Part III
In Delbo’s text, deception is brought through two major themes: nature and references to social values. First, Delbo scatters her descriptions of hell, with hope and light. It is less a matter for her to suggest that her experience held momentary glimpses of hope, than a way to further emphasize the horror of the camp. Hope and light are often symbolized by blue sky, water, spring and flowers. They are mentioned when Delbo alludes to the life before or outside, but not exclusively, as I will demonstrate it. The short story titled “La tulipe”—“The Tulip”—gives us a good example of this technique. First, Delbo depicts a common scene in her camp experience: the group of women struggling as they walk to work one morning, and face yet another harrowing day:
Nous allions la tête baissée sous les rafales de neige fondue qui ceiglaient au visage, piquaient comme grêle. A chaque rafale, nous redoutions la suivante et courbions davantage la tête. La rafale s’abattait, giflait, lacérait. Une poignée de gros sel lancée à toute violence en pleine figure. Nous avancions, poussant devant nous une falaise de vent et de neige.
Où allions-nous?
C’était une direction que nous n’avions jamais prise. Nous avions tourné avant le ruisseau. La route en remblai longeait un lac. Un lac gelé
Vers quoi allions-nous? Que pouvions-nous faire par là? La question que nous posait l’aube à chaque aube. Quel travail nous attend? Marais, wagonnets, briques, sable. Nous ne pouvions penser ces mots-là sans que le coeur nous manquât. (97-8)
We were walking head down under squalls of melting snow which lashed our faces, stinging like hail. With each blast we lowered our heads even more in anticipation of the next. The squalls came sweeping down, slapping and lacerating our skin. It was as though a handful of coarse kitchen salt was flung smack in our faces. We were moving forward, shoving before us a cliff of wind and snow. Where were we going?
It was a direction we had never taken before. We had taken a turn before reaching the brook. The embankment ran along a lake. A great frozen lake.
Toward what were we going? What could we possibly have been doing there? This was a question raised by the dawn every dawn. What work awaited us? Marshes, hand trucks, bricks, sand. We could not think of these words without losing heart. (Lamont 60).
Then, as they progress, they come upon a home:
C’est là qu’apparaît la maison. Nous marchons moins durement. Nous allons vers une maison.
Elle est au bord de la route. En briques rouges. La cheminée fume. Qui peut habiter cette maison perdu? Elle se rapproche. On voit des rideaux blancs. Des rideaux de mousseline. Nous disons “mousseline” avec du doux dans la bouche. Et, devant les rideaux, dans l’entre-deux des doubles fenêtres, il y a une tulipe. (98)
This is where a house comes into view. We walk a little more softly. We are walking in the direction of a home.
It is next to the road. Made of red brick. The chimney is smoking.
Who could be living in this remote house? It draws nearer. We can see white curtains. Muslin curtains. We utter “muslin” softly in the mouth. And in front of the curtains, in the space between the window and the storm sash, there is a tulip. (Lamont 60)
Here again, elements of the description assure continuity between this and the previous scene. However, the red bricks contrast here with the gray landscape previously described as well as with the bricks the deportees often had to transport by hand. The color red as well as the smoking chimney suggest warmth and contrast with the “squalls of melting snow” and the wind which lacerates their faces. The muslin curtains is a reminder of civilization and the tulip, a symbol of spring, of hope and beauty, all things of which the deportees have been deprived for so long. The hope, the excitement the tulip brings in the heart of the women is clearly expressed by Delbo:
Les yeux brillent comme à une apparition. “Vous avez vu? Vous avez vu? Une tulipe.” Tous les regards se portent sur la fleur. Ici, dans le désert de glace et de neige, une tulipe. Rose entre deux feuilles pâles. Nous la regardons. Nous oublions la grêle qui cingle. La colonne ralentit. “Weiter”, crie le SS. Nos têtes sont encore tournées vers la maison que nous l’avons depuis longtemps dépassée.
Tout le jour nous rêvons à la tulipe […]. […] nous avions un moment d’espoir. (98-99)
Our eyes light up at this apparition. “Did you see? You did see, didn’t you? A tulip.” All eyes converge on the flower. Here, in a desert of ice and snow, a tulip. Pink between two pale leaves. We look at it. We forget the stinging hail. The column slows down. “Weiter, ” shouts the SS. Our heads are still turned toward the house that we passed a long time back. All day we dream of the tulip […]. […] we experienced a moment of hope. (Lamont 60-1)
But the women are soon brought back to the dim reality of the camp and the memory of the tulip itself is soiled by it. The chapter ends:
Quand nous avons appris que c’était la maison du SS qui commandait la pêcherie, nous avons haï notre souvenir et cette tendresse qu’ils n’avaient pas encore séchée en nous. (99)
When we found out that this house belonged to the SS in charge of the fishery, we despised this memory and the tender feeling which had not yet dried up within us. (Lamont 61)
As we see, hope is brought to the narrator by an image of beauty and by the promise of spring. She is deceived by that same image and by that same promise, as they are ultimately associated to her suffering.
The concept of nature and beauty are similarly rejected in the chapter titled “Adieu”—“Farewell.” In it, Delbo contrasts the process of sending a group of women to the gas chamber with what she refers to as “le monde” ‘the world’. At the beginning of the story and in a passage mentioned earlier, she presents nature and associates it with the reaction it would suggest in the world before/beyond Auschwitz. She writes “C’était un jour d’hiver sec et froid. Un de ces jours d’hiver où on dit: ‘Il ferait bon marcher.’ Des gens. Ailleurs” (80). ‘It was a dry, cold winter day. One of those wintry days when people say: ‘It would be nice to take a walk.’ People. Somewhere else” (Lamont 49).
This reference is contrasted further by the silent cry of the women transported to their death as she says “Rien n’entendait ces appels du bord de l’épouvante. Le monde s’arrêtait loin d’ici. Le monde qui dit: “Il ferait bon de marcher” (81). ‘Nothing heard these cries from the edge of dread. The world stopped far from there. The world that says, ‘It would be lovely to take a walk’’ (Lamont 50). Here, not only is the previous reference to normalcy defeated by the horror of the impending slaughter of the women, the narrator also stresses the indifference of the world beyond, an indifference simultaneous to the murder but which as we know, also lingered in post-war societies.
As we see, these references to what I have called earlier “normalcy”, and to what Delbo refers to as “the past,” “home,” or “childhood,” are often brought to consciousness by glimpses of natural and simple beauty. These references connect reader and writer and as Delbo’s text defeats them, the narrator thus allows writer and reader to acknowledge in unison, the inhumanity and abnormality of Auschwitz. Even though she writes that “as we spoke of the past, the past became more unreal” (Lamont 76), she keeps bringing the past into consciousness and her present thus becomes more real to us, readers from her future.
In fact, an important factor here is the relationship, which the witness tries to establish between past and present. As I pointed earlier, mentions of normalcy, of references shared by both writer and reader are often made in the past tense. What is held by deep memory, the camp experience, points to a rupture in the narrator’s life and identity. To describe particular episodes of her Auschwitz experience, Delbo often uses the present tense. The present diminishes the distance between reader and text and makes the scenes more vivid, allowing the reader to experience these scenes simultaneously to the act of telling.
As part of this familiarity or normalcy, which Delbo uses to coax her reader to the text, then, as I showed, to deceive her, we also find numerous references to familiar human and social values. As the reader processes Delbo’s text, she is called to reverse these values which she expected to be universal, and she is forced to reconstruct the horror of the camp as a place where those values are no longer in effect. The following excerpts are taken from the first story “Arrivées, départs”—“Arrivals, Departures”:
Les femmes avec les enfants d’abord, ce sont les plus las. Les hommes ensuite. Ils sont aussi las mais ils sont soulagé qu’on fasse passer en premier leurs femmes et leurs enfants.
Car on fait passer en premier les femmes et les enfants. (12)
Women and children first, they are the most exhausted. After that the men. They are weary too but relieved that their women and children should go first.
For women and children are made to go first. (Lamont 5)
Again, the reader has to call onto her own set of historical references and she is asked to deny herself a social value she may have so far held for universal: in Auschwitz, women and children are only given the privilege to die first. The following passage functions in a comparable way:
Il y a les fillettes d’un pensionnat avec leurs jupes plissées toutes pareilles, leurs chapeaux à ruban bleu qui flotte. Elles tirent bien leurs chaussettes en descendant. Et elles vont gentiment par cinq comme à la promenade du jeudi, se tenant par la main et ne sachant. Que peut-on faire aux petites filles d’un pensionnat qui sont avec la maîtresse? (14)
There are boarding-school girls wearing identical pleated skirts, their hats trailing blue ribbons. They pull their knee socks carefully as they clamber down, and walk neatly five by five, holding hands, unaware, as though on a regular Thursday school outing. After all, what can they do to boarding-school girls shepherded by their teacher? (Lamont 6)
The reader is asked once again to fill the gap but this time, the narrator also asks her to answer a question. The rhetorical character of this question leaves no escape: we now know what “they” can do.
I would also like to suggest that in her work in general, and in the first story titled “Rue de l’arrivée, rue du départ”—“Arrivals, Departures”--, in particular, the deception experienced by Delbo’s reader parallels that of the victims unaware of their fate. This technique thus allows the reader to identify more easily with the victims, all of the victims: in this case, not the political prisoners, like Delbo herself, but the Jewish victims arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Delbo repeats “ils ignoraient, ils ne savent pas, ils ne comprennent pas.” ‘they ignored, they don’t know, they don’t understand. Here is a passage illustrating this:
Ils ne savent pas qu’à cette gare-là on n’arrive pas.
Ils attendent le pire—ils n’attendent pas l’inconcevable.
[…]
Les mères gardent les enfants contre elles […]Enfin on arrive, elles vont pouvoir s’occuper d’eux […].
La gare n’est pas une gare. C’est la fin d’un rail. Ils regardent et ils sont éprouvés par la désolation autour d’eux.
Le matin la brume leur cache les marais.
Le soir les réflecteurs éclairent les barbelés blancs dans une netteté de photographie astrale. Ils croient que c’est là qu’on les mène et ils sont effrayés […]. Par cinq ils prennent la rue de l’arrivée. C’est la rue du départ ils ne savent pas […]. Ils arrivent à une bâtisse et ils soupirent. Enfin ils sont arrivés. (10-16)
They do not know there is no arriving in this station.
They expect the worst—not the unthinkable […].
Mother keep a tight hold on their children […] At last they have reached their destination, they will be able to take care of them now […].
The station is not a railroad station. It is the end of the line. They stare, distressed by the surrounding desolation.
In the morning, the mist veils the marshes.
In the evening, floodlights reveal the white barbed wire with the sharpness of astrophotography. They believe this is where they are being taken away and are filled with fear […].
They reach a building and heave a sigh. They have reached their destination at last. (Lamont 4-7)
Throughout her text, Delbo establishes connivence—complicity—between narrator and reader. She and her reader share common historical knowledge and social values which allows them to grasp what the future hold for the unaware victims, as well as the concept of Auschwitz as a place where human values are worthless. Again, this complicity leads to a more active reader’s participation in the testimony. It is clear in the following excerpt:
Il y a une mère qui calotte son enfant cinq ans peut-être parce qu’il ne veut pas lui donner la main et qu’elle veut qu’il reste tranquille à côté d’elle. On risque de se perdre on ne doit pas se séparer dans un endroit inconnu et avec tout ce monde. Elle calotte son enfant et nous qui savons ne le lui pardonnons pas. D’ailleurs ce serait la même chose si elle le couvrait de baisers. (15)
There is a mother who’s boxing her five-year-old’s ears because he won’t hold her hand and she expects him to stay quietly by her side. You run the risk of getting lost if you’re separated in a strange, crowded place. She hits her child, and we who know cannot forgive her for it. Yet, were she to smother him with kisses, it would all be the same in the end. (Lamont 7)
The “we” Delbo uses at the end of this passage leaves ambiguity. Whether it embodies the women in her group and she or the reader and she, Delbo, through the change in the narrative voice, provides within the text, the reader’s reaction to this episode: the conclusion that Auschwitz is a place where motherhood has changed meaning and has become irrelevant.
As Nicole Thatcher has suggested and as we saw in the passage I just cited, switches from a narrative voice “je”--“I”-- to a “nous”-- “we”--, and also scattered throughout the trilogy, to a “vous”-- “you”-- represent as many changes in the narrator’s identity. Thatcher mentions Gérard Genette who noted that the voice in the narrative discourse is not only the narrator who speaks but “éventuellement tous ceux qui participent, fût-ce passivement, à cette activité narrative” ‘eventually all those who participate, even passively, in this narrative activity’. Thus, according to Genette, the variety of narrators suggests a variety of readers. (Thatcher 110) And for our purpose, here, we can say that this variety of readers is called to provide a variety of reactions. Or, that the multiplicity of narrative voices, echoed by multiple responses from the readers, represent another attempt by Delbo to reunite her split self, her common and deep memories, and to reconcile, in the reader’s reactions, her realities.
copyright © Dominique A.H. Linchet.
