Auschwitz and After

The memoir of Charlotte Delbo, a French writer sent to Auschwitz for her resistance activities against the Nazi occupation of France and the Vichy government.

“Delbo’s exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time.”—Sara R. Horowitz, York University

Charlotte Delbo’s moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the postwar trauma of survivors, Auschwitz and After, is now a classic of Holocaust literature. Offering the rare perspective of a non-Jew, Delbo records moments of horror and of desperate efforts at mutual support, of the everyday deprivation and abuse experienced by everyone in the camps, and especially by children. Auschwitz and After conveys how a survivor must “carry the word” and continue to live after surviving one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century.

This second edition includes an updated and expanded introduction by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer.

“No memoir of those times is more sensitive and less sentimental.”—Geoffrey Hartman

“I find Rosette C. Lamont’s remarkable translation of Charlotte Delbo’s work perceptive, delicate, and poignant, in short: exceptional.”—Elie Wiesel

“Delbo’s exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time. The superb new introduction by Lawrence L. Langer illuminates the subtlety and complexity of Delbo’s meditation on memory, time, culpability, and survival, in the context of what Langer calls the ‘afterdeath’ of the Holocaust. Delbo’s powerful trilogy belongs on every bookshelf.”—Sara R. Horowitz, York University

Winner of the 1995 American Literary Translators Association Award