Clothing Matters: Uncovering overlooked experiences and post-war resonances of deportation, the Holocaust and survival in Charlotte Delbo

Charlotte Delbo is known as a Holocaust writer but her works also relate experiences of detention in holding camps in France, deportation of non-Jews to concentration camps, survival in post-war France and the Paris Massacre of peacefully demonstrating Algerians on 17 October 1961. As a member of the only convoy of female political prisoners deported from France to Auschwitz-Birkenau and a non-Jewish, non-university-educated, working-class writer, her ‘outsider’ status provides different perspectives on these experiences. This thesis offers new approaches to and insights into Delbo’s work by examining it through the hitherto missed critical potential of clothes, bringing unpublished, untranslated and overlooked texts to light and opening up interpretations of her better-known ones. Starting from close readings of four garments strikingly described by Delbo, this thesis identifies neglected aspects of personal experience and cultural history. It examines a raspberry-silk déshabillé [negligee] in a Gestapo holding camp in Paris that is pre-haunted by deportation. Analysis of striped prisoner uniforms destabilises perceptions of a uniform experience of the camps and distinctions between life and death, incarceration and survival. A mauve-silk robe d’intérieur [house coat] in convalescence is explored as resonating with the memory of loss experienced through the senses and the irrevocable change wrought by her experiences. Resonances of the Holocaust in the Paris Massacre are examined through representations of young children pulling up their socks: Jewish girls in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Algerian boys on 17 October 1961. Through analysing Delbo’s representations of these garments from across the range of her texts, this thesis contributes new facets to knowledge and understanding of her work and to neglected aspects of the lived experience of deportation, the Holocaust, survival of concentration camps and colonial violence in metropolitan France during the Algerian War.