Auschwitz and AfterIn March 1942, French police arrested Charlotte Delbo and her husband, the resistance leader Georges Dudach, as they were preparing to distribute anti-German leaflets in Paris. The French turned them over to the Gestapo, who imprisoned them. Dudach was executed by firing squad in May; Delbo remained in prison until January 1943, when she was deported to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbruck, where she remained until the end of the war. This book - Delbo's vignettes, poems and prose poems of life in the concentration camp and afterwards - is a literary memoir. It is a document by a female resistance leader, a non-Jew and a writer who transforms the experience of the Holocaust into prose. |
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able Alice alive arms arrival Auschwitz barbed wire believe Birkenau block 25 blows Bordeaux bread camp Carmen Charlotte Delbo cold column comrades count crematoria dead death Delbo deported diarrhea ditch door dress drink everything eyes face feel feet felt Flac front gas chamber German Gestapo hand hard head hear heart hold imagine kapo keep kissed knew Le Malade Imaginaire Le Misanthrope leave legs Lily lips living longer look Lulu Mama Marie-Louise marshes Mauthausen memory morning mother mouth move naked never night once Pierre prisoners pulled ranks Ravensbrück remember roll call Romainville shout silence sleep snow someone speak standing stay Stenia step stopped stream Sylviane tell things thirst thought tin cup took turn typhus Viva voice waiting walk wanted What's woman women wonder words
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Page v - The skin enfolding the memory of Auschwitz is tough. Even so it gives way at times, revealing all it contains. Over dreams the conscious will has no power. And in those dreams I see myself, yes, my own self such as I know I was: hardly able to stand on my feet, my throat tight, my heart beating wildly, frozen to the marrow, filthy, skin and bones; the suffering I feel is so unbearable, so identical to the pain endured there, that I feel it physically, I feel it throughout my whole body which becomes...
Page iii - Auschwitz is so deeply etched in my memory that I cannot forget one moment of it. — So you are living with Auschwitz? — No, I live next to it. Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory, an impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self.
Page iii - ... intact. No doubt, I am very fortunate in not recognizing myself in the self that was in Auschwitz. To return from there was so improbable that it seems to me I was never there at all. Unlike those whose life came to a halt as they crossed the threshold of return, who since that time survive as ghosts, I feel that the one who was in the camp is not me, is not the person who is here, facing you.