But You Did Not Come Back: A Memoir

By Marceline Loridan-Ivens and Judith Perrignon

A French woman’s heartrending account of her survival in a WWII Nazi concentration camp—and a tribute to her father who died there.
 
A runaway bestseller in France, But You Did Not Come Back has already been the subject of a French media storm and hailed as an important new addition to the library of books dealing with the Holocaust. It is the profoundly moving and poetic memoir by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, who at the age of fifteen was arrested in occupied France, along with her father. Later, in the camps, he managed to smuggle a note to her, a sign of life that made all the difference to Marceline—but he died in the Holocaust, while Marceline survived.
 
In But You Did Not Come Back, Marceline writes back to her father, the man whose death overshadowed her whole life. Although her grief never diminished in its intensity, Marceline ultimately found her calling, working as both an activist and a documentary filmmaker. But now, as France, and Europe in general, face growing anti-Semitism, Marceline feels pessimistic about the future. Her testimony is a memorial, a confrontation, and a deeply affecting personal story of a woman whose life was shattered and never totally rebuilt.
 
“But You Did Not Come Back is indisputably a story of survival . . . yet it is also a story of how trauma impacts through the generations.” —The Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9780802190659

Book preview

ButYouDidNotComeBackHC_front.jpg

BUT YOU

DID NOT

COME

BACK

BUT YOU

DID NOT

COME

BACK

MARCELINE

LORIDAN-IVENS

WITH JUDITH PERRIGNON

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY

SANDRA SMITH

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2015

Translation copyright © 2016 by Sandra Smith

Jacket design by Royce M. Becker

Jacket artwork: Courtesy of the author

Author photograph by JFPAGA © Grasset

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New York, NY 10011 or [e-mail].

First published in French as Et tu n’es pas revenu by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8021-2450-0

eISBN 978-0-8021-9065-9

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

BUT YOU

DID NOT

COME

BACK

I was quite a cheerful person, you know, in spite of what happened to us. We were happy in our own way, as a revenge against sadness, so we could still laugh. People liked that about me. But I’m changing. It isn’t bitterness, I’m not bitter. It’s just as if I were already gone. I listen to the radio, to the news, so I’m often afraid because I know what’s happening. I don’t belong here anymore. Perhaps it’s an acceptance of death, or a lack of will. I’m slowing down.

And so I think about you. I can picture the note you managed to get to me back there, a stained little scrap of paper, almost rectangular, torn on one end. I can see your writing, slanted to the right, and four or five sentences that I can no longer remember. I’m sure of one line, the first: My darling little girl, and the last line too, your signature: Shloïme. But what came in between, I don’t know anymore. I try to remember and I can’t. I try, but it’s like a deep hole and I don’t want to fall in. So I concentrate on other things: Where did you get that paper and pencil? What did you promise the man who brought me your message? That may seem unimportant today, but then, that piece of paper, folded in four, your writing, the steps of the man walking from you to me, proved that we still existed. Why don’t I remember? All I have left is Shloïme and his darling little girl. They were deported together. You to Auschwitz, me to Birkenau.

Afterwards, history linked those two places with a simple hyphen. Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some people just say Auschwitz, the largest death camp of the Third Reich. Time obliterates what separated us, it distorts everything. Auschwitz was built behind a little town; Birkenau was in the countryside. It was only when you went out through the large gate with your work detail that you could catch a glimpse of the other camp. The men from Auschwitz looked toward us and thought: That’s where our wives, our sisters, our daughters died; and that’s where we’ll end up, in the gas chambers. And I, I looked toward you and wondered, Is it a camp or a town? Has he gone to the gas chamber? Is he still alive? Between us stood fields, prison blocks, watchtowers, barbed wire, crematoriums, and above all else, the unbearable uncertainty of what was happening to us all. It was as if we were separated by thousands of kilometers. The books say it was barely three.

There were very few prisoners who could move between the two camps. He was an electrician; he changed the odd lightbulb in our dark prison block. He appeared one evening. Or it might have been a Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I was there when he came, I heard my name, Rozenberg! He came in, he asked for Marceline. That’s me, I replied. He handed me the scrap of paper, saying: This is a message from your father.

We only had a few seconds, we could have been killed for that simple act. And I had nothing to answer you with, no paper, no pencil, objects no longer existed in our lives—they formed mountains in the storehouses where we worked, objects belonged to the dead. We were slaves: all we had was a spoon wedged into a seam, a pocket, or a shoulder strap, and a band tied around our waist—a bit of fabric torn from our clothes or a thin rope found on the ground—to hang our metal bowl from. So I took out the gold coin I’d stolen while I was sorting out the clothes. I’d found it in a hem, hidden as if it were some poor man’s treasure,

Reviews for But You Did Not Come Back

[fliss88_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

100 pages to tell her story, that's all she took. Written with sadness and yet much strength. Marceline tells her story of survival from Auschwitz-Birkenau with a quiet dignity. This is her personal narrative to her father. They were arrested together but sadly he did not return. She talks to him constantly, telling him all about her life since the camps, all the things he's missed seeing and sharing with her. I thought Marceline's frankness and empathy had a powerful calmness. One passage has really stuck with me, I don't think I'll ever forget it - "Fifteen years later.........I hadn't become an optimist. I would shiver in the waiting room of a train station. In hotels, I refused to go into any bathroom that had a shower. I couldn't stand the sight of factory chimneys. When you've come back, you're aware of such things as long as you live." We have no idea of the horrors endured by these innocents. Marceline died 18th September 2018

[lineells · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

BUT YOU DID NOT COME BACK is a unique and open stor.....i almost wrote story.....MEMOIR. A story has the possibility of being made-up. As much as we all may WISH away the holocaust and make it a story, it happened. Marceline Loridan Ivens has written from her heart of what became her gut-wrenching life, telling us of what DID happen to her and her father. Their capture, the prisons and camps....of his last message to her. HIStory and HERstory. The evil of the camps, the fears and pain, and unimaginable torture of existence ....."My memory had to shatter, otherwise I would not have been able to go on living."

[shancroley1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am a World War ll History Buff. This book is unlike any I have every read. It is heart wrenching, sad but also wonderful. The author should win the Nobel Peace Prize.

[anniemod · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Most of the Holocaust survivors wrote their memoirs in the first few decades after the end of WWII. Some new ones had been trickling in since then - some found now, more rarely written now. Marceline Loridan-Ivens waited 7 decades after she was liberated from Birkenau. She survived the ordeal but her father never came back - and now, close to her end, she decided it is about time to write him a letter. A letter to a man that was with her for a very short time; a man whose fate noone knows. And the letter is heart breaking. Writing with all the knowledge that she acquired in the decades since WWII, Loridan-Ivens's story does not sound as bright-eyed and optimistic as the older accounts - she had seen the changes failing, the racism and antisemitism raring their ugly heads over and over again. But deep in her heart, she is still the young girl that went to hell and came back - and lost her father. Her recalling the scenes of their last meetings stay with you (and mentioning that these scenes had been told before in other people's stories - for these meetings had given hope to a lot of people); her raw loss and love even that many years later is self-evident. It is part memoir of a woman, part recollection of times that should have never happened. But it also has her story - because even after the camps, after she came back, being free was not easy; dealing with her mother (who was never sent to a camp) while missing her father opened the wounds over and over. Even if you are tired of WWII memoirs, you need to find the time and read this letter. An old woman, a young girl, none of them, both of them. It is haunting. And so very well done.

[tangledthread · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

At age 85, Marceline writes in epistolary style to her father who died in the German concentration camps in WWII. She and her father were taken at the same time, when she was 15, while the rest of the family escaped that fate. The writing reveals the author's lingering sense of dislocation as a result of this horrific experience and the constant longing she has for her lost father, the one who would be able to understand.When I finished this book, I couldn't help but think of the The Diary of Anne Frank, and thought that Ms. Loridan-Ivens has provided us an opportunity to reflect on another ending to that story....but still no happy ending.

[welsh_eileen2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A deeply moving, heartbreaking account of a French father and daughter arrested and taken, he to Aschwitz and she to Birkenau.
This is a letter written by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, the author of this harrowing story, to her father who she ever saw again.
It is very hard to read,but I'm so glad I finished it.
I was given a digital copy of this story by the publisher Faber and Faber via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review

[reinadecopiaypega · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really loved this book !

It is not your typical Holocaust memoir only filled with horror, death, suicide and barbarism. The whole basis of this very short book is that her father managed somehow to sneak a tiny note to her while she was in Dachau and he was in Auschwitz and the whole short book is her answer to his few short lines written on a tiny scrap of paper that she could never figure out where he got it from, nor the pencil to write with.

A beautiful book. A

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What can I say after reading this? Words seem so trite after what Marceline and many, many, too many others went through. She is only fifteen when their chateau in France is overtaken by the Nazis. While most of her family escapes, she and her beloved father are captured. Taken first to Drancy, they are separated and he is taken to Auschwitz, she to the neighboring camp Birkenau. He manages to send her once last note.How do you live after going through such extreme trauma? Never forgetting, always grieving for the father who never returns, people and family who cannot possibly understand. So heartbreaking, such strength just to get up in the morning. Am in awe of all she accomplished in her life. Very profound, emotionally stirring. Unforgettable.ARC from Netgalley.

[theyodamom · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Marceline, was taken to a camp with her father when she was just 16. She writes of her nightmare, her community, her country, her family, but mostly the effect of losing her father and his dreams in such a way. Her painful memories that never diminished, while everyone kept telling her to just forget. Those who did not walk in her skin could never fully understand their bond and the cost of the break.This is her story a feel of what being in her skin felt like during and after the war. Her life was forever altered and never safe and free. The story is beautiful, her words direct and full of heartbreak. I finished it still wishing he might come home. This war left few happy ever after stories. I will never forget her,

[lisa2013_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thanks to my Goodreads friend Chrissie for convincing me to read this book. Because it was short and I didn’t want it to languish on my to-read shelf, I borrowed it from the library. It never even got put on my currently reading shelf because even though I’m in the middle of a can’t put it down novel I decided to start it, a bit after midnight and ended up staying up half of the night reading it, until I had to sleep, so I finished up later in the morning. It was worth taking a few hours away from my novel to read it.This book gives me hope that perhaps there are other elderly Holocaust survivors who will write other worthy memoirs.This spare little book packs a punch, and it’s amazing how much the author is able to cover in this memoir, written as a letter to her father. She’s now an elderly woman. She was a Jew in France and at 15 she was sent to the concentration camps. She writes about her experiences in the camps, a bit about her life prior to that, and a lot about the scope of her entire life. While it’s true what other reviewers here have said that she hasn’t been able to get past the camps, nor have her surviving friends and relatives, I was actually impressed with how much she’s done in her life, how much good, despite the scars she continues to carry, despite how greatly her family was impacted, both during and after the war. She definitely makes a point of addressing the continued anti-Semitism in modern times and throughout various eras too, and the entirely of the book is what made it feel very important to me. I’m so glad that she wrote it and got it published.I wish I could have read it in its original French but as far as I could tell it was a fine translation. I mostly appreciate her honesty, as her way of expressing it cuts right to the heart of all that’s important, every time, in every way.As I was reading I thought I might assign 4 stars to this book because I assumed I’d want more than what was contained within its 100 pages. By the time I got to the end though it felt complete. I can’t give it less than 5 stars. In a way it’s a slight book, but what’s there is brilliant and important. Outstanding book!Note to self: Her father originally came from Poland and this author’s maiden name is Rozenberg, meaning mountain rose or mountain of roses. One of my grandparents was a Jew whose parents (My great grandparents) were born in Hungary, and their last name was Rosenberg, with the same meaning, just a different spelling. I always think of how the countries’ borders have changed over time. I know that this is a common name, but I’m interested in genealogy, and I always wonder who might be related to me, however distantly. I also recently found out that two of my other grandparents had ancestors from Poland, one might have been born there himself. Different surnames though.Highly recommended for readers who like reading Holocaust memoirs, coming of age stories, historians, today’s young people high school and up.Notable quotes:“Surviving makes other people’s tears unbearable. You might drown in them.” “...our family became a place where you screamed for help but no one heard, not ever.” “...our history, the history of European Jews...they will never forgive us for the evil they've done to us”