Charlotte Delbo

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Charlotte Delbo (born August 10, 1913 ; died March 1, 1985 ; also Charlotte Dudach ) was a French artist and writer . Active in the French Resistance during the German occupation , she was deported to Auschwitz after her arrest and was imprisoned in Birkenau and Ravensbrück for two years . After her liberation in 1945, she processed her experiences as an Auschwitz survivor in various autobiographical stories and poems. Her best-known work is Trilogie - Auschwitz et après (published in German under the title Trilogie. Auschwitz and after ).

Life

Delbo was the eldest of four children of machine builder Charles Delbo and his wife Erménie Morero. She grew up in Vigneux-sur-Seine , not far from Paris , in a middle-class French family. She was drawn to the theater and political issues from an early age. After completing her Baccalauréat (Abitur), she began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne . In 1932 she joined the Jeunesse communiste , the League of Young French Communists. In 1934 she met the journalist Georges Dudach , whom she married in 1936.

During her studies, in the late 1930s, she interviewed the then very famous actor and theater director Louis Jouvet and published the interview in a student magazine. Jouvet then offered her a job as his assistant. Delbo accepted and dropped out. When the Wehrmacht occupied France in 1940 , they were in Buenos Aires with Jouvet .

When Philippe Pétain , leader of the Vichy regime , used special criminal procedures to try members of the Resistance in 1941 and one of their friends, a young architect named André Woog , was sentenced to death, Delbo returned to join the Resistance. Back home, she found that her husband, Georges Dudach, was already actively involved in the Resistance and acted as a courier for the internationally known poet Louis Aragon . The couple later joined the resistance group around the Marxist philosopher Georges Politzer , which among other things published the magazine Les Lettres Françaises from the underground .

Most of the members of this group were arrested on March 2, 1942, and Dudach, Politzer and the other men were executed shortly afterwards. Dudach was shot on May 23, 1942 after Delbo was given the opportunity to say goodbye to him. Delbo herself was taken to Santé prison, from there she was transferred to the fortress of Romainville on August 17th, and a few days later she was transferred to Fresnes.

Delbo was one of 49 women who survived deportation in the same transport. She died of lung cancer in 1985.

Detention and deportation

Delbo remained imprisoned in various French prisons (including Santè and Fresnes) for the rest of the year, before she and 229 other women from the 24th January 1943 transport - the last transport of non-Jewish political prisoners from France to this camp Romainville was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The transport arrived at the camp on January 27, 1943. When they arrived at the camp, the women sang the Marseillaise .

As a French national and a non-Jew, Delbo was classified as a political prisoner, a category that gave her some advantages over her compatriots of Jewish descent. Nor was she sentenced to death. Six months later she was assigned to a privileged work detachment in Raisko , a sub-camp that was known for its experimental farms and where living conditions were much better than in Birkenau. In 1944 she was deported to Ravensbrück. On April 23, 1945 she was able to leave the camp with the help of the Red Cross ( rescue operation of the White Buses ). It came back to France via Switzerland and Sweden. After 1945 she worked for the UN and the French Center for Science.

plant

Delbo later wrote about her experiences in Le convoi du 24 janvier . Immediately after her liberation, she wrote Aucun des nous ne reviendra , a fragmentary work located between narrative and prose poem, in which she attempted to testify to her camp experience “dans la palpitation du présent”. It would be another twenty years before it was published as part of the trilogy - Auschwitz et après . The second part, Une connaissance inutile , appeared in 1970, the third and final part, La mesure de nos jours , 1971.

Works

  • Trilogy. Auschwitz and after . Translation Eva Groepler, Elisabeth Thielicke. Afterword by Ulrike Kolb Fischer. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1993, ISBN 3-596-11086-6 .
  • Le convoi du 24 janvier . Les Editions de Minuit. 1965

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Charlotte Delbo on Chemins de Memoire, with a poem and photos, accessed April 2, 2018.
  2. ↑ On the edge of nothing , review of the trilogy in Die Zeit No. 48/1990.
personal data
SURNAME Delbo, Charlotte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dudach, Charlotte
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French artist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 10, 1913
DATE OF DEATH March 1, 1985