Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion were born within a few years of one another, on or near the threshold of World War I.1 Although their family backgrounds, social milieux, and cultural experiences were strikingly diverse, all three of them grew up during a succession of major upheavals that weighed heavily upon the lives of all Europeans. While the widespread carnage of the Great War no doubt loomed in the background of their earliest experiences, their formative years coincided with the painful reconstruction that unfolded so precariously throughout Europe during the war’s prolonged and troubled aftermath. They all witnessed the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, the Spanish Civil War, the ineffectual pacifism of a short-lived socialist regime in France, and the alarming harbingers of yet another world conflagration. Each came to maturity having been within the intellectual and cultural milieus of Paris or its suburbs prior to World War II. At the outset of the war, moreover, each woman committed herself to active participation in one or more of the major initiatives of widespread resistance that proliferated on many fronts as the scope of the conflict was expanding apace.
In this study I examine in depth the unique thematic dimensions and stylistic tendencies of each writer, comparing the textuality, temporality, and subjectivity of her major works, giving due attention not only to such “writerly” criteria as characters, situations, idioms, and imagery, but also to the role of gendered subjectivity and other features that distinguish her as a woman writing. Furthermore, one of my principal objectives is to consider how each writer’s prewar and wartime experiences helped her shape the nature and substance of her works in keeping with a profound, long-term commitment to what I have chosen to call “writing resistance.” That goal entailed the production of writings “against the grain,” so as to construct and maintain profoundly oppositional positions with regard to the “official” discourses of propaganda, defeatism, capitulation, and collaboration. Although their respective efforts to accomplish that objective are remarkably diverse, in general all three frequently reflect two major tendencies. On the one hand they offer vivid and often shocking accounts of misfortunes and tragedies of wartime based on their own eyewitness experiences. On the other hand, they create prismatic, frequently bizarre, or distorted reflections of myriad catastrophes by couching them in poetic registers that serve to defamiliarize their ultimately numbing redundance. In doing so, they paradoxically heighten their moral import and impact on the reader.
Since the end of World War II, many autobiographical testimonies and historical studies have documented the significant contributions of hundreds of courageous women who responded to the political crises of those dark years. While many of those accounts focus primarily or even exclusively on their public images and their notable, even heroic deeds, in this book I also devote considerable attention to these three writers’ subjective, and often quite intimate experiences as well as their reflections on the interface between their respective social roles as résistantes and their private lives. This broadened perspective affords important insights into the importance of their close personal contacts with intellectuals, political and moral leaders, and companions whose commitments to specific values and ideals inspired or influenced them to assume crucial roles in defending humanity against the atrocities of war. With these criteria in mind, I devote a separate chapter to each author.
Charlotte Delbo was a pioneer among French women who wrote about internment during the Holocaust. As a wartime political prisoner, she spent nearly three years in French prisons and at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps. Her writings are unquestionably influenced by these experiences. She transformed them according to her own distinctive style of poetry and prose which thereby offers fresh perspectives for the literary historian with regard to feminine writing and trauma in France following the Second World War.
Delbo was of Italian origin on both the maternal and paternal sides of her family. She was born to Charles Delbo, who was from the French department of Sarthe, and to her mother Ermini (née Morero) who immigrated to France at eighteen years of age from Torre Pellice, in the Piemonte region of northern Italy. Her parents married in 1911 and moved to Vigneux-sur-Seine with their four children: Charlotte (b.1913), Odette (b.1918), André (b.1922), and Daniel (b.1926).
Delbo’s works began to receive attention in the academic circles of higher education most notably in the United States in the 1970s. During that time Rosette Lamont, a specialist in French theater and professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Queens College of the University of New York, met Delbo while she was in France and established a rapport with her. Lamont was the first scholar to translate Delbo’s writings into English and was also likely the first professor to add Delbo’s name to a syllabus that contained a list of French women writers of the twentieth century. Also during the 1970s, renowned scholar of Holocaust studies and English Lawrence L. Langer, of Simmons College, was instrumental in recognizing the importance of Delbo’s contributions to the canon of Holocaust literature and how they related to the extermination of the Jews of Europe. He claimed that Delbo’s literary representations of Auschwitz are the most important that he had encountered. In his 1978 publication entitled The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature he discusses the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, and Delbo, even though he acknowledges that at that time few scholars were as yet aware of who she was.2 Like Lamont, Langer incorporated Delbo’s works into his courses in an effort to give them a prominent place in the emerging field of Holocaust studies. In 1980 Lamont arranged for Delbo to participate in academic conferences in the United States and funding for this was supported by the Ministère des Affaires étrangères [Ministry of Foreign Affairs]. Langer was also involved with this initiative and invited Delbo to participate in his seminar on Holocaust Studies.3 Thus, not until decades following the end of World War II and during the final years of Delbo’s life did her works begin to receive significant attention, and far beyond her native France.
Delbo’s political and intellectual pursuits first came to prominence in 1934, in the articles and journals she published in the Cahiers de la Jeunesse, a communist journal of the arts. It was during the 1930s that she joined the Parti communiste français (PCF) and studied Marxist theory between 1930 and 1934 during evening classes sponsored by an association of students of the Left led by noted philosopher, sociologist, and her lifelong friend, Henri Lefebvre.4 He unquestionably influenced Delbo’s intellectual interests both before and after the war and was a key male figure in her life, and to whom she referred as her “complice intellectuel” [intellectual partner in crime].5 During the 1960s the two reunited and collaborated on a more formal basis, while Lefebvre was working at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) prior to his appointment as professor of sociology at the Université de Paris X Nanterre from 1961 to 1965. After having had a postwar position as stenog...