Arrested by collaborating French police on March 2, 1942, the couple was handed over to the Germans, who imprisoned the two separately. Delbo had a brief visit with her husband just before a firing squad executed him on May 23. A prisoner in France until her deportation, Delbo describes her Auschwitz arrival in January 1943 as follows: "The doors of the cattle cars were pushed open, revealing the edge of an icy plain. It was a place from before geography. Where were we? We were to find out--later, at least two months hence; we, that is those of us who were still alive two months later--that this place was called Auschwitz. We couldn't have given it a name."

Those words come from Delbo's superb trilogy, Auschwitz et après (Auschwitz and After), whose anguished visual descriptions and profound reflections on memory make it an unrivaled Holocaust testimony. Its three parts begin with Aucun de nous ne reviendra (None of Us Will Return), which she wrote in 1946 after she had been released to the Red Cross from Ravensbrück, a Nazi camp for women. She recuperated in Sweden and then returned to France. Delbo waited nearly 20 years, however, before she allowed None of Us Will Return to be published in 1965. Parts of Une connaissance inutile (Useless Knowledge) were also written shortly after Delbo's return to France, but this second volume in the trilogy did not appear until 1970. Its sequel, Mesure de nos jours (The Measure of Our Days), soon followed.