Charlotte Delbo, working administratively in the theatre, came back to France in 1940 from touring abroad to join her husband, who was active in the Resistance. In 1942 both were arrested and her husband was subsequently shot, while she was sent in a convoy to Auschwitz where she managed to survive to the end of the war, though her only sister died there. Her memoir of this Dantesque ordeal, written in prose with occasional passages of free verse, is remarkably free from hysteria, exaggeration or self pity. Ironically, when she tried after her release to obtain legal redress against the two French policemen who had arrested her and her husband originally, she was told that they had later worked for the Resistance and so could not be prosecuted. Delbo herself died in 1985, aged 72, after nursing her dying, widowed father and without remarrying.