Dying, Delbo continues, might bring a giddy instant in which one could feel "it is over, no more suffering and struggling, or requiring the impossible from a heart at the end of its resources...a bliss one did not know existed." The very lack of reverence for death, however, brought Delbo back to life--but only partly: "I wish to die but not to be carried on the small stretcher. Not to be carried by on the short stretcher with hanging legs and head, and naked under a tattered blanket. I do not wish to be carried on the small stretcher." Because Auschwitz reduced the reasons for living to that extent, Delbo concluded that "it is far better to know nothing if you wish to go on living."

As for love, after Auschwitz it is no longer so tragically triumphant as conventional wisdom would have it. The phrase "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" does not apply here. To an overwhelming degree, Delbo suggests, the Nazis defeated love. Granted a last meeting with her husband before he was killed, she reports that they found their separation compounded by the only act of love that seemed possible: mutual deception, pretending to each other not to know the fate awaiting them.

In Auschwitz, love could not be remembered well. There, memory itself was a luxury that energy scarcely permitted. When it did loom up, Delbo laments, memory often added pain too great for those already living beyond their emotional means.

And so for Delbo, as for every other survivor, came complex, searching questions. What Delbo called useless knowledge left her to wonder if her survival was worth it. Her brutally honest and profoundly melancholy testimony is not the same as that of others--Jews or non-Jews--who endured the Nazi camps. However, it amplifies one of the Holocaust's key repercussions, an impact or reverberation that deserves thoughtful attention: Especially after Auschwitz, care must be taken to resist utilizing the Holocaust as a sort of philosophical lever to affirm pre-Holocaust ideals and religious faith.