Auschwitz and After

Auschwitz and After is a first person account of life and survival in Birkenau. Charlotte Delbo had returned to occupied France to work in the Resistance alongside her husband. 1943, she and 229 other Frenchwomen, imprisoned for their resistance activities, were sent to Auschwitz. Her memoir uses unconventional, almost experimental, narrative techniques to not only convey the experience of Auschwitz but how she and her fellow survivors coped in the years afterwards. Auschwitz and After is a trilogy of separately published shorter works. Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return) was completed in 1946 and published in 1965. Une connaissance inutile (Useless Knowledge), written in 1946 and 1947, was published in 1970. The final volume, Mesure de nos jours (The Measure of Our Days) appeared in 1971. The first and last volumes deal with Auschwitz as lived and remembered, respectively, and do not entirely follow linear time. The middle volume concerns the surviving Frenchwomen's slow journey back to freedom after they were moved from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück and ultimately turned over to the Swedish Red Cross, and is somewhat more linear.