Charlotte Delbo (1913 – 1985) is a French woman of letters, Resistance fighter during the Second World War, who notably devoted a large part of her work to testifying to her experience in the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück camps. /strong>
Communist Youth
Born August 10, 1913 in Essonne (Île-de-France), daughter of a worker, Charlotte Delbo is the eldest of four children from a family of Italian immigrants. She did not pass the baccalaureate but took courses within the framework of the Workers' University, studying in particular philosophy and labor economics. She also received training as a secretary and learned English. Charlotte joined the Young Communists in 1932 and then, in 1936, the Union of Young Girls of France, a pacifist and anti-fascist movement founded by Danielle Casanova. In 1936, she married communist activist Georges Dudach, whom she met while attending the Workers' University.
In 1937, Charlotte began to write for Les Cahiers de la jeunesse, a communist newspaper for which she conducted an interview with actor and director Louis Jouvet. The latter then hired her as a personal secretary, instructing her in particular to transcribe his lessons. When the Second World War broke out, Louis Jouvet and his theater troupe left for South America on a propaganda tour for the Vichy government. Hesitantly, Charlotte accompanies him for a while. In 1941, she learned of the execution of one of her friends, arrested in possession of leaflets against Nazism. She then decides to return to France, against the advice of Louis Jouvet, and to join the Resistance with her husband.
the Politzer group
Charlotte Delbo and Georges are part of the Politzer group which is responsible for publishing the resistance newspaper Les Lettres françaises, a newspaper created in 1941 by Jacques Decour and Jean Paulhan, and in which Louis Aragon, François Mauriac, Edith Thomas and Raymond Queneau collaborate. Charlotte is in charge of typing printed materials, tracts and magazines, and listening to clandestine radio stations. The couple was arrested on March 2, 1942, along with many Communist Party intellectuals. Georges was shot in May, while Charlotte was imprisoned for some time in France. On January 24, 1943, she was part of a convoy of 230 women, French political deportees, including many Communists, sent to Auschwitz. Resistance fighter Danielle Casanova is also part of this convoy.
None of us will return
At Auschwitz, Charlotte Delbo decides, if she survives the camp, to write a book to testify to what she and her deportation companions experienced, a book whose title she chooses:None of us will return , from a verse by Guillaume Apollinaire . In order not to lose her footing, she spends a lot of time remembering poems and plays. Transferred to Ravensbrück in January 1944, she manages, thanks to these efforts of memory, to organize performances of plays. Charlotte was liberated by the Red Cross on April 23, 1945, and repatriated to France two months later.
After struggling for months with depression and suicidal thoughts, Charlotte embarks on the writing of None of us will return , a manuscript she writes in one go before she puts it away. She also started writing stories and poems about the deportation, which she sold to newspapers. She resumed her activity for a while with Louis Jouvet, then worked for the UN, then for the CNRS from 1961.
Charlotte takes a strong stand against the Algerian War, and denounces the torture used there. She expresses this opposition through the publication of a series of correspondence. In 1965, finally, twenty years after writing it, Charlotte sent the manuscript of None of us will return to a publisher. , which is published.
Charlotte Delbo died on March 1, 1985 in Paris.