In March 1942, French police arrested Charlotte Delbo and her husband, the resistance leader Georges Dudach, on a charge of distributing anti-German leaflets in Paris. The French turned them over to the Gestapo, who imprisoned them. Dudach was executed by firing squad in May; Delbo remained in prison until January 1943, when she was deported to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbruck, where she remained until the end of the war.

This book - Delbo's profoundly moving vignettes, poems, and prose poems of life in the concentration camps and afterward - is a memoir of great literary value. It is a unique document by a female resistance leader, a non-Jew, and a remarkable writer who transforms the experience of the Holocaust into spare, austere, yet lyric prose.