Charlotte Delbo was born in 1913 near Paris, in Vigneux-sur-Seine. The daughter of Italian immigrants, at the age of seventeen she began working as a secretary in the French capital. In 1932 she joined the Communist Youth movement, and two years later she met Georges Dudach, very active within the party, whom she married in 1936. A year later, she became Louis Jouvet's secretary. , then director of the Théâtre de l'Athénée. On March 2, 1942, Charlotte and her husband were arrested by the special brigades of the French police. Delbo she was imprisoned in La Santé, where she last saw Dudach on May 23, the same day he was shot. She was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 24, 1943 in a convoy along with two hundred and thirty other women, most of them members, like her, of the Resistance. At the beginning of 1944 she was transferred again, this time to the Ravensbrück camp, and in April 1945 she was released, after twenty-seven months of captivity. Of the two hundred and thirty women in the convoy that arrived at Auschwitz, forty-nine returned. A few months later, while she was recovering in a Swiss sanatorium, Delbo began writing None of Us Will Return, which would become, twenty-five years later, the first volume of the Auschwitz and After trilogy. In 1947, she began working for the UN in Geneva and lived in Switzerland for twelve years. Upon her return to Paris she worked for the CNRS as an assistant to the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, whom she had met in 1932. There she died in 1985, aged seventy-two.