Auschwitz and After
Delbo's distinction between deep memory, which the body keeps, and the ordinary memory that can be spoken.
Today, I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain it is truthful.
Charlotte Delbo wrote three volumes about her deportation to Auschwitz and Ravensbruck as a member of the French Resistance: None of Us Will Return, Useless Knowledge, and The Measure of Our Days. She composed them in short vignettes, prose fragments, and verse, letting hunger, thirst, cold, and the bodies of the dead register as sensory shocks, not a story that resolves.
The trilogy sets two kinds of memory against each other. One holds the camp in the senses and the body, where it stays present and returns without warning; the other belongs to the person speaking now, who can place Auschwitz in the past and put it into ordinary words. Delbo shows the first breaking through the second, and the survivors of the third volume carrying the camp into lives that look resumed.
For a therapist, the work is a survivor's account of what clinical language later named traumatic memory and its persistence in the body, and of how far speech falls short of the event.
About the author
Charlotte Delbo
Charlotte Delbo (1913 to 1985) was a French writer and member of the Resistance. Before the war she worked as an assistant to the theatre director Louis Jouvet, traveling with his company. Arrested in 1942 for her Resistance activity, she was deported to Auschwitz in January 1943 and later held at Ravensbruck. She survived and devoted much of her later writing to bearing witness. She is best known for the trilogy Auschwitz and After, drawn from what she endured.
Details
- 1965
- French
- Yale University Press
- Yale University Press