Charlotte Delbo: to the measure of female testimonies From one generation to another: the writing of great witnesses

Charlotte Delbo © Shoah Memorial

Some witnesses wrote immediately after the war, creating a de facto literary genre. Others, later, have shed light on renewed aspects of the genocidal process and its aftermath. Over time, the public has discovered the works of Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, Aharon Appelfeld, Charlotte Delbo and other great founding texts. How did these works influence our contemporaries and why did they become classics?

Charlotte Delbo became an author at the end of the concentration camp experience that earned her her participation in the communist resistance. Paul Gradvohl, co-author of the biography of Charlotte Delbo published by Fayard, questions the work of the resistant. A work in prose and verse that bears witness to the survival of women during and after internment at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, while asserting themselves as feminine.

In what way are female testimonies about the Holocaust different from stories written by men? This is what Michèle Tauber will try to analyze by evoking the writings of Charlotte Delbo, Anna Langfus, Ida Fink, Ruth Reilly, Odette Abadi, Germaine Tillon, Micheline Maurel, or Hélène Berr.

Claude-Alice Peyrottes, actress and director, director of the company "Bagages de Sable", will talk to us about her staging of the writings of Charlotte Delbo, in particular of "Mesure des jours" and her relationship with Delbo’s work.

Ghislaine Dunant investigated the life of Charlotte Delbo and analyzed her works to shed light on their origin and the context of their writing. It will evoke the power that Delbo gives to literature to tell the catastrophe of Auschwitz and to connect us with what took place.

This meeting is part of a cycle of four meetings on the theme "From one generation to another: the writing of great witnesses"