In Auschwitz, memory meant life: remembering the humanity extinguished by the death camps and hoping to survive to tell what had been endured. Charlotte Delbo, a non-Jew sent to Auschwitz for being a member of the French resistance movement, recalls the poems, vignettes, and meditations that fed her companions' spirits, interweaving her experiences with the sufferings of others and depicting dignity and decency in the face of inhumanity.

This definitive translation is by Delbo's close friend, the author and theater critic Rosette Lamont, an expert on the works of Ionesco and Beckett. Lamont wrote that Delbo was, like Beckett, "a minimalist of infinite pain, a voice of conscience."

CHARLOTTE DELBO was traveling in South America when she learned of the fall of France to the Nazis. Upon returning home, she and her husband were imprisoned by the Gestapo. After the murder of her husband, Delbo was held for nine months before being deported to Auschwitz in January 1943. She was in her seventies when she died in 1985. Days and Memory, published posthumously, appeared as La mémoire et les jours later that same year.

ROSETTE LAMONT (1927–2012) was a theatre critic, author, translator, and teacher. She was a known for her expertise in the works of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. Her many works include The Two Faces of Ionesco and Ionesco's Imperatives, and Women on the Verge, highlighted the work of women playwrights whose voices, she rightly insisted, were not being heard. A close friend of Charlotte Delbo, she translated Delbo's Auschwitz and After in addition to Days and Memories. A close friend of Delbo, she considered her to be, like Beckett, 'a minimalist of infinite pain, a voice of conscience.'