Auschwitz and After: Chapter by chapter summary, background and additional notes PDF

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Summary

****AUSCHWITZ AND AFTER BY CHARLOTTE DELBO ***

Auschwitz And After, book by Frech author Charlotte Delbo about her experiences as a prisioner in Auschwitz and her life after her liberation.
This is a summary chapter by chapter which includes relevant quotes, notes and background ...

Description

Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo 

Background

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Charlotte Delbo was born in Vigneux-sur-Seine, near Paris in 1913. During her youth she worked as an assistant to theatre impresario Louis Jouvet and went to South America in a tour with the company. The Germans occupied France in 1940 and, when she learned that the Gestapo had executed a close friend, she returned to France in November of 1941. She joined her husband, Gorges Dudach, who was part of the Resistance. In 1942 the French police arrested the couple in their flat where they edited and printed anti-German leaflets. The police turned Delbo and her husband to the Gestapo who arrested them. Dudach was executed. Delbo remained in prisons in France until the end of 1942. In January 1943 she was sent to Auschwitz in a convoy of 230 women. Most of them were involved in French Underground or anti-German political activity. A good number of them had strong ties with the communist party. Only 49 returned. Later she was transferred to Ravensbrück Jan. 1944 (via Raisko Jun. 43) Released to Red Cross and Sweden after liberation April 1945.

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 Auschwitz And After Trilogy:   

None of Us Will Return (Composed 1946, published 1965) (Birkenau) Useless Knowledge (move towards realist testimony) (1970) The Measure of Our Days (Ida section (1971))

Literary Form          

Brief sections of text – dialogues, prose like poetry, poetry as prose, drama, dream-like (see ‘Night’) Modernist poetics rare in survivor literature (Federman) Stream of Consciousness Multiple narrative voices Past and present tense Disrupted chronology Epiphany – hand like anemone Poetry for attentiveness Prose not enough ‘Just try and see’

‘Only the language of poetry enables one to make people see and feel’ (Delbo) Anaphora/Repetition  

Run--schnell--the gate--schnell--the plank--empty out the earth—schnell--barbed wire--schnell--the gate—schnell—run—apron—run– run run run schnell schnell schnell schnell schnell. A maniacal run (p.94) Chapter “Sunday” The SS walked by. He enjoyed setting his dog on them. This was the howling heard at night. Then silence. The roll call was over. It was the daytime silence. The women still alive went back. The dead remained in the snow. (p.19) Chapter “The Dummys”

1. None of us will return Arrivals, Departures Opening line: “People arrive. They look through the crowd of those who are waiting, those who await them. They kiss them and say the trip exhaust them.” p. 3 Delbo goes one describing a typical scene of people leaving and arriving to an unknown place, which is could be either a train station or an airport. She says there’s a café called arrivals and another one called departures. Then, she describes “another station.” But there’s a station where those who arrive are those who are leaving A station where those who arrive have never arrive, where those who have left never came back. Delbo describes the arrival in Auschwitz without mentioning the place directly or including too many details. People brought their valuable possessions to the journey, including their gold. “you do not leave your dearest possessions when you set out for far-distant lands (. . . ) They think they’ve arrived in hell but they don’t believe it. They arrive in an unknown, desolated, station preparing for the worst. Then, the guards start shouting to re-group by fives. The mothers take hold of their children. Women and children are made to go first, they are the most exhausted by the journey. They are in the centre of Europe but don’t know it. In a nameless station. Among the group of people there are boarding school girls dressed in their uniforms, intellectuals, doctors, architects and other professionals; people from multiple nationalities and people who had never travelled before. “Five by five they walk down the street of arrivals. It is actually the street of departures but no one knows it.” P. 7

A group of men, women and children is ordered to go inside a shower room and strip. A band is ordered to play Viennese waltzes every Sunday. The chimneys smoke all day, every night. “fed by this fuel dispatched from every part of Europe.” Final paragraph: “Only those who enter the camp find out what happened to the others. They cry at the thought of having parted from them at the station the day and officer ordered the young prisoners to line up separately. People are needed to drain the mashes and cover them with the other’s ashes. They tell themselves it would have been far better never to have entered, never to have found out.” P. 9 Notes: The chapter begins with the allusion of the airport and then introduces Auschwitz without mentioning directly. It’s written in an abstract way, without giving too many details, facts or dates. Delbo rather focuses in the emotions. Followed by 5 short poems.

Dialogue

Someone, possibly Delbo, encounters a French Jewish woman and asks her if she’s French. She says she is, and from Paris. There’s no “F” on her chest but a star. She’s been there for 16 days and the narrator 5 weeks. The girl ask her, begging, if the narrator thinks they can survive this and the narrator says that yes, that they got to try. The girl points at the narrator’s ragged jacket her own dirty and oversized clothes. She’s hopeless; she says is easier to throw herself at the barbed wire. The narrator tries to convince her otherwise but she isn’t so sure herself.

The Dummies The narrator/Delbo is on he tier with other seven women “a group of friends would separate”. The room is very low and they can fit there only sitting down, head low. They eat the soup that had been distributed. It’s murky but it’s hot and it is winter. There’s a barred window that looks out of block 25. There’s no view unless the door that leads to the camp is open. When the door is open the women are able to see naked corpses.

The yard is full of them. Naked. Stacked side by side. White, a bluish whiteness against the snow. Heads shaved, pubic hair straight and stiff. The corpses are frozen. White with brown toe nails. There is something ridiculous about these cocked up toes. Horrifyingly laughable. P17 Delbo remembers the past, when she was at the Boulevard de Courtais in Montlucon. She was waiting for her father when she saw a group of naked dummies being delivered. For the display window. Their nakedness startled her. I couldn’t take my eyes of them, embarrassed by their nakedness. (…) I had never imagined outside of the display window, without electricity to highlight their poses. To discover them thus made me as uneasy as seeing a dead person for the first time. Now the dummies are lying in the snow, bathed in a winter light which reminds me of the sunlight of the asphalt P. 18 Delbo says that these women were alive the day before and they were lined up for the roll call. They were selected by the SS seeing because they looked more ashen than the others, because they fainted at roll call, they were ill, they failed to run fast enough when they should have, or they were hungrier than the rest. Some of them had gone willingly, as if to commit suicide. Every 2 or 3 days trucks arrived to take the living to the gas chamber and the dead to the crematory. Seemingly these women are locked together in block 25 before being sentenced to die. They are seen begging for something to drink. End of fragment: I look too. I look at this corpse that moves but does not move me I’m a big girl now. I look at naked dummies without being afraid. P. 19 Notes: The end of the chapter suggests that the horrors in Auschwitz no longer surprise Delbo; she has become desensitised and accustomed to see the corpses. The Men In the morning and the evening Delbo’s group passes a group of men. The Jews wear civilian clothing with a red lead cross on their backs. So do the women. The rest wear the striped uniforms. They wear canvas foot-wraps with wooden soles that don’t stay on. The French women can’t imagine how do they manage to walk like that and they pity them. These men are made to march at the orders of the German guards. The French women are not ordered like that* Their appearance: deeply circled eyes, dilated pupils, gaunt faces. Swollen lips. Their eyes haunt the women.

They walk pass Delbo’s group and they start whispering that they’re French women, just to find out if there are any French men among them. None answers. Delbo’s group try to feed them with the extra bread they have. (Some women are so sick they can’t eat anything.) The men don’t react; they have no willpower. One morning, Delbo’s group carry the breads under their jacket and tossed them to the men. They fight for it and, when their done and the SS start shouting at them, they resume the march, without looking at the women. As soon as they were abreast with us, we took out our bread and tossed it to them. There was a mad scramble. They caught the bread, fighting over it, snatching pieces from one another. They had wolve’s eyes. Two of them rolled into the ditch with the bread that escaped from their grasp. We watched them fight and wept. The SS shouted, setting his dog on them. The colum reformed, resuming its march. Links. Zwei. Drei. They did not even turn their head in our direction. P 21.

Notes: The chapter exposes the degradation of men and also how they suffer physically, perhaps more than women, for being exposed to hard labour. This has not only affected their appearance but also their inner and mental conditions, reducing them to resigned people who no longer respond to the women.

Roll Call

During roll call (appell) prisoners would have to stand still, wearing very thin clothing, in all weathers and for hours on end. The block kapo would count the number of prisoners before reporting to the SS officer. If the number of prisoners appeared not to be correct, it would take hours until the SS officer finally made the numbers tally. Anyone unable to stand was taken away to his or her death. Roll calls were often used as a punishment to prisoners. This was especially the case with evening roll call, which often took much longer than the morning one. If a prisoner had not worked hard enough he or she would be punished; if a prisoner had attempted some form of resistance, he or she would be punished; if a prisoner tried to escape, he or she would be punished. Punishment usually meant death. This treatment was used to teach the other prisoners that it was pointless to resist. http://www.theholocaustexplained.org/ks3/the-final-solution/auschwitz-birkenau/roll-call-and-routines/#.WdguYtOGO1s

SS in black capes have walked past. They made a count. We are waiting still. We are waiting for days, the next day. Since the day before, the following day. Since the middle of the day, today. We wait.

Day is breaking. We await the day because one must wait for something. One does not live in expectation of death. One expects it. We have no expectations. We expect only what happens. Night because it follows day. Day because it follows night. We await the end of the roll call. p. 22 Delbo and her rank await for the roll call. They are standing longer than usual. An SS medic comes along and shouts for a translator. A woman named Marie Claude steps forward. He asks if there’s any woman who can’t endure roll call. Indeed, who can’t endure the roll call? Who can remain motionless for hours? In the middle of the night. In the snow. Without having eaten or slept? Who can endure this cold for hours on end? P. 22 to 23 The doctor also asks who is aged or sick. A few women raise their hands. They immediately lowered when Marie-Claude translate that it’s better not to do so. A 67-year old woman raises her hand anyways and she’s taken to block 25. One Day While on roll call, Delbo observes a woman from afar. She’s separated from the rest and is apparently trying to escape. She wears the civilian clothes of the jews and her appearance is very frail. “Each of her movements was so slow and awkward, revealing her weakened condition, that one wondered how she was still able to move. At the same time, it was difficult to graps why she needed to work so hard, quite out of proportion to her enterpriser, her wighless body. (…) Her legs were bound with rags. They were so thin that despite these tatters they looked like swinging bean poles, scarecrow legs. Even more so when they were kicking in the air. Finally he woman fell to the bottom of the ditch.” p. 24. Her hands waves in the air for help. Delbo and the other women don’t move. They are exhausted and cold. Delbo no longer knows how she can stand on her feet. “Standing motionless since the middle of the night, we had grown so heavy on our legs that we sank into the earth, the ice, unable too fight off numbness. The cold bruised our temples, our jaws, making us feel that out bones were about to break, or craniums to burst. We had given up hopping from one foot to the other, tapping our heels, rubbing or palms together. Exhausting exercise.” p. 25 Another woman leaves the rank. Delbo initially thinks she might be and old, blind woman. But is actually very young, with very frail shoulders.

Delbo looks away and sees another woman near the gate of block 25. She’s naked except for a blanket and is dancing apparently to avoid the cold and numbness. Delbo imagines she’s writing that story at a café. The sky clears and she wonders whether is afternoon. She has lost the notion of time. Back to the woman who broke the rank, Delbo sees she’s now eating the clean snow. Delbo knows she’s about to die. She remembers the first being she saw dying. It was “Flac”, possibly a pet. The SS see the woman eating the snow and throw the dog at her; it beats her neck. Delbo sees everything like it’s a dream. “A wrenched out scream. A single scream tearing through the immobility of the plain. We do not know if the scream has been uttered by her or by us, whether it issued from her punctured throat, or from ours. I feel the dog’s fangs in my throat. I scream. I howl. Not a sound comes out from me. The silence of a dream. P. 29 The SS pulls on his leash. The dog lets go. There is some blood on his muzzle. The SS whistles softly under his breathe as he leaves. P. 29 At the end of the chapter Delbo says she’s writing the story, sitting in a café. Notes: One of the most relevant chapters; it describers what the women have to endure in roll call and also, how they have learnt to fear the SS. They don’t break rank when they see the woman at the pit asking for help. The episode with the dog also demonstrates such cruelties are common at the camp for both the SS and the prisoners.

Marie Marie seems to be a short poem about a woman whose father, mother, brothers and sisters were all gassed upon arrival. Her parents were too old, the children too young. P. 30 Marie says her little sister was too beautiful. That the SS wouldn’t have killed if they had seen how beautiful she was. The Next Day

The roll call had begun at night and now it was day, and extremely cold. They soon started to move forwards. They were so exhausted that Delbo barely noticed it and says: “ our legs move forward as thought they did not belong to us.” P. 31 They are grouped in ranks of ten. An officer examines the ranks of 15,000 women while he rides a horse. They remain motionless again.

Time oozes without the light’s changing. It remains hard, frozen, solid and the sky is just as blue, as hard. The ice draws tight on out shoulders, weighs hard on us, crushes us. Not that we feel colder, we have grown increasingly inert, increasingly sensitive. We are caught witching a block of crystal through which we see the living, far back in our memories. Viva says. “I won’t ever like winter sports again.” Strange that snow might evoke something other than a mortal, hostile element, unnatural and until now, unfamiliar. P. 32 A woman sits down on the snow. They try to make her stand up saying she will catch a cold. The woman ignores them and digs a hole for herself, like she was digging her own grave. Suddenly a series of trucks appear, each of them carrying death and alive women. The living women scream and shout for help. Delbo and the rest remain motionless. “They are howling. We hear nothing. The truck slides in silence on the snow. We watch with eyes that cry out, eyes full of disbelief. Each face is inscribe with such precision over the icy light, the blue of the sky, that it remains marked there for eternity. For eternity, these shaven heads, squeezed against one another, bursting with shouts, mouths twisted by cries we do not hear, hands waign in a mute cry. The cries remain inscribed upon the blue sky.” P. 34 They were emptying block 25 that day. The women inside the trucks were taken to the gas chamber. Notes: “They were howling because they knew, but their vocal cords had snapped in their throats. And, as for us, we were walle din the ice, the light, the silence.” P. 34 The essence of the chapter. Being a witness and being unable to do anything for the ones damned.

The same day Delbo feels they have become statues of the cold, unable to feel anything, without consciousness. They start returning and on their way, the pass corpses on the snow, they keep walking unconcerned. “The were just ordinary obstacles so far as we were concerned. It was no longer possible for us to feel anything at all. We were walking. Walking automatons. Walking statues. Exhausted woman walking.” P. 35

A woman advises Delbo to start running once they reach the gate and to pass this message to others. The women start running. The reason is because the SS women stood there with sticks, belts, lashes and more to hit the passing women. They hit them and keep screaming “Schneller!” faster! When they’re finally inside, Delbo reunites with part of her group. The women start asking for their friends. Some were left behind. The SS guards mostly took elderly and Polish women away. Marie Claude, the translator says they need women to volunteer, the youngest. When Cécile the youngest goes and return, she says the SS needed people to carry the death women to block 25. One of them was still alive and begged to be saved. 14 women of Delbo’s block died. Notes: Alice’s Leg Simone, a young girl of the group sees Alice’s leg. Alice was among Delbo’s group. It is in the morgue, a hut that serves a place for the dead to be piled up. The rats were devouring the corpses. They see Alice’s prosthetic leg. After a while, the leg is taken away. The women presumed it was burned by a gypsy, none else would dare to do such a thing. Stenia That night the women of Delbo’s block, herself included, are unable to sleep. They hear noises from outside. “It is a moan mounting from the marshes, a sob swelling, swelling and bursting, then subsiding into shivering silence, another sob swells, swells and burst and dies down. No one is able to fall asleep.” P. 42 A woman, Stenia gets up and starts shouting “silence.” They manage to get her back to bed gently. As the sounds persist, none is able to sleep. Notes: Gas chambers? “The death rattle feels the silence between the wind’s waves, fills all the blackness of the night.” P. 42 Daytime Each day, Delbo’s group waits for daybreak to se out. They walk and she says none ever thinks about running away. To run away is to count on one’s all muscles. Every day the columns are formed and they learn to be assigned to any of them, the only concern is to get separated.

The pass the marshes on the right and houses to be demolished on the left. The road that day is iced over and they keep falling down. Some women need to be carried as their feet are too swollen to walk. They walk and are counted by the SS. They start the work; they grab spades, burry them in the ice, grapple with the earth underneath and pull up clods of it. At the distance, they hear screams. The marshes turn into liquid when the sunlight comes. The women end the day with frozen hand and frozen teeth, hunger fever and thirst. Notes: Account of a regular day and the excessive labour. The chapter has a tone of “matter-offact” and is less focus...