Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After

Abstract

The essay focuses on Delbo’s three-volume autobiography, Auschwitz and After, which recounts Delbo’s ordeal in Auschwitz and her efforts to re-enter French society after her liberation. She was part of a convoy of 230 Frenchwomen, most of them arrested for political or resistance activity, who were deported to Auschwitz in January of 1943. With the exception of one or two who may have been Jewish or part-Jewish (though the Germans had no way of knowing this) they were not subject to selection upon arrival, nor were they ever constant candidates for the gas chamber, though a small number who proved too old or too ill to work suffered that fate. Delbo’s memoir offers a classic refutation of the myth of “gendered heroism” in Auschwitz, which argues that women, because of their greater social skills, were better able to survive than men in the camps. Although the Frenchwomen shared the same barracks, spoke the same language, for the first few months toiled in the same work details and devoted their energy to a system of determined mutual support, Delbo reports that after 73 days only 70 were still alive. The spirit of survival proved powerless against the real enemies in Auschwitz: the physical assaults on the body of dysentery, exhaustion, malnutrition and disease. Delbo’s narrative is not just one more version of the deathcamp ordeal. She was a literary artist who forged a unique style for conveying almost viscerally the bodily anguish suffered by the Auschwitz inmate, especially as experienced by women. After the war she wrote a volume called Convoy to Auschwitz: Women in the French Resistance, in which she supplied brief biographies of all but one of her 230 fellow deportees, describing the fate of those who did not return and the long-term debilitating impact on the health of many of those who did.