Days & Memory (Paperback)

In this her last book, completed shortly before her death, Delbo becomes the living voice of memory, conjuring a series of poems and vignettes, dialogues and meditations that interweave her experience in the death camp with the suffering of others around the world who bear remembering. These scenes comprise a comprehensive picture of man's inhumanity to man (and woman) in our time, and of the power of human dignity, decency, and the hope to survive. Here are memories from the German concentration camps that have figured strongly in Delbo's previous writings, with them are images from the Second World War: sketches of the Polish partisans in Warsaw and the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto; and depictions of Parisian Jews rounded up by the French police, and of the Germans' slaughter of all the men in a Greek village. Delbo also recalls events in Greece and Spain that occurred decades after the war. She shows us the women of Buenos Aires assembled to remember and protest the disappearing of their fathers, husbands, and sons. And she appeals to memory on behalf of prisoners lost to Soviet gulags, the most forgotten of the forgotten. Dark, by turns stark and lyrical, dispassionate and fiery, Days and Memory compels our attention -- and rewards it with beauty, sorrow, and hope.