Testimony and Vision: Poetic Responses to Concentration Camp Experience

Abstract

As former deportees and survivors, Charlotte Delbo (1913-1985) and Jean Cayrol (1911)1 shared the common experience of the concentration camps during the Second World War and the overcoming of expected death in these camps. Both Delbo and Cayrol were arrested for their activities in the French Resistance and deported as political prisoners: Delbo to an extermination camp, Auschwitz or rather Birkenau, the neighbouring camp reserved for women where the gas chambers and chimneys were an ever-present reality; and Cayrol to MauthausenGiisen under the brutal system of Nacht und Nebel, working in the death-ridden stone quarries. On their return from the camps, writing became a manifestation of survival: for both, the past was constantly with them both as a means of testimony and an integral part of their effort to survive in the present,