Charlotte Delbo - Auschwitz and After: Second Edition

Praise for Auschwitz and After

In this finely translated trilogy, Charlotte Delbo renders with economy and nuance pictures from the hell of Auschwitz. What she recalls in prose and verse would be unbearable except for the very precision of thought and sense she brings to it. No memoir of those times is more sensitive and less sentimental.

Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University

Charlotte Delbos harrowing text, beautifully written in varying poetic prose, takes the fusion of form and content on to another plane, depicting inferno where death is ever present.

Emma Klein, The Tablet

This powerful work should soon be both widely admired and read alongside other tragic narratives of the Holocaust.... One of the most important books to appear on the war.... The challenge of Auschwitz and After is this: to listen to the woman who is speaking, to hold the beauty of her words and the starkness of her images at once.

Elizabeth A. Houlding, Womens Review of Books

This poetry helps us touch the truth. It alone could communicate to us, make us feel the despair beyond all despair, martyrdom.

Francois Bott, Le Monde

Translated into English for the first time in its entirety.... Delbo brings a humanity to these familiar scenes of inhumanity through her vivid rendering of her comrades, and she eschews the philosophical musings of other Holocaust literature for an intimate account of daily life in the camps.... A profound testimonial.

Kirkus Reviews

Perhaps more than any other survivor memoir, this one captures the hell of the death camp.... Delbos works present paradox after paradox, embodying and echoing the incredible truths that define the Holocaust.

Myra Goldenberg, Feminist Studies

This trilogy uses fresh images and innovative stylistic techniques to force readers to confront the horrors of the concentration camps and of the Holocaust. The author breaks new ground in addressing the psychology of Holocaust survivors.

Richard Lachman, Multicultural Review

Finally translated into English, this unique memoir will be able to reach the larger audience that it deserves.

George Cohen, Booklist

Because Delbos work is such a poignant reminder of the horrors of the concentration camp experience and addresses survivors difficulties in postwar life, it would be an excellent choice for an undergraduate or graduate class on the Second World War. It should also be required reading for graduate courses on the Holocaust.

R. Wesley White, German Studies Review

This bookDelbos profoundly moving vignettes, poems, and prose poems of life in the concentration camps and afterwardis a memoir of great value.

Translation Review

Auschwitz and After

Charlotte Delbo

Second Edition

Translated by Rosette C. Lamont

With a New Introduction by Lawrence L. Langer

Published with assistance from the Charles A. Coffin Fund.
Frontispiece and cover photograph by Eric Schwab.

Copyright 1995 by Yale University.
Introduction to the Second Edition copyright 2014 by Lawrence L. Langer.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).

Designed by Deborah Dutton.
Set in Bembo type by Marathon Typography Service, Inc., Durham, North Carolina.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012945659
ISBN 978-0-300-19077-9 (pbk.)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Translating Charlotte Delbos trilogy proved to be a sublime duty. As I was working I recalled her impassioned tone as she explained that she had to transmit the knowledge she acquired in lunivers concentrationnaire. Je veux donner voir! she kept on repeating. She was referring to the moral obligation she felt to raise the past from its ashes, to carry the word (the title of one of her plays). One might call her entire uvre a literature of conscience. In French conscience would signify both conscience and consciousness. It is Delbos acute consciousness which makes her a privileged witness. However, to bring the word back requires a great deal of restraint. In order to bear and bare the unbearable, Charlotte struggled to render her style unobtrusive, almost transparent. Because she wrote from the extreme edge of being, she sought never to attract attention to the manner in which she expressed herself. How she said was important only because of what she had to say. The Holocaust experience, which she described as the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, spoke through her as its messenger.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my profound gratitude to two friends who made this work possible. My former student, Dr. Cynthia Haft, who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation under my direction at the CUNY Graduate School, introduced me to Charlotte in Paris. I recall thinking as soon as I saw this tall, proud, beautiful woman: She looks the way I envision Electra. Later I was to find out how important Jean Giraudouxs Electra, staged by her great master and friend, Louis Jouvet, was to her. In fact, the final poem of the trilogy, the one she entitles Envoi, refers directly to this play.

Charlottes close friend, the actress Claudine Riera Collet, Delbos literary executrix, facilitated all the transactions that led to this publication. She also provided the photograph for the frontispiece and showed me some important papers and documents. Although Claudine did not share the camp experience with Charlotte, they became close, loving friends. After Charlottes death from cancer, Claudine and I grieved together, and we also made plans to ensure that our friends message would reach future generations so that, as Charlotte kept on saying, such a horror would not happen again.

Nearly forty years after the end of World War II Genevive de Gaulle, niece of General Charles de Gaulle (leader of the Free French Forces in England), reflected on her experience as a member of the Resistance in France during the war, and on her deportation to the Ravensbrck concentration camp:

What we in the Resistance had not foreseennone of uswas the full implication of our commitment. We were aware that we could be arrested, that we could be tortured. That was not a reassuring perspective at all. You never know if you will resist under torture. I could never have predicted my response. You can stand up to some things but you have no idea of your limits. If one of my children or grandchildren had been tortured in front of me, I do not know what I would have done. That is how I feel today. It is terrible to have to contemplate such possibilities, but it was like that. Then there was death. We recognized that. Death was part of our Destiny.