Delbo, who had returned to occupied France to work in the French resistance alongside her husband, was sent to Auschwitz for her activities.

Her memoir uses unconventional, almost experimental, narrative techniques to not only convey the experience of Auschwitz but how she and her fellow survivors coped in the years afterwards.

The middle volume concerns the surviving Frenchwomen's slow journey back to freedom after they were moved from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück and ultimately turned over to the Swedish Red Cross, and is somewhat more linear.

"[2] She knew that ordinary language could not begin to convey what she had experienced, and drew on her theatrical background and contemporary literary trends to produce a more postmodern text built around short vignettes, poems both titled and untitled and narrative fragments replete with repetition and sentence fragments that feel more like poetry.

The end result has the effect of conveying the violence done to reason and orderly language by the horror of Auschwitz.