8 | JANUARY 27 • 2022 

of 10 prisoners who were 
then building Monowitz, 
the vast synthetic rubber 
factory whose construction 
took thousands of lives, yet 
produced not an ounce of the 
precious material. Those who 
did not die that winter would 
“suffer minute by minute, 
all day, every day.” In fact, 
the very word “winter,” Levi 
argues, seems inadequate to 
what the prisoners had to 
endure. 
“Just as our hunger is not 
the feeling of missing a meal,” 
he writes, “so our way of 
being cold has need of a new 
word. If the Lagers had lasted 
longer, a new, harsh language 
would have been born; and 
only this language could 
express what it means to toil 
the whole day in the wind, 
with the temperatures below 
freezing, wearing only a shirt, 
underpants, cloth jacket and 
trousers, and in one’s body 
nothing but weakness, hunger 
and knowledge of the end 
drawing near.” 
Writing in the wake of his 
liberation, Levi could not have 
known that a French woman, 
who had faced even harsher 
conditions at Birkenau, was 
also struggling to find new 
combinations of words to 
describe what winter had 
meant there. 
Charlotte Delbo was not 
a Jew and had been sent to 
Auschwitz in January 1943 as 
part of a group of 230 women, 
nearly all of them political 
activists. Her account of 
the first winter she endured 
comprises most of None of Us 
Will Return, a searing account 
she wrote in a single month, 
January 1946, but declined to 
publish for two decades. 
In one section, Delbo 
strives to convey the sensa-
tions of standing at roll call 
amidst the frozen Polish 
landscape. “The sky is blue, 
hard and glacial. One thinks 

of plants caught in ice,” she 
writes. “It must happen in 
the Arctic region, when the 
ice even freezes underwater 
vegetation. We are frozen in 
a block of hard, cutting ice, 
transparent like a block of 
pure crystal. And this crystal 
is pierced by light, as if the 
light were frozen within the 
ice, as though ice were light.” 
With more of a poetic sen-
sibility, perhaps, than chemist 
Primo Levi, she pushes figu-
rative language almost to the 
breaking-point, as if only such 
excess could convey what she 
terms the “deep memory” of 
Auschwitz. 
 Delbo describes the light as 
“motionless, wounding,” the 
“light of a dead planet,” but 
then settles on evoking the 
sensations of her comrades as 
they stand one day for hours 
in the Polish winter, blinded 
by the light of the snow-cov-
ered plain: “Immobile in the 
ice wherein we are caught, 
inert, unfeeling, we have lost 
all living senses. Not one of us 
utters, ‘I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. 
I’m cold.’ Ferried over to 
another world, we are subject 

to drawing breath in another 
life, we the living dead caught 
in ice, light, silence.” 
With the mundane title, 
“The Next Day,” Delbo con-
veys Birkenau’s perpetual 
horrors and routine barbari-
ties, a place where in winter 
SS guards and their dogs 
are both clad in warm coats, 
while an officer on horseback 
“examines the perfect squares 
of 15,000 women standing on 
the snow.” And as they shiver 
on a field of “dazzling snow,” 
the women are gripped by a 
shared fear, wondering “What 
are they going to do with us?” 
After hours of standing, of 
being “turned into statues by 
the cold,” they finally under-
stand the reason for their 
interminable assembly: Block 
25, the way station to the 
crematoria, is being emptied, 
its marked-for-death women 
prisoners packed into open 
gravel trucks that drive them 
to the gas chambers. 
“Each face is inscribed 
with such precision over 
the icy light, the blue of the 
sky,” Delbo declares, “that 
it remains marked there for 

eternity.” All of the women 
howl yet make no sound: 
those on the trucks because 
they know their fate, though 
“their vocal cords had 
snapped in their throats”; 
those standing on the snowy 
plain because they were 
“walled in the ice, the light, 
the silence.” 
Central to Dante’s scheme 
for his Inferno is the idea that 
all punishments suffered there 
are just, are based on sins 
committed in life. With her 
stark echo of Dante — a fig-
ure central also to Levi’s book 
— Delbo depicts a Hell built 
upon sin, not justice, in which 
the innocent, even those who 
survive the camp, remain 
trapped in its frozen center. 
As her comrade Mado says 
in The Measure of Our Days 
(1971), “At any moment, car-
ried by a smell, a day from 
over there returns.” The mere 
fact of a rotten potato in her 
vegetable bin sends her back 
to walking past the camp 
kitchens, so that “everything 
surfaces again: the mud, the 
snow, the blows of the trun-
cheons.” 
In his poem “Shema,” Primo 
Levi addresses us directly, we 
who “live safe” in our “warm 
houses,” who return each 
night to “hot food and friend-
ly faces,” entreating us not 
just to remember those who 
suffered in the Holocaust, but 
figuratively to affix reminders 
of their stories to the door-
posts of future generations. 
 “Carve them in your hearts” 
he entreats, “repeat them to 
your children.” And so, when 
late January comes, I gird 
myself against winter’s harsh-
ness and, in my heart, once 
again join the standing and 
marching thousands. 

Robert Franciosi is a professor in 

the Department of English Language 

and Literature at Grand Valley State 

University. 

SANDRA AHN MODE

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