posted on 17 Jun 2016

But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens

At times it seems hard to believe that there is anything new to say about the Holocaust, and even less likely that this might come from amongst its last living witnesses. But Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ tiny memoir, But You Did Not Come Back, disproves this view and reading its exactly 100 pages is a searing experience. What it says most loudly is what William Faulkner said in another connection: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

In 1944, at the age of fifteen, Loridan-Ivens was arrested in occupied France along with her father – a polish-born Jew who had settled in France – and deported, he to Auschwitz, she to Birkenau. In the period that they spent there, she saw her father twice (on one occasion they managed to speak), and received a smuggled note from him. And then he was never seen again, and Loridan-Ivens was left to imagine how he met his death, what his life might have been like had he lived, and what he would have made of the lives of those who survived.

And that, essentially, is the substance of this book – a love letter to her father, an accounting, an expiation of guilt.

But this runs the risk of over-simplifying the book, for it is also nuanced and complex and far-reaching. It is also about what it has meant to be a survivor, and how the Holocaust sickened and killed families without their ever having been in the camps – as happened to her own family. Her younger brother descended into depression, alcoholism and mental illness, committing suicide at roughly the age their father had been when the Nazis killed him. Two years after her brother’s death, her mother died. A few weeks later, her older sister committed suicide when she was sixty.

I bought this book based solely on reviews. To my shame, I knew nothing of its extraordinary author, who is 88 this year, and nothing of her career as a writer and documentary film-maker, both on her own and with Joris Ivens, her husband of thirteen years.

Loridan-Ivens is outspoken and possessed of a steely determination, and that voice is occasionally audible in this short work. She did “not become an optimist” – as if that would have been a failure of judgement, perhaps even a betrayal – but in order to live, she says, one must find something to believe in, and what she found to believe in was that “it was possible to change the world”.

It was this view that led her to spend years in underground political activity supporting the Algerian liberation struggle, and later, with her husband Joris Ivens, to document the Chinese revolution and the struggles of Vietnam. But her view of this revolutionary period is now a profoundly chastened one. She was “a woman under the influence”, she says, as much in  thrall to Ivens as she was to the power of social transformation. He was “the school I’d never finished”, his was “the love that would save me”, the antidote to her father’s absence; indeed, Ivens was a man her father himself would have loved, she says. But “we were seeking the idea of revolution itself, in vain”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Loridan-Ivens’ relationship to her country, France, is complicated. She refuses to forget that the country her father adopted sent him to die in Poland, and believes that the same indifference to French antisemitism that prevailed during and after the war is resurgent today. In a radio interview after the killings at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices in January 2015, and just after the huge public rally called by the French president, she stunned her interviewer by saying, “Do you believe the French would have gone into the streets if only Jews had been killed?”

76,500 French Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Marceline Loridan-Ivens is “one of the 160 still alive out of the 2,500 who came back”. This book is the bleak, unflinchingly honest and perhaps despairing testimony of a Jewish woman whose experience stands in for millions. It should on no account be missed.

 

Alun Severn

June 2016