Charlotte Delbo
A Life Reclaimed
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
In 1943, Charlotte Delbo and 229 other women were deported to a station with no name, which they later learned was Auschwitz. Arrested for resisting the Nazi occupation of Paris, Delbo was sent to the camps, enduring both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück for twenty-seven months. There, she, her fellow deportees, and millions of others were subjected to slave labor and nearly succumbed to typhus, dysentery, and hunger. She sustained herself by reciting Molière and resolved to someday write a book about herself and her fellow deportees, a stunning work called None of Us Will Return. After the camps, Delbo devoted her life to the art of writing and the duty of witnessing, fiercely advocating for the power of the arts to testify against despotism and tyranny.
Ghislaine Dunant’s unforgettable biography of Delbo, La vie retrouvée (2016), captivated French readers and was awarded the Prix Femina. Now translated into English for the first time, Charlotte Delbo: A Life Reclaimed depicts Delbo’s lifelong battles as a working-class woman, as a survivor, as a leftist who broke from the Communist Party, and most of all, as a writer whose words compelled others to see.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dunant (Brazen) brings French Holocaust survivor and writer Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985) to life in this moving biography. Born in Paris, Delbo was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 for her resistance work. After her liberation in 1945, Delbo wrote extensively on what she went through in stories, poetry, and memoir. Most notable was her stark account None of Us Will Return, which was written months after her liberation but went unpublished for 20 years. Dunant closely analyzes Delbo's use of "deep memory" as she returned to her time in Auschwitz in various forms, and poignantly homes in on the attention to detail that marks Delbo's writing: the "pleated skirts" in which girls got off the trains to Auschwitz, the "white muslin curtains" in the camp. Later, Delbo's focus turned to the 1961 protests in Algeria: "Before then, no one... had written or published anything about the demonstration and its tragic outcome." Dunant's survey, while at times repetitive and challenging because of its persistent reexamination of trauma, nonetheless convincingly shows that Delbo's experience of horror led her to intensely analyze language. With a sharp eye, Dunant offers a perceptive look at a lesser-known literary figure.
