Synopses & Reviews
Written by a member of the French resistance who became an important literary figure in postwar France, this moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the post-war experiences of women survivors has become a key text for Holocaust studies classes. This second edition includes an updated and expanded introduction by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer. “In this finely translated trilogy, Charlotte Delbo renders with economy and nuance pictures from the hell of Auschwitz. What she recalls in prose and verse would be unbearable except for the very precision of thought and sense she brings to it. No memoir of those times is more sensitive and less sentimental.”—Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University Winner of the 1995 American Literary Translators Association Award
Review
“I find Rosette C. Lamont’s remarkable translation of Charlotte Delbo’s work perceptive, delicate, and poignant—in short: exceptional.”—Elie Wiesel
Review
“For 75 years, Nazisms victims have told their affliction. This will carry on. Meanwhile, no other “Auschwitz” writer than Charlotte Delbo has so clearly shown human detail and human depth.”—John Felstiner, author of Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems
Review
“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
Synopsis
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
Synopsis
Written by a member of the French resistance who became an important literary figure in postwar France, this moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the post-war experiences of women survivors has become a key text for Holocaust studies classes. This second edition includes an updated and expanded introduction by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer.
About the Author
Charlotte Delbo (19131985) was the author of numerous plays and essays. Rosette C. Lamont (19272012) was a professor of French and comparative literature at Queens College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Lawrence L. Langer is Professor of English emeritus at Simmons College in Boston.