Not on Bread Alone: Spiritual Resistance, Secular Communion, and the Shifting Boundaries of Community in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et Après

In New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton writes that “To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others, is absolutely necessary, if man is to remain human.” Yet, as the works of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel demonstrate, communion and dialogue were precisely what was forbidden in the “concentrationary universe,” where men survived on an ethics of complete selfishness. What strikes this reader of Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après, however, is the presence of dialogue, human words, listening ears. The intractable camp laws of anonymity, conformity, and self-absorption have given way to the reality of community which defines itself in the most remarkable ways and explains why and how the women imprisoned here survived together. A final section deals with the simultaneity of disaster and community and the difficulty of returning from an elsewhere that is unimaginable to others.