Review: Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo

4 stars for Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo.

Auschwitz and After is a finely translated masterpiece that encompasses three volumes - Volume I None of Us will Return, Volume II Useless Knowledge and Volume III The Measure of Our Days. The entire book holds within itself one of the saddest accounts of living and breathing in the concentration camp in the history of mankind, and yet, the unique blend of prose and poetry gives a lyrical feeling of poignancy that stretches from sadness to beauty.

The book tells of the price the women from the French Resistance paid for their daring contributions in World War II. Of the 230 women sent to Auschwitz in January 1943, only 49 returned. Besides the daily struggle to stay alive in the concentration camp besieged by hunger, thirst, fatigue, abuse and despair, these women have to contend with debilitating diseases such typhus and dysentery that come about due to terrible living conditions. To survive against the odds, these women form groups and avoid being separated from one's group. The temptation to give up is high when one is alone, but when surrounded by others, one is able to endure and dare to hope. Members of the same group give support and take care of one another. However, there are still those who stop believing they will return home and these women are as good as dead. To stay alive, one has to make plans about going home. Hope keeps one alive.

After Auschwitz, those who survived continue to struggle. These survivors, yes, they return, they live and they are alive. Everything about them is the same, yet nothing is. Because nothing will ever be the same within those who survived Auschwitz for they carry the weight of the dead in their arms, in their heart and in their memories. These survivors, though liberated from their captors, are imprisoned by their memories of the dead. They find it difficult to talk to the living. And having conversed with death, they find everything pointless and grapple with the meaning of living. Through the author, we learn that surviving and returning is not the end. In fact, it is the beginning to living again. No one survives Auschwitz and returns unscathed. For those who return, it is a must to learn to endure their horrid past and adjust to living anew, otherwise they cannot move on.

This trilogy of a book is written for us to learn from the past so that history will not repeat itself ever again. Reading this book makes me appreciate even more for being born and living in a part of the world where there is peace and harmony.


Publisher: Yale University Press; Second edition
Publication date: 30 Sep 2014

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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.

*Blurb from Goodreads*

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