Auschwitz and after /

Delbo, a French resistance fighter, was arrested by the French police, imprisoned, and then sent to camps with a large contingent of non-Jews and a smaller number of Jewish women. The Jews had their heads shaved regularly; Delbo's and others' were not. Except for that difference, each suffered the same senseless blows, the same roll calls, starvation, and hard labor. The present work, first published in French (1970), is not the usual memoir with a narrative. Delbo instead offers vignettes of the endless roll calls, re-creating standing in the cold for hours and winter work details--mud, digging ditches, filth, rotten gruel, perpetual hunger and thirst. The reader is not spared senseless beatings or the last moments of a woman's life, degraded, beaten, torn apart by SS dogs. One by one, Delbo's friends fall and die. The writing is clean and dry-eyed in contrast to the excesses of horror. Like the work of Primo Levi, this valuable, well-translated collection provides an important account of a prisoner's life at Auschwitz. All levels. H. Susskind; Monroe Community College

In1942, Charlotte Delbo (1913-85) and her husband were arrested in their Paris apartment, where they were preparing to distribute anti-German leaflets. He was executed, and she was deported first to Auschwitz and then to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Auschwitz and After, first published in France as three separate books (None of Us Will Return, Useless Knowledge, and The Measure of Our Days), is a memoir about her experiences in the camps. Delbo, a non-Jew, recounts the daily struggle to stay alive while besieged with hunger, thirst, abuse, fatigue, and despair. She also relates the recollections of survivors of her own work group and their difficulties in returning to a normal life, as well as her return to France after her liberation. A small portion of the memoir is written in the form of poetry. Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer has written a penetrating introduction to this masterpiece, in which he says that Delbo writes "not as a heroine but as a victim. Her language is exquisite, but the pain of her memories is not, and this may help to explain why her audience has never been very large." Finally translated into English, this unique memoir will be able to reach the larger audience that it deserves. --George Cohen

Working for the French Resistance, Delbo was arrested by the Nazis in 1942, imprisoned, and later sent to Auschwitz and Ravensbruck. A talented writer, she sought to preserve a record of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. This volume contains a trilogy: "None of Us Will Return" (written in 1946 but not published until 1965), "Useless Knowledge," and "The Measure of Our Days," originally published in 1970. Her writing is haunting, gracefully combining vignettes of poetry and poetic prose and enveloping the reader in an emotional whirlwind. There is a deceptive simplicity inherent in her understated but exceedingly powerful imagery. Lamont's translation is unusually sensitive and fluid, while Lawrence Langer's penetrating introductory essay provides both background material and a deserved tribute to the author. Highly recommended.‘Carol R. Glatt, VA Medical Ctr. Lib., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Translated into English for the first time in its entirety, a painful and moving trilogy by a member of the French resistance and survivor of Auschwitz. Delbo (19131985) was arrested in 1942 with her husband, Georges Dudach, who was executed almost immediately. Delbo was interned first in a French prison, then in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Ravensbrück. The trilogy's first two volumes, ``None of Us Will Return'' and ``Useless Knowledge,'' describe the author's time in prison and the concentration camps. In brief vignettes that flow in and out of poetry, Delbo tells of her terrible hunger and even more terrible thirst, the full days standing in the snow, the beatings, the endless parade of skeletal corpses. But at the same time the author acknowledges the futility of her task- -to explain the inexplicable. Why does she struggle against this paradox? The answer can be found in the text itself: Since ``none of us was meant to return,'' Delbo writes, by returning she has triumphed over her oppressors. Delbo brings a humanity to these familiar scenes of inhumanity through her vivid rendering of her comrades, and she eschews the philosophical musings of other Holocaust literature for an intimate account of daily life in the camps. The third book, ``The Measure of Our Days,'' is filled with stories of survivors after the war: the woman who could never get warm, no matter how many sweaters she wore; the man who came home to find his parents killed in a bombing and himself accused, wrongly, of betraying his resistance group; Delbo herself, who has recurring nightmares about escaping from the concentration camp and returning voluntarily--perhaps an allusion to her constant return to the camps in her writing. A profound testimonial.