French figure of the Resistance during the Second World War and woman of letters, this month we talk about Charlotte Delbo.
Charlotte Delbo was born on August 10, 1913, in Vigneux-sur-Seine (Seine-et-Oise, current Essonne). Of a family of Italian immigrants, she is the eldest of four. Bilingual shorthand typist in English, in the Paris of the 30s, she met Henri Lefebvre who introduced her to a group of young philosophers who reflected around Georges Politzer and Paul Nizan. At their side, Charlotte discovered Marxism and joined the Communist Youth in 1934, then, from 1936, the Union of Young Girls of France, created and directed by Danielle Casanova. On the benches of the workers' university, she met Georges Dudach (1914-1942), a fervent communist militant. They married on March 17, 1936. From 1937, on behalf of the communist newspaper "Les Cahiers de la Jeunesse" directed by Dudach, Charlotte did cultural freelancing. On this occasion, she interviewed Louis Jouvet.The latter offers him to come his assistant and hires him in the troupe of the theater of the Athénée that he directs. In particular, she is responsible for taking in steno and reconstructing the courses he gives to the students of the Conservatory.
In 1940, after the arrival of the Germans in Paris, the limits imposed on the troops by the occupiers became unbearable in Jouvet. So he decided to take the troupe on tour, first in Switzerland, then in Latin America. Charlotte accompanied the troupe but when the boss decided not to return to France, in September 1941, she refused to follow him and, alone, returned to France where she found Georges Dudach, who had gone into hiding. Attached to the Politzer network, he deals in particular with the technical aspects of publication of the clandestine journal La pensée libre. On behalf of the National Committee of Writers who will give birth to the French Letters, he is also the link with Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, refugees in the free zone. On her return from Latin America, Charlotte took her place in the network. It is officially responsible for listening to Radio London and Radio Moscow, typing leaflets and magazines. Actions that earned her, after the war, to be certified chief warrant officer under the French resistance.
On March 2, 1942, five policemen from the special brigades burst into their studio at 93 rue de la Faisanderie. They fall into a vast dragnet that decapitates the underground intellectual movement of the PCF. With them are arrested Georges and Maï Politzer, Danielle Casanova, Jacques Decour, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Marie-Elisa Nordmann and many others. After interrogations, Georges and Charlotte are transferred to Health. Dudach was sentenced to death on May 23, 1942, he was shot at Mont Valérien. On the morning of his execution, Charlotte can say goodbye. On August 24, Charlotte was transferred to Fort Romainville. On 20 January, 230 political deportees left for the Compiègne camp where, on the morning of 23 January, they boarded the train that took them to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
From January to August 1943, she saw her companions fall, one after the other. Charlotte survived the typhus epidemic that decimated them. She was sent to a subcamp in Birkenau, Rajsko, specializing in the cultivation and harvesting of kok-sagyz (a kind of dandelion from which sap was extracted to replace latex). With her companions, Charlotte staged Le malade imaginaire, reconstructed from memory. Shortly afterwards, in January, she was transferred to Ravensbrück. She remained there until her liberation by the International Red Cross on April 23, 1945. Of the 230 passengers in the January 24 Convoy, only 49 survived.
Back in Paris, Charlotte Delbo resumed her place alongside Jouvet.But, very tested, she does not have the strength to continue. At the beginning of 1946, she left, with great regret, Paris and her work to return to the clinic "Les Hortensias" in Mont sur Lausanne. His state of health is delicate because his heart is suffering from parcel myocarditis. During this period of enforced rest, she wrote None of Us Will Return, the account of the months spent in Auschwitz. Then she locks it in a drawer. After her convalescence, she resumed her work at the Athénée and then chose to leave it to join the UN which was being created. Recruited for her skills in shorthand and English, she was attached first to the Economic Commission and then to the Technical Services. In 1960, Charlotte Delbo left the UN to become the assistant of her old friend, Henri Lefebvre, at the CNRS. From then on, she joined his team until her retirement in 1978.
At the same time, she writes. In 1960, she published Les Belles Lettres, a collection of letters exchanged by opponents of the Algerian war. Then, in 1965, Éditions Gonthier published None of us will come back, the manuscript she had written in Switzerland twenty years earlier. It is the first volume of a trilogy, Auschwitz and After, which will be published in full by Editions de Minuit from 1970. She never stopped writing, publishing plays, poems, op-eds, stories testifying to her concentration camp experience. She becomes a great literary voice, inflexible on the fate of Man in the violence he faces.
Charlotte Delbo died of cancer on March 1, 1985. She is buried in the cemetery of Vigneux-Sur-Seine.
"For Charlotte Delbo, to testify was to say what haunted her memory"
François Veilhan
Claude-Alice Peyrottes stressed the importance of Charlotte Delbo's work: "We know that in the near future, the survivors, survivors of concentration and extermination camps will have disappeared. These women and men will no longer be there to tell us, to testify, to tell us the inconceivable experience that was theirs and those of their companions… Tirelessly, so that we know and do not forget, that we do not forget them, it is necessary, it will be necessary that in their turn the younger and subsequent generations take over their voices, their words, drawing on the works they will have left us as a legacy. This passing of the baton, already undertaken, will thus be able to perpetuate and maintain beyond their memory a state of awakening to the ever-present threats of inhumanity."
