Product Description

In March 1942, French police arrested Charlotte Delbo and her husband, the resistance leader Georges Dudach, as they were preparing to distribute anti-German leaflets in Paris. The French turned them over to the Gestapo, who imprisoned them. Dudach was executed by firing squad in May; Delbo remained in prison until January 1943, when she was deported to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbruck, where she remained until the end of the war. This book - Delbo's vignettes, poems and prose poems of life in the concentration camp and afterwards - is a literary memoir. It is a document by a female resistance leader, a non-Jew and a writer who transforms the experience of the Holocaust into prose. "Auschwitz and After" speaks of the moments of horror and of heroism Delbo never left behind, of the everyday deprivation and abuse experienced by all the people in the camps. Delbo describes the suffering of the doomed children. She also recounts the collections of survivors of her own work unit and their difficulties in returning to normal life after Auschwitz. The book conveys how a survivor must "carry the world" and continue to live after surviving the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Translated from French and now available in English in its entirety, "Auschwitz and After" began as three separate books published in France by Editions de Minuit: "None of Us Will Return", "Useless Knowledge" and "The Measure of Days".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32112 in Books
• Published on: 1997-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

Customer Reviews

Haunting
How can you review a book like this? All I can say is that it I read it a couple of years ago and I've read it many times since. So often I'll be walking down the street or in work ands all of a sudden I'll remember a passage from the book and I'll just stop in my tracks.

Its beautifully written, the translation is excellent its haunting and almost lyrical you don't read it as much as swim through the words. Of course its disturbing - its effected me much more that any other holocaust literature I've ever read but I was able to read it without analysing every phrase and word somethig I've enevr escaped when readingf Levi. It made me feel humbled and sad but strangely refreshed. The women Delbo remembers and Delbo herself remind me so much of my friends and me and maybe that's the most uncomfortable about about the book.