Waiting. Expecting the worst. Capturing horrific images. Hoping against all reason. Spring 1945, the war is over. The narrator is waiting in Paris for her husband Robert L., who was taken to a German concentration camp as a member of the Résistance. She studies the lists of survivors, alternately imagining his death and his return, on the brink of collapse. Discovered and rescued by chance in a pile of corpses in Dachau, he is eventually brought back, emaciated to 37 kilograms. She can hardly bear to see him, nursing him back to health for many weeks, but the love is gone. And the pain remains. Autobiography or fiction? Whether the author actually wrote this text during her waiting for her then-husband Robert Antelme or whether it was filtered and written many years later is hardly significant.