Auschwitz and After is a first person account of life and survival in Birkenau by Charlotte Delbo, translated into English by Rose C. Lamont. 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" , "Useless Knowledge" ,... and "The Measure of Our Days" . 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. Her guiding principle was, as she regularly described it, Essayez de regarder.
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