Days and Memory

In Auschwitz, memory meant life: remembering the humanity extinguished by the death camps and hoping to survive to tell what had been endured. In Auschwitz, Charlotte Delbo collected from memory the plays, stories, and poems that fed her companions' spirits. There she committed to memory all that she would one day describe for future generations. In Days and Memory, her last book, completed shortly before her death, Delbo becomes the voice of memory. Poems and vignettes, dialogues and meditations, interweave her experience in the death camp with the sufferings of others around the world, depicting the power of dignity and decency in the face of inhumanity. A remarkable achievement, stark and lyrical, passionate and fiery, this virtuoso performance demands attention-and rewards readers with beauty, sorrow, and hope.

In poems, stories, and dialogues, Delbo interweaves memories of Auschwitz with scenes from Spain, Greece, Argentina, and the Soviet Union.

Publishers Weekly

After France fell to the Germans during WW II, Delbo and her husband, Communist and Resistance leader Georges Dudach, were imprisoned. Dudach was shot and killed, and Delbo was sent to Auschwitz. Days and Memory , originally published in France soon after the author's death in 1985, is a testimony of atrocities experienced and witnessed by Delbo in the concentration camp and includes stories recounted by others of suffering borne both during and after the war. Delbo ( None of Us Will Return ) is an objective interpreter of these horrors, allowing the scenes to speak for themselves, yet grief and sorrow are palpable on every page. Unforgettable is the sketch in which a woman, called out of the barracks during the night by the roll-call siren, searches desperately with the help of other women to locate her galoshes in the snow, while the barracks leader swings at them with her club. The most harrowing piece commemorates the mass execution of all of the men in a Greek village by the Germans in 1943 and the women who must find a burial place for 1300 bodies. (Aug.)

Charlotte Delbo was traveling in South America when she learned of the fall of France to the Nazis. Upon returning home, she and her husband were imprisoned by the Gestapo. After the murder of her husband, Delbo was held for nine months before being deported to Auschwitz in January 1943. She was in her seventies when she died in 1985. Days and Memory, published posthumously, appeared as La mémoire et les jours later that same year.