Charlotte Delbo: Writing the Deportation

"When it comes to informing the world, journalists and historians will do it. As for me, I want to write a work that measures up to the paroxysm of history that is the catastrophe of Auschwitz: to represent what Auschwitz was, to write a form of tragedy in prose and poetry."

Charlotte Delbo's aim was to write what Auschwitz was, to write about what she and her companions experienced. What is utterly astonishing about her writing is the extreme lucidity of her gaze and the connection she sustains with the dying—to communicate the atrocity, she does not shield readers from the horror. Not once does she reject those who are already dying, who are living the horror, whose bodies are already half consumed by rats. We can sense her love for their humanity in her sentences and her empathy for what they endured. And there are the images she created to depict the sensations of what they experienced. For instance, to describe a roll call, those roll calls during which the wind gusted with such force on the Silesian plain that it penetrated their ribs, she writes: "Their lungs flap in the icy wind. Wash[ing] hung on a line."¹ One image, and we see, we feel, we understand. Or to evoke the few frozen trees in the "dissolving" white light of Auschwitz, that extremely pale winter daylight: "The trees gleam in their icy shrouds" (NUWR, 48). The images through which Charlotte Delbo depicts the landscape and the presence of death give us the same emotion that literature provides as art: a sense of beauty, an emotion that humanizes us as readers even as we confront what happened there. The catastrophe of Auschwitz severs us from our humanity. This is the power of Charlotte Delbo's work: the experience of reading her makes us intensely human, even as we hear her speak about the very thing that severs us from our humanity.

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Delbo gives an account of what she endured in writing these tableaux of Auschwitz, and her experience assisting Louis Jouvert several years before the war was certainly a fundamental factor. If he was the leading French director of the day, the "rediscoverer" of Molière, he also had that capacity to create what in theater is called "poetic illusion." In other words, he demonstrated that what theater talks about is not reality; instead, theater has the capacity to convey something essential about a human situation, a human experience, thanks to the work of mise-en-scène and the precise choice of a minimalist set design. Charlotte Delbo held onto that lesson when writing her tableaux. When depicting Auschwitz and writing the scene in which a truck appears—"one which ought to be used to carry gravel" (NUWR, 33)—in which dead women mixed with the living are being taken to the crematorium, because they are emptying Block 25, the bare heads of the living women "shrinking from dread," "small, shaven, boy-like, narrow heads, tightly squeezed against one another," "their mouths shouting," "cries we do not hear," "their hands waving in a mute cry," she is able to describe the terror of those being transported and the despair of those watching the scene.

"A silent truck sliding along the barbed wire like some careful ghost. A frieze of faces against the sky. … Each face is inscribed with such precision over the icy light, the blue of the sky, that it remains [marked] there for eternity" (NUWR, 34). Her evocative precision in rendering emotion conveys what she had learned from the care Jouvet took in honing the intensity of this tableau.

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In None of Us Will Return, there is something essential: the opening of the book, its first chapter. Charlotte Delbo did not choose to recount the arrival of her convoy, though it was a terrible moment for all of them. Much later, when the survivors were asked to talk about their deportation, they always evoked their first impressions on emerging from the cattle cars. But this is not what Charlotte...