembled stories of every one of her fellow inmates. It was initially published in 1965 as Le Convoi du janvier. Delbo recalls the somewhat superficial optimism of her fellow travelers as they wrote home.

"We took out paper and pencils out of our bags and wrote notes: ‘“Would that person who finds this be kind enough to notify _____ (blank) in _____ (blank) that her daughter’ _____ (blank) or ‘his wife’ or ‘her sister’ – ‘Christine’ or ‘Suzanne’ or ‘Marcelle’- has been deported to Germany. We are in good spirits. See you soon.’” Viva always ended with ‘I will return,’ underlined."

These women were faced with an unthinkable journey to an unimaginable place. They had only heard stories about the horrors of Auschwitz and now were preparing themselves to face this horror. This somewhat superficial claim to “good spirits” ads an interesting element to their story because it impresses upon their belief in the cause for resistance and imprisonment was not going to damper they way they felt about the actions of the Nazi regime.

Delbo recounts the first site of Auschwitz, “Turning off the road, we were suddenly faced with barbed wire and watch towers. Barbed wire white like sugar crystals, watch towers black against the snow.” Her convoy had her stories of the unpleasant nature of which they were headed and now at the first sight of the horror they would call home, there is an almost immediate transformation. Auschwitz inmates were forced to prepare themselves for an unimaginable struggle as soon as they entered because without any remote preparation they would have lost all sense of life immediately. Delbo’s convoy of women is very famous for the unique and noticeable entrance into Birkenau, the female side of Auschwitz, as they were singing “la Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France, demonstrating their pride and faith in the nation they could call home.

Stay in Auschwitz

Delbo’s first section of Auschwitz and After, “None of Us Will Return,” begins her journey into Auschwitz and describes many of the terrors she experiences when she is an inmate. As she departs she notes, “They had no idea you could take a train to Hell but since they were there they took their courage in their hands ready to face what’s coming.” Both Delbo and the other women in Auschwitz were not just facing Hell, they were living it; “only those who enter the camp find out what happen to the others” and these women were trying to avoid the possibility of becoming “the others” because their fate was death. Upon entering the camp, “All were marked on their arm with an indelible number. All were destined to die naked.” This branding was the inception of inhumane treatment. They walked in as human beings and within hours they were transformed into meaningless numbers treated like meaningless cattle destined for nothing more than death. Delbo’s stay in Auschwitz was characterized by this constant quest to avoid what was thought to be the inevitable: death. She retells the hours of standing, barefoot in the snow, as the SS would question whether any of them women could not endure the roll call. Any women who claimed that they could not stand the role call would be escorted to the infamous block 25, where they were sent to die.

Much of the struggle to survive was in finding the balance of surviving as an individual and surviving as one:

"We did not move. The will to struggle and endure, life itself, had taken immediate refuge in a shrunken part of our bodies, somewhere in the immediate periphery of our hearts. We stood there motionless, several thousand women speaking a variety of languages from all over, huddled together, heads bowed under the snow’s stinging blasts."

Delbo’s struggle to survive was not a fight fought alone. She fought as an individual to remain an individual, to retain a sense of remote autonomy, self-worth and being and she fought as a group to stay alive. Her struggle to balance this sense of individualism in a group points to the struggle faced by all inmates of Auschwitz. Above all else one could only depend on oneself however it was necessary to depend on others, it was impossible to survive without both of these elements presenting in an inmates life. In 1945 the Swedish chapter of the International Red Cross retained custody of Charlotte Delbo as well as many of the women who were fellow inmates in Auschwitz.

Gender Relations in Auschwitz

While Delbo provided most of her insight into the lives of women in Auschwitz, she discusses the lives of males in some accounts and distinguishes that, in the case of political prisoners, there was no distinction among men and women in the Holocaust. This is a rather interesting point because men and women were separated into different camps while at Auschwitz so even though she makes the distinction that men and women cannot be distinguished, they actually were. After World War II Delbo claims, “I must not be discussed as a woman writer. I am not a woman in my writing.” She told her friend Cynthia Haft that there was not “a distinctive female experience of the Holocaust” emphasizing “the camp system grants complete equality to men and women.” Much of the sociological research on the gender relations/treatments during the Holocaust reveals exactly what Delbo was saying all along: that treatment was universal and not distinguished to a certain sex, but a certain people. Sociologists and Holocaust scholars argue against any research on the treatment of different genders during the Holocaust because they would distract from the intent of the Nazis; it was not to conquer a gender but to conquer the Jewish religion/race. Delbo’s role in the Holocaust is rather different because the Nazis weren’t attempting to exterminate the race of resistance movement members; rather they were attempting to silence them. Even though the treatment of Jews and non-Jews resistance leaders was different in real life it was rather similar once they arrived in the death camps. Thus, the argument that gender treatment in Auschwitz didn’t provide a large-scale discrepancy can be applied to the case of Delbo.

After Aushwitz

After recovering, Delbo returned to France and was faced with another task: the task of reintegrating herself into a nation that had traded her to the enemies, a culture who she had lost a connection to and finding herself after a horror that had taken almost everything. Just as her native French had traded her to the enemies guiltlessly, they had watched the home of many of these death camp prisoners destroyed. Thus, it was difficult to find a home because so many had been lost during the wartime. Any of the homes that were left after the liberation of Paris were either government offices or allocated to those who had lost their homes during the war. Delbo recalls the terror in returning the home in which her sister, who had died in Auschwitz, was born.

"All was still in its place in the house. Dedee’s [her dead sister’s] things here and there, her room; all was as it had been before…all becoming menacing. I didn’t know how to avoid contact with all those objects that encircled, assailed, hit me. How to flee, how to dissolve myself, to no longer be held by the past, bumping into walls, things, memories?"

Even though it was difficult to live in a home she once shared with her sister it was even more difficult for her to create a home elsewhere, where there were no memories, good or bad. Even memories that haunted her were more meaningful than a life without memory. There was no way to create a clean slate upon which she could write a new life, so Delbo was forced to continuing living and simply add to her story, a story that for three years had been written for her. She began writing as soon as she regained her strength and she recalls it being rather easy her emotions just poured out in words.

None of Us Will Return

Delbo wrote the first volume of her trilogy "Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return)" with the hopes of connecting with a future generation. Even though she was one of the few survivors, Delbo explains the state of the prisoners in their Auschwitz world were “silence reigned.”

"I was standing amid my comrades and I think to myself that if I ever return and will want to explain the inexplainable, I shall say: “I was saying to myself: you must stay standing through roll call. You must get through one more day. It is because you got through today that you will return one day, if you ever return.” This is not so. Actually I did not say anything to myself. I thought of nothing. The will to resist was doubtlessly buried in some deep, hidden spring which is now broken, I will never know. And if the women who died had required those who returned to account for what had taken place, they would be unable to do so. I thought of nothing. I felt nothing. I was a skeleton of cold, with cold blowing through all the crevices in between a skeleton’s ribs."

As Delbo was writing she realized that this text was to make readers envision what universal concentration would be like, however this was impossible because it wasn’t like anything anyone had ever experienced before. “I hope that these texts will make the reoccurrence of this horror impossible. This is my dearest wish.” This first volume is a fusion of the camp experience felt by French female resistance fighters who had a heroic love for their motherland. After this first volume poured out so quickly, Delbo decided to put it away in a drawer, to re-read and polish at a later time. However, “None of Us Will Return” remained untouched in that drawer for nearly twenty years. While the text lay alone in a drawer, unread and unrecognized, Delbo continued her professional life as a sociologist with a research group first in Geneva and then back in Paris. She claims her mother was her best friend throughout this time and those few survivors became part of her family.

Back to Reality: Resuming "Normal Life"

The next two volumes, written twenty years after the first account for her struggle to return to the “normal life” she had once lived. But in returning to what once was, Delbo had to manage the extraordinary experience she had survived. Attempting to convey the evils of the Holocaust became a key portion of her return to life away from Auschwitz. In her work Delbo was not trying to elicit some sort of sympathy from those who had not experienced that atrocity of a concentration camp but for readers to “listen to the stories of those who have suffered evil” because too often they “fail[ed] to face suffering as suffering, fail[ed] to acknowledge the extremity of suffering as a result of evil action.”

Lasting Implications

Through her work Delbo leaves the world with a sense of the senseless. She points to the ever-present nature of evil but the necessity for the human race to never accept that evil must exist. True evil is such an unfamiliar image to most and thus it is even more disturbing. Delbo’s phenomenology of evil distorts any ideas we can garner about evil and shows that any knowledge we have on evil is limited and any knowledge one can gain about evil (through suffering evil itself) is useless.

One of her greatest contributions was her willingness to bridge two worlds separate from one another. Instead of isolating herself in a world that nobody could understand, Delbo attempted to explain the unexplainable so that the untouched world could not lose their connection with the sufferers and the sufferers could grow to tell their story and combat the future existence of such evil and suffering.

Delbo’s Auschwitz experience did not end there. After she faced and conquered many of the lasting imprints of her time in the death camp, working past the struggle to survive and gaining the will to move on, Delbo honored her compatriots, her fallen friends, who just as much kept her alive in Auschwitz as they did after.

Charlotte Delbo died in 1985 from lung cancer. She never remarried and was survived by one son.

Annotated Bibliography

(1) Abowitz, Deborah . "Bringing the Sociological into the Discussion: Teaching the Sociology of Genocide and the Holocaust." Teaching Sociology 30.1 (2002): 26-38.

This article examines many of the sociological concepts behind genocide specifically in the Holocaust. It analyzes the social constructs and "collective behavior" necessary for genocide to exist and proliferate in society. While this review is over fifty years after the Holocaust it provides a modern day picture of the circumstances needed for this horror; a horror that Charlotte Delbo depicts in Auschwitz and After. Delbo was a former philosophy student at the Sorbonne and throughout her text it becomes apparent that she has identified many of the variables present for the terror of the Holocaust.

(2) Auslander, Leora . "Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris." Journal of Contemporary History 40.2 (2005): 237-259. jstor. Web. 25 Apr. 2010.

This article address many of the issues that Jews were facing when they returned to Paris at the end of World War II. They were returning to a land they were supposed to call home, but it proved extremely difficult since this "home" had virtually sold them over to the enemy. They had lost their Parisian identity and were faced with the challenge of regaining not only that identity but a trust in their nation. While Charlotte Delbo was not a Jew, her time in the Auschwitz death camp was very similar to that of the Jews who were in the death camp. As the article depicts, Jews faced the issue of reintegrating themselves back into society and reconnecting with articles they had left behind when they were sent to the death camps. These were similar sentiments felt by Delbo. While the government did not ostracize her for her religion, she was ostracized for political opinion and belief in humanity. It took her 20 years to publish the first part of Auschwitz and After once it was ridden and this struggle demonstrates much of her battle to overcome the evils of World War II and touch the future with her words.

(3) Geddes, Jennifer. "Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust." Hypatia 18.1 (2003): 104-115. jstor. Web. 24 Apr. 2010.

Jennifer Geddes examines much of the evil present in the holocaust and the debate about evil. She recognizes the three divisions in scholarship on evil: (1) the division between the study of the perpetrator verse the study of the victim, (2) the debate over the intent or the effect of evil, and (3) theoretical and empirical studies on evil. This article centers much of its opinion of the victim’s emotions on Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After, specifically focusing on the metaphysical aspects of Delbo's text. "Delbo shows us, there are subtle ways in which we fail to listen to the stories of those who have suffered evil, fail to face suffering as suffering, fail to acknowledge the extremity of suffering undergone as a result of evil action." As it is noted, Delbo is speaking for the victim, attempting to picture the impossible to readers who have no idea of the horror she is speaking and the suffering she has faced.

(4) Lamont, Rosette. "The Triple Courage of Charlotte Delbo: A Place without a Name." The Massachusetts Review 41.4 (2000): 483-497. jstor. Web. 23 Apr. 2010.

In this article Rosette Lamont shares the details of her relationship with Charlotte Delbo and the insight she gained about Delbo's Aushwitz and After through their talks. Much of the article deals with both Delbo's intent for writing her book and the struggle she faced in writing it. Lamont recalls Delbo stating, "'I hope that these texts will make the recurrence of this horror impossible.'" Delbo was not just writing for the sake of her story but for the sake of humanity and its future on Earth. Lamont voices Delbo's personal struggle to overcome the scars of life in Auschwitz and entrust future generations with the responsibility of "carrying the word" that this horror could never happen again.

(5) Langer, Lawrence. "The Humanities of Testimony." Poetics Today 27.2 (2006): 297-309. jstor. Web. 24 Apr. 2010

In this article Lawrence Langer discuses the difficulties and struggles faced by survivors in conveying the truth of life in World War II death camps. Langer notes the difficulties in writing down the horrors that are truly alien to most audiences and tribulations faced in recurring those tragedies on paper. These are battles that Charlotte Delbo faced in writing Auschwitz and After. The lack of moral universe in the Holocaust leaves her to find meaning in mass chaos and destruction. Fortunately, and for selfless reasons, Delbo overcomes her personal demons and writes a telling story about life in Auschwitz.