None of Us Will Return

Plot

First published in French as "Aucun de nous ne reviendra" in 1965. Charlotte Delbo joined the Resistance movement at the very beginning of the Nazi occupation in France. She was arrested in 1942 and deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Delbo's recounting of her experiences in Auschwitz moves outside the documentary studies and reports by condensing the tragic essence of a series of memories into spare, taut free verse and rhythmic prose. Through her voice we enter into the world of endless agony, where all individuals have been reduced to anonymity and bound together in the wordless fraternity of those doomed to die as mere statistical quantities. The collective horror becomes the background for the intense, specific memories of one woman who had the will to endure and now the courage to remember. What distinguishes her book from the many other accounts is a style which re-creates but simultaneously transcends the horrors of the events described.