Spectres, mes compagnons

by Charlotte Delbo

Dans ce texte, donné comme une lettre inachevée et qui est la poursuite d’un dialogue avec Louis Jouvet, des personnages de roman et de théâtre accompagnent la narratrice dans les différentes étapes de son voyage de la prison vers Auschwitz.Quels liens les apparitions, les disparitions, les agissements de Fabrice del Dongo, Ondine, Alcestre, Électre… ont-ils avec cette traversée de l’inéluctable et avec ces lois que Louis Jouvet essayait de dégager à propos du personnage de théâtre ?Tandis que l’imaginaire gagne la réalité faite ombre, l’intériorité de l’être ainsi incarnée, face à une épreuve qui tente de la détruire ou de la nier, place cet écrit au cœur de la démarche de Charlotte Delbo.

62 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published April 27, 2013

About the author

Charlotte Delbo 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.
Born in Vigneux-sur-Seine, Essonne near Paris, Delbo 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 producer Louis Jouvet and was with his company in Buenos Aires when Wehrmacht forces invaded and occupied France in 1940.
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."
Accordingly she returned to Paris and Dudach, who was already active in the resistance as the assigned courier for the internationally famous poet Louis Aragon. The couple spent much of that winter printing and distributing pamphlets and other anti-Nazi Germany reading material. They became part of the group around communist philosopher Georges Politzer, and took an active role in publishing the underground journal Lettres Françaises.
On March 2, 1942, police followed a careless courier to their apartment, and arrested George and Charlotte. The courier was able to escape from a back window.
Her memoir uses unconventional, almost experimental, narrative techniques to not only convey the experience of Auschwitz but how she and her fellow survivors coped in the years afterwards.