Auschwitz and After - Charlotte Delbo

Auschwitz and After (Auschwitz, et après) is a first person account of life and survival in Birkenau by Charlotte Delbo. Delbo, who had returned to occupied France to work in the French resistance alongside her husband, was sent to the camp for her activities. 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 really a trilogy of separately published shorter works: "None of Us Will Return" (Aucun de nous ne reviendra), "Useless Knowledge" (La connaissance inutile), and "The Measure of Our Days" (Mesure des nos jours). 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.

"O You Who Know," ("Vous qui saviez") a poem early in the trilogy, challenges the reader with the inadequacy of what they already understand:

O you who know
Could you know that hunger makes the eyes sparkle?
While thirst makes them dim?
You who know
Could you know that you can see your mother dead
Without shedding a tear?
You who know
Could you know how in the morning you crave death
Only to fear it by evening?
"Horror cannot be circumscribed," she concludes, and throughout the trilogy she regularly expresses doubt as to whether she can truly tell the reader what it was like, whether anyone can.

You don't believe what we say
because
if what we say were true
we wouldn't be here to say it.
we'd have to explain
the inexplicable
"I am not sure that what I wrote is true," she wrote in the epigraph to the first volume, "I am certain that it is truthful." Resolving those two statements makes reading Auschwitz and After an advanced reading experience that more are slowly discovering.