Charlotte Delbo (10 August 1913 – 1 March 1985) was a French writer chiefly known for her haunting memoirs of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, where she was sent for her activities as a member of the French resistance. Biography Early life Charlotte Delbo was born in Vigneux-sur-Seine, Essonne near Paris in 1913, to Charles Delbo from the French department of Sarthe, and Ermini (née Morero) who moved from Italy to France at the age of 18-years. She gravitated toward theater and politics in her youth, joining the French Young Communist Women's League in 1932. She met and married George Dudach two years later. Later in the decade she went to work for actor and theatrical producer Louis Jouvet and was with his company in Buenos Aires when Wehrmacht forces invaded and occupied France in 1940. She could have waited to return when Philippe Pétain, leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime, established special courts in 1941 to deal with members of the resistance. One sentenced a friend of hers, a young architect named Andre Woog, to death. "I can't stand being safe while others are guillotined", she told Jouvet. "I won't be able to look anyone in the eye." Resistance and arrest Accordingly, she returned to Paris with Dudach, who was already active in the resistance as the assigned courier for the internationally famous poet Louis Aragon. The couple spent much of that winter printing and distributing pamphlets and other anti-Nazi Germany reading material. They became part of the group around communist philosopher Georges Politzer, and took an active role in publishing the underground journal Lettres Françaises. On 2 March 1942, police followed a careless courier to their apartment, and arrested George and Charlotte. The courier was able to escape from a back window. Time in camps Dudach was shot on the morning of 23 May after being allowed to bid his wife farewell. Delbo was held in transit camps near Paris for the rest of the year; then on 23 January 1943 she and 229 other Frenchwomen, imprisoned for their resistance activities, were put on a train for the Auschwitz concentration camp, in what became known as Convoi des 31000. It was one of only a few convoys of non-Jewish prisoners from France to that camp (most were sent to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp or other camps for political prisoners) and the only convoy of women. Only