1. Charlotte Delbo was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French Resistance.
11 Facts About Charlotte Delbo
1. 2.
Charlotte Delbo was born in Vigneux-sur-Seine, Essonne near Paris in 1913, to Charles Delbo from the French department of Sarthe, and Ermini who moved from Italy to France at the age of 18-years.
3.
Charlotte Delbo gravitated toward theater and politics in her youth, joining the French Young Communist Women's League in 1932.
4.
Charlotte Delbo met and married George Dudach two years later.
5.
Charlotte Delbo could have waited to return when Philippe Petain, leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime, established special courts in 1941 to deal with members of the resistance.
6.
Charlotte Delbo was held in transit camps near Paris for the rest of the year; then on 23 January 1943 she and 229 other Frenchwomen, imprisoned for their resistance activities, were put on a train for the Auschwitz concentration camp, in what became known as Convoi des 31000.
7.
Charlotte Delbo wrote her major work, the trilogy published as Auschwitz and After in the years immediately after the war but held off on publishing the first part until 1965 to give the book the test of time, because of her fear that it would not do justice to the greatest tragedy humanity had known.
8.
Inga Clendinnen notes that Charlotte Delbo registered her "deepest subjective experience", the interior monologue, the terror and despair in violent moments in the camps.
9.
Charlotte Delbo's guiding principle was, as she regularly described it, Essayez de regarder.
10.
Feminists are showing an increasing interest in her work, though Charlotte Delbo did not identify herself as a feminist.
11.
Charlotte Delbo is one of the female French Resistance members in the book A Train in Winter by British biographer Caroline Moorehead, published in 2011.