Charlotte Delbo (1913-1985) was a communist activist, resistance fighter and writer. For the first two reasons, she was arrested in March 1942, along with her husband, by the special brigades of the French police.
In mourning for her lover, shot in May 1942, she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1943, before being transferred to Ravensbrück in 1944, from where she was finally liberated in April 1945. Literature, she would often say later, allowed her to survive.
Delbo is a powerful, incandescent, “dazzling” writer, as historian Annette Wieviorka would say of her, emphasizing the survivor’s ability to bear witness with force to “the violence she suffered” and with gentleness to “the tenderness that united her with her camp companions.”
Delbo’s main work is entitled Auschwitz and aftera trilogy published from 1965 to 1971 in which she recounts her experience in the concentration camp and that of her unfortunate fellow resistance fighters.
But Delbo is also a poet, she even believes that “only the language of poetry allows us to see and feel”, which is why she inserts poems into her stories, already written in striking prose. It is these scattered pieces that she brings together for the first time in a single book Prayer to the living to forgive them for being alive (Midnight, 2024, 160 pages).
In his essay Professors of Despair (Babel, 2005), Nancy Huston presents Delbo as a counter-example to the “singers of nothingness.” The survivor, she writes, bears witness to the worst of humanity, “by getting as close as possible to this reality that has surpassed the worst nightmares of the mad,” but she also knows, adds Huston, that “the truth of the extreme is not the truth of life” and that the violence of evil does not erase the possibility of love, as proven by the solidarity with her deported companions that allowed her to survive.
Delbo’s poems, written in a clear, luminous and piercing language, evoke all this: the love for the shot communist husband, the horror of the camps, the call for solidarity, the need to fight – against Nazism, obviously, but also against murderous communism in Poland and against the military dictatorship in Argentina – and the desire, despite everything, to live and find meaning in existence.
Professors of despair often conclude, from the existence of evil, that life is not worth living. “Charlotte Delbo,” Huston notes, “did not commit suicide. On the contrary, she lived with intensity and delight; it was for her a revenge against the Nazis who had wanted to deprive her of the beauty of the world.”
Delbo, however, is not always tender towards her readers, whom she often grabs by the throat, as in this poem from 1965: “You who have cried for two thousand years / one who has agonized for three days and three nights / what tears will you have / for those who have agonized / many more than three hundred nights and many / more than three hundred days […] They didn’t believe in resurrection into eternity / And they knew you wouldn’t cry.”
In Prayer to the living to forgive them for being alivehis best-known poem, Delbo first expresses the survivor’s resentment towards those whom fate has spared: “How can I forgive you for being alive… / You who pass by / well dressed with all these muscles / how can I forgive you / they are all dead.”
Yet she refuses to lock herself in resentment by following up with a plea that entrusts the living with the duty to live a life that has meaning: “I beg you / do something / learn a step / a dance / something that justifies you / that gives you the right / to be dressed in your skin and your hair / learn to walk and laugh / because it would be too stupid / in the end / for so many to die / and for you to live / without doing anything with your life.”
Delbo, inspired by her husband who died for the cause of social justice, never loses her taste for fighting. After seeing so much suffering, she writes that she knows that “nothing was too much in this struggle”. Her existential wounds as a deportee still inhabit her, but she does not give in and continues her quest: “Every man has the right to know / the why of things / the why of his work / his life / his misery / There is surely an explanation.”
Delbo’s only true faith, Nancy Huston and Tzvetan Todorov would write in turn, was in literature. In a letter to the great theatre man Louis Jouvet, whose secretary she had been before the tragedy, Delbo would say that it was the characters of Molière and Stendhal who, by accompanying her to the camps to console her, had preserved her from absolute despair.
“Literature can do a lot,” Todorov concluded in Literature in danger (Champs, 2014). Reading Delbo, I agree with him.