RPM's Genocide Reading Project; Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory, and Auschwitz and After

This is the first video in the Genocide Project. Charlotte Delbo was a member of the Maquis French Resistance during WWII. She and her husband were caught and her husband was executed. She was later transferred to Birkenau where she witnessed the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. She became a writer to make sure that what happened would not be hidden or forgotten. The two books discussed are collections of short, powerful pieces.`

[@BigTexan59]

Chalotte Delbo was a powerful writer. She doesn't just spit out chronological facts, she allows the reader to feel events through intense abstraction. You want to know what Auschwitz was like? Read Delbo. The excerpt that grabbed me was :
“A brick has come loose from the low wall separating our cell from the next where other larvae sleep, moan and dream under the blankets that cover them - these are shrouds covering them for they are dead, today or tomorrow what does it matter… We feel that we teeter on the edge of a dark pit, a bottomless void-it is the hole of the night where we struggle furiously, struggle against another nightmare, that of our real death.”

[@ronrutstein3440]

Thanks for watching! I recently inherited some books from a cousin that included a collection of holocaust plays that included one of Delbo's. I hope to find time to read it soon.