Community Culture As Pragmatic Tool For Survival In Concentration Camps: The Inner And Outer World Of Charlotte Delbo

Abstract

The Holocaust literature of Charlotte Delbo throws a flood of light on the brutal atrocities of the Nazis. Her Memoirs, novels, lectures and interviews describe her perception about the life before and after Auschwitz. Like Prino Levi and Elie Wiesel, Charlotte Delbo was also the victim of the atrocities of German Gestapo. Delbo spent twenty seven months in different concentration camps including “Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Ravensbruck” Delbo evolved her own strategy and mechanism to escape death and selection to the gas chambers.  She organized a co-operative of women and formed a unity to fight and resist the barbaric cruelties of the Nazis. The Trilogy of Delbo is a harrowing description of physical and psychological traumatic experiences of women prisoners of Auschwitz. Delbo didn’t believe that she survived the Auschwitz; she became a forceful voice speaking to the world the enormity of the human degradation. Her community culture proved very effective in helping each other in the hour of crisis. In the hours of death and destruction, Delbo experienced that patience; rational thinking and balance of mind are essential prerequisites to survive.