But You Did Not Come Back
Marceline Loridan-Ivens
Faber
Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ memoir is a devastating account of her life as a Jewish survivor of WWII. Deported with her father from occupied France to Auschwitz-Birkenau at the age of 16, Marceline faces the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi death camps, and is irredeemably altered by her experiences there. The title refers to Marceline’s father, who predicts their ultimate separation: ‘“You might come back, because you’re young, but I will not come back.” That prophecy burned into my mind as violently and definitively as the number 78750 tattooed on my left arm a few weeks later.’ Marceline’s younger self, her identity before the Holocaust, is also irrevocably lost. She refers to the 10th of May 1945, the day she was liberated, as the day she was born, and asks, ‘Why was I incapable of living once I’d returned to the world?’ She fixates on a letter smuggled to her by other prisoners from her father, but she can’t remember his words. The Nazis’ regime of forced labour diminishes Marceline’s identity, the root of which is her relationship with her father: ‘I served death. I’d been its hauler. Then its pickaxe. Your words slipped away, disappeared, even though I must have read them many times. They spoke of a world that was no longer mine.’
The author has worked on films and documentaries dealing with the Holocaust, notably with her late husband, the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. The direct, detailed narration of But You Did Not Come Back suggests Loridan-Ivens’ documentarian skill. Throughout, she vociferously defies the temptation to forget the pain she suffered along with millions of others, not only at the hands of the Nazis but also through the complicit French government. The book naturally makes for difficult and at times harrowing reading, but it is a dignified, eloquent and courageous telling of a supremely important story.
Words: Anna-Grace Scullion
