Charlotte Delbo

Delbo is one of the female French Resistance members in the book A Train in Winter by British biographer Caroline Moorehead, published in 2011.

A translation of Qui Rapportera Ces Paroles? (Who Will Carry the Word?) was completed by Dr. Cynthia Haft and appears in 'The Theatre of the Holocaust' edited by Robert Skloot and published in 1982 by the University of Wisconsin Press. A translation of the whole Auschwitz and After trilogy, by Rosette Lamont, was only published in the U.S. in 1995, ten years after the author's death.

A limited-edition English translation of Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return), translated by John Githens, was published in 1968 by Grove Press.

She wrote her major work, the trilogy published as Auschwitz and After ("None of Us Will Return", "Useless Knowledge" and "The Measure of Our Days,") in the years immediately after the war but held off on publishing the first part until 1965 to give the book the test of time, because of her fear that it would not do justice to the greatest tragedy humanity had known. The final volumes were published in 1970 and 1971.

During the 1960s, she worked for the United Nations and philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who had worked with Politzer before the war.

The women were in Auschwitz, first at Birkenau and later the Raisko satellite camp, for about a year before being sent to Ravensbrück and finally released to the custody of the Swedish chapter of the International Red Cross in 1945 as the war drew to a close. After recuperating, Delbo returned to France.

Dudach was shot on the morning of 23 May after being allowed to bid his wife farewell. Delbo was held in transit camps near Paris for the rest of the year; then on 23 January 1943 she and 229 other Frenchwomen, imprisoned for their resistance activities, were put on a train for the Auschwitz concentration camp, in what became known as Convoi des 31000. It was one of only a few convoys of non-Jewish prisoners from France to that camp (most were sent to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp or other camps for political prisoners) and the only convoy of women. Only 49 returned; she wrote about this experience later in Le convoi du 24 janvier (published in English as Convoy to Auschwitz).

On 2 March 1942, police followed a careless courier to their apartment, and arrested George and Charlotte. The courier was able to escape from a back window.

She could have waited to return when Philippe Pétain, leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime, established special courts in 1941 to deal with members of the resistance. One sentenced a friend of hers, a young architect named Andre Woog, to death. "I can't stand being safe while others are guillotined", she told Jouvet. "I won't be able to look anyone in the eye."

She gravitated toward theater and politics in her youth, joining the French Young Communist Women's League in 1932. She met and married George Dudach two years later. Later in the decade she went to work for actor and theatrical producer Louis Jouvet and was with his company in Buenos Aires when Wehrmacht forces invaded and occupied France in 1940.

Charlotte Delbo (10 August 1913 – 1 March 1985) was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French resistance.

Charlotte Delbo was born in Vigneux-sur-Seine, Essonne near Paris in 1913, to Charles Delbo from the French department of Sarthe, and Ermini (née Morero) who moved from Italy to France at the age of 18-years.