Auschwitz and After

"I chose this for several reasons. She was a quite remarkable female resistance fighter in France, who was transported to Auschwitz after having to witness the murder of her husband. (The men were shot; the women were taken to Auschwitz.) She was on a convoy of 230 women sent there. They entered the camp supposedly singing the Marseillaise . Of her original convoy, only 49 survived, and what I find fascinating about her account is the way she tries to convey the raw experience in little vignettes—based on her personal experience quite clearly, but in some cases trying to tell the stories of other women who were on the convoy with her, and trying to memorialize those who did not survive. She agonizingly conveys aspects of her experience to those of us who have had the fortune never to have experienced such things. For instance, the way she writes about the feeling of thirst, just the tiny vignette of wanting the drop of water from a tap, or risking a drink despite the possibility of being killed for taking it—it’s incredible. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That’s one aspect that I think is extraordinary and extremely powerful: this very raw experience, particularly in the first part of the trilogy, which she wrote very soon after the war. The other thing I find fascinating is the way in which she tries to develop a notion of two selves: the disassociation of her post-war self from the Auschwitz-self, a complete disconnect (or attempted disconnect) between the self who experienced and lived through Auschwitz, and the self who survived and was recounting it. That captures what a lot of survivors try to convey in one form or another: this complete caesura in their lives between what they went through and how they live later. Different people deal with it in different ways, and come to terms with it in different ways. One of the things I found difficult about choosing books that are still in print is that many don’t convey the experiences of those who never wrote—those who were much less successful, or less literate, or didn’t have the means or the wherewithal to publish. In some of the interview testimonies gathered by the different foundations that are collecting them, you get a similar sort of reflection, where some people say that the self that lived on afterwards is not their ‘real’ self. They have a sense that their ‘authentic self’ died with the family and the friends who perished in the Holocaust, and the person living later is someone completely different, though they may appear to be alive and have a new family and a new life and so on. I think Charlotte Delbo was particularly successful in the way that she negotiated that. Successful in the sense that she managed to make both selves authentic. I’ve heard survivors completely break down in interviews because they feel the present isn’t their real life. I think Delbo was more stable. But this leads to another thing which I think is important about this account: she wasn’t Jewish. She makes it very clear how dreadful it was even for non-Jewish prisoners, and yet registers that it was even worse for Jewish prisoners. The fact that she was a member of a resistance group allowed for a sense of community on returning after the war. They returned singing as well as having entered singing. They could sing, and this was not possible for other survivors. I think she’s in striking contrast to somebody like Gilbert Michlin, for example, who I write about in my book, who was a Jewish French prisoner deported from France to Auschwitz. When he returned to France, he had to keep the fact that he was Jewish quiet and pretend he was just French because the myth of resistance was so big in post-war France and there was still a festering antisemitism . So, his return to France was much more miserable than Delbo’s. “Many survivors have a sense that their ‘authentic self’ died with the family and the friends who perished in the Holocaust” The other person who I’d really want to contrast her experience with is Pierre Seel, who I also write about in my book. He was taken not to Auschwitz but to Schirmeck, and arrested because he was homosexual. After the war, homosexuals couldn’t talk about the reasons they’d been arrested and imprisoned. In the annexed area of Alsace, where Seel lived, the Nazis had introduced homophobic laws which were not immediately repealed after the war when De Gaulle repealed Nazi antisemitic legislation, so homosexuality was still a criminal offense. Even when it was decriminalized, Seel said he felt so ashamed about it. He couldn’t talk to his family, his friends. He tried to get married, and had children with his wife even though he was gay. He eventually became an alcoholic, had a total breakdown, got divorced and then finally came out and said he had to speak about it. Ghastly and heart-rending though Delbo’s experiences are—and I have to admit the first time I read the book I was just in tears; I couldn’t bear it—I think we have to recognize that there were other experiences too, experiences that were awful in a wide variety of ways. Indeed. Particularly in Eastern Europe where non-Jews had taken over the homes and possessions of Jews whom they assumed dead. It was a question of, ‘What? You’ve survived? We don’t want to see you!’—slamming the door in their faces and telling them to go away."