Abstract
This chapter offers an in-depth analysis of the prewar and wartime lives of Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion to show how their experiences conditioned their political engagements and how, in terms of both style and substance, their works grew from their commitments to resistance activities. Each author’s unique modes of “writing resistance” take shape according to her particular activities and preoccupations. These find expression through a variety of genres, including autobiography; chronicles of wartime atrocities; the eyewitness accounts of victims; journalistic evaluations of major political events; and the art of fiction—literary characters, narrative settings, idioms, and imagery.
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Notes
- 1.
Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985), Noor Inayat Khan (1914–1944), and Germaine Tillion (1907–2008).
- 2.
See Lawrence L. Langer, interview by Joanne Weiner Rudof, June 22, 2016, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library, Holocaust testimony HVT-4489. See also Langer, The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978).
- 3.
Ghislaine Dunant, Charlotte Delbo, La vie Retrouvée (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2017), 391–394. In 1971 Lamont discussed Delbo’s works for the first time during a conference at her university. Cynthia J. Haft, Lamont’s graduate student, whose Ph.D. thesis was on Nazi concentration camps and French literature, was a close acquaintance of Delbo. Haft translated into English Delbo’s “A Scene Played on the Stage of Memory,” The Massachusetts Review 59, no. 1 (2018): 11–28, and more recently “February,” The Massachusetts Review 60, no. 1 (2019): 17–27.
- 4.
Dunant, Charlotte Delbo, La vie Retrouvée, 22–23.
- 5.
Ibid., 248. See also Violaine Gelly and Paul Gradvohl, Charlotte Delbo (Paris: Fayard, 2013). Henri Lefebvre received his doctoral degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne and joined the Parti communiste français in 1920.
- 6.
Ibid., 212.
- 7.
The Athénée troupe performed several plays on classical themes by Jean Giraudoux, including Ondine, Electre, and La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu.
- 8.
Precisely why Delbo left South America is unclear. See Gelly and Gradvohl, Charlotte Delbo, 67–69.
- 9.
Dunant, Charlotte Delbo, La vie Retrouvée, 364–370.
- 10.
Gelly and Gradvohl, Charlotte Delbo, 106.
- 11.
Dunant, Charlotte Delbo, La vie Retrouvée, 22–23.
- 12.
They were arrested at their apartment on rue de la Faisanderie in Paris. Among the resistance literature confiscated was the first number of La pensée and issues of Lettres Françaises. There was also a report on the execution of fifty hostages held in the Camp d’internement de Châteaubriant, twenty-seven of whom were communist militants. The victims were executed in retaliation for the October 1941 murder of German officer Hotz.
- 13.
“Convoi du 24 janvier 1943” is also referred to as “Convoi des 31000” because “31” was inscribed on the prisoners’ arms. Of the two hundred and thirty women deported to Auschwitz, only seventy survived.
- 14.
Gelly and Gradvohl, Charlotte Delbo, 235.
- 15.
For more on the SOE, see Beryl E. Escott, The Heroines of SOE: F Section: Britain’s Secret Women in France (New York: The History Press, 2010).
- 16.
Claire Ray Harper and David Ray Harper, We Rubies Four: The Memoires of Claire Ray Harper (New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 2011), 168–180.
- 17.
Ibid., 180–182.
- 18.
David Harper, Noor’s nephew, who holds her unpublished correspondence with her Turkish Jewish fiancé, Azeem (Ely) Goldenberg, has granted me permission to examine unpublished letters written by her as well as the Inayat Khan family photos. Noor and Goldenberg were involved in a relationship between 1934 and 1940 and were engaged to be married. Their correspondence reveals her emotional ties with him and also sheds light on her personal sentiments with regard to many issues.
- 19.
For more information on the origins of Sufism in the West, see http://tinyurl.com/, https://inayatiorder-org-our-n (accessed on June 27, 2019).
- 20.
Ora Ray Baker (1892–1949) was originally from Wenatchee, Washington, though for many years she lived in Manhattan, New York, and in Leonia, New Jersey, with her half brother Pierre Bernard, a pioneer of American yoga and founder in 1905 of the Tankrit Order of America, and in 1910 of the Sanskrit College of New York. In 1913 she met Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927). He traveled throughout the world teaching Sufism, and his establishment of the movement’s infrastructure led to the founding of the Sufi Headquarters in Geneva; members of the movement now celebrate the anniversaries of his birth and death, and many adherents also commemorate the day he left his native India on a pilgrimage to the West. He and Baker were married in London in 1913, and she adopted the name “Ameena Begum.” For more on their lives, see Harper and Harper, We Rubies Four, 25–39.
- 21.
On music and the Inayat Khan Family, see Harper and Harper, We Rubies Four, 103–108.
- 22.
Jean Overton Fuller, Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan: Madeleine (Rotterdam, Netherlands: East-West Publications: 1971), 68.
- 23.
In addition to obtaining from David Harper some of Noor’s correspondence with Goldenberg, courtesy of the Personal Archives of David Harper, I have also corresponded with Henriette (Yetty) Blanc Van Gool, a friend of the Inayat Khan family during the 1930s who also maintained contact with Goldenberg for several decades, until his death in the late 1980s.
- 24.
Fuller, Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan, Introduction.
- 25.
Basu refers to Goldenberg as “a Rumanian Jew” from a “working class background,” who lived with his mother in Paris and struggled to pay his tuition at the École Normale de Musique. Shrabani Basu, Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan (New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 2007), 23–24. Claire Ray Harper refers to him as “Goldenberg, a Turkish Jew,” We Rubies Four, 118.
- 26.
“Healing Dachau,” Heart and Wings, Summer and Fall, 1996, sec. 7. Pir Vilayat Khan recalled his memories of Noor on June 30, 1996, during a “universal” worship ceremony in her honor at the Dachau concentration camp.
- 27.
Entitled “Escape from Saint Nazaire (1940),” this essay could be compared to Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française in the way that both authors describe the trauma of exile, even though the latter’s account is contained in a much longer manuscript.
- 28.
When Noor joined resistance movements she assumed several new identities. In FANY she became Nora Baker to conceal her Indian heritage. The SOE identified her as Jeanne Marie Renier, born in Blois, whose father was a philosophy professor and her mother a citizen of both France and the United States. Her radio code name was “Madeleine” when she was communicating with SOE headquarters. See Harper and Harper, We Rubies Four, 157–162.
- 29.
Among the key figures who recruited and trained Noor were Selwyn Jepson (1899–1989), a recruitment officer for the French section of SOE; Maurice Buckmaster (1902–1992), a leader of the SOE French Section; cryptographer Leo Marks (1920–2001); and Vera Atkins (1908–2000), assistant to Buckmaster. The two women with whom she worked closely during her training were Cecily Lefort (1900–1945) and Yolande Beekman (1911–1944).
- 30.
Juliette Pattinson, “‘Playing the Daft Lassie with Them’: Gender, Captivity, and the Special Operations Executive During the Second World War,” European Review of History 13, no. 2 (2006): 271–292.
- 31.
This SOE report of April 1943 is cited in Harper and Harper, We Rubies Four, 58.
- 32.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,1999).
- 33.
Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück (Paris, France: Editions de la Baconnière, 1946), Ravensbrück (Paris, France: Éditions Famot, 1976), and Ravensbrück (Paris: Seuil, 1988). She revised them twice over a period of forty-two years.
- 34.
Germaine Tillion, Une opérette à Ravensbrück: Le Verfügbar aux enfers (Paris: Martinière, 2005).
- 35.
From Tillion’s accounts of her personal experiences in Fragments de Vie , ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 2009), 350–351. My translation. Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017), an eminent historian and prolific literary scholar, did extensive research on Tillion’s life and writings.
- 36.
He was a captain during the First World War and considered an ardent patriot.
- 37.
Durkheim (1858–1917) taught theology and considered religion one of the “major regulating origins of society.”
- 38.
Alice L. Conklin, The Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 2–5, 252. See also Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 233–234. Fournier addresses the problems of defining anthropology. The discipline was vaguely defined until the late nineteenth century when it finally began to proliferate in the curriculum and generated a profusion of publications and the creation of societies and museums. Although in its broadest sense anthropology encompassed ethnology and ethnography, in France the three terms referred to distinct disciplines, each with its own specific theoretical and institutional field. While anthropology is the comparative study of beliefs and institutions, understood as the foundation of social structures, ethnography entails the description of ethnic groups, and ethnology studies their linguistic, economic, and social unity as well as their evolution.
- 39.
Essai sur le don: Form et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques. (L’année Sociologique, seconde série, 1923–1924); The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: Norton, 190). Mauss was also a historian of religion interested specifically in the historic origins of prayer. He established the Ernest Renan Society for the study of the history of religion. Fournier, Marcel Mauss, 218.
- 40.
Fournier, Marcel Mauss, 161.
- 41.
The draft of which went missing permanently while she was at Ravensbrück. In 1932 she earned a degree from the Institut d’Ethnologie.
- 42.
Tillion, Combats, 63. Louis Massignon (1883–1962), a Catholic scholar of Islam, was also one of her mentors. He encouraged her to return to the Aurès in 1954. At that time, she was involved with the Algerian War of Independence.
- 43.
Thérèse Rivière, who was affiliated with the Institut d’Ethnologie de Paris, traveled with Tillion to the Aurès in December of 1934. The two took photographs and collected items to bring back to the Musée de l’Homme for an exhibition. Rivière filmed some of her work on-site in the Aurès in 1934–1936. See https://bit.ly/2uoNfVD (accessed on June 20, 2019). L’Aurès, Ministère de la Culture, Les archives du film du Centre national de la cinématographie, in collaboration with Cinémathèque française, 1946.
- 44.
Tillion, La traversée du mal (Paris: Arléa, 2015), 43.
- 45.
A resistance group comprised of intellectuals and led by Anatole Lewitsky. See Martin Blumenson, Le Réseau du musée de l’homme: Les débuts de la résistance en France (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1979).
- 46.
Tillion, Fragments, Introduction. Tillion was arrested on August 13, 1942.
- 47.
Emilie Tillion, her mother, was deported to Ravensbrück in February of 1944 and died there. Emilie was in solidarity with her daughter with regard to resistance activities, and the two women often held meetings about them in their home.
- 48.
Tillion, Fragments, 12.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
See the film Germaine Tillion par elle-même, “Association Germaine Tillion,” 2016, https://bit.ly/2Jx525K (accessed on June 21, 2019).
- 51.
See Todorov, “Two Approaches to the Humanities: Claude Lévi-Strauss and Germaine Tillion,” Sign System Studies 45, no. 3/4 (2017): 302–316.
- 52.
The CICRC was an international organization of non-Communist political deportees to Nazi concentration camps, launched by writer and political activist David Rousset (1912–1997). Following her internment, Tillion was involved with the Association Nationale des Anciennes Déportées and Internées de la Résistance (ADIR), in which she served as vice president. In 1962 she returned to her cherished career in ethnology, while for her wartime efforts she received the Croix de Guerre, the Médaille de la Résistance and the Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, as well as several other recognitions, the highest being her ceremonial entombment in the Panthéon in Paris in May 2015.
- 53.
See the film Germaine Tillion par elle-même.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Dalia Ofer, “The Contribution of Gender to the Study of the Holocaust,” in Gender and Jewish History, eds. Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 131. Although Ofer’s chapter centers on Jewish women, she nonetheless implies that there is an important dialectic between the notion of gender and resistance during World War II.
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Curtis, L.R. (2019). Introduction: Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender—Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion. In: Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31242-8_1
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