Ebook: But You Did Not Come Back: A Memoir
Author: Loridan Marceline, Smith Sandra
- Tags: Loridan Marceline -- 1928-, Holocaust Jewish (1939-1945) -- Personal narratives., Holocaust survivors., Fathers and daughters.
- Year: 2016
- Publisher: Faber & Faber Childrens Books
- Language: English, French
- epub
Marceline Loridan-Ivens was just fifteen when she was arrested by the Vichy government's militia, along with her father. He prepared her for the worst, telling her that he would not return. They were soon separated. The three kilometres between her father in Auschwitz and herself in Birkenau were an insurmountable distance, and yet he managed to send her a small note via an electrician in the camp - a sign of life.
In But You Did Not Come Back, Marceline writes a letter to the father she would never know as an adult, to the man whose death enveloped her whole life. Her testimony is a haunting and challenging reminder of one of the worst crimes humanity has ever seen, and an affecting personal story of a woman whose life was shattered and never totally rebuilt.
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Review
Praise for But You Did Not Come Back:
“A profoundly moving testimony of the challenges of survival, a wake-up call to those who ignore the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, and a stunning tribute to her late father, But You Did Not Come Back is heartbreaking, important, and unlike anything that has preceded it.”—André Aciman
“I read this book in one sitting, it was unputdownable, an astonishing account of a family caught up in the Holocaust’s turbulent wake, so deeply sad and very, very moving. Most striking to me was the brutal honesty and clarity of her relationship with her father who, despite his murder by the Nazis, is still very much with her more than fifty years later, and the question, so troubling, as to whether it would have been better if he had come back instead of her.”—Thomas Harding, author of *Hanns and Rudolf*
“The year has barely started but already one of the most beautiful books of the year has been published. Short, dense, powerful, in a word: overwhelming, with a simplicity of expression and a skill for creating an image. . . . you will read it in one sitting.”—*Le Parisien*
“In this tormented time, this troubled period where the extreme right is showing its teeth all over Europe, Marceline Loridan-Ivens gives us a valuable lesson. . . . You read this with tears welling up in your eyes. . . . I’ll say it again: read it. . . . [An] important book, [one] book you’ll never forget.”—*Challenges Magazine*
“A final, poignant address . . . In the pages of this book . . . words are spoken which have not been spoken before.”—*Le Monde des Livres*
“In literature, every so often, there comes a miracle, a book, a text, an author, a writing style, a way of recounting something, refusing any pathos and any exposition, that says things about life and death. I’m evoking But You Did Not Come Back. . . . [A] brief and marvelous opus.”—*Le Magazine Littéraire*
“Her testimony is of an extraordinary force . . . The reasons for the wonderful success of this book in France are many. The book owes its reception in the first instance to the quality of the story. Marceline Loridan-Ivens, in spite of the darkness of the events described, avoids any kind of pathos. In radio and television interviews after publication, she has shown an extraordinary pugnacity . . . Now more than ever, it is necessary that we listen to the testimony of this survivor.”—*Le Figaro*
“Film-maker, writer, activist, Marceline Loridan-Ivens was deported at the age of 15, together with the father. She survived, but he did not. Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, she takes up a dialogue with him, in But You Did Not Come Back . . . You can still very clearly see a little girl in the rebellious, cheerful, and slightly cloaked face of this petite woman of eighty-six.”—Elle (France)
“A precious story, seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz. . . . [Loridan-Ivens] is speaking about the France of today, the country where [in January, after the Charlie Hebdo attacks] four people were killed in a grocery store because they were Jews. Her testimony is perhaps one of the last, and more than ever it deserves to be read and heard.”—*Les Inrockuptibles*
“The words of Marceline Loridan-Ivens . . . have an exceptional force. You have to read these words surrounded by a reverence which is appropriate, but in fact from the very first line, a silence descends, and nothing matters until you have read the last line, and no one could forget those words. You might think that after Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, Claude Lanzmann, there was nothing left to say. But Marceline Loridan-Ivens proves the opposite. Her book gets its force from her anger and her pain, which are still completely intact, even amplified by this ‘time that doesn’t pass.’”—*Le Journal du Dimanche*
“A dry, tough, violent book . . . The era of the first-hand witnesses of victims of this genocide is drawing to a close and this testimony, which is absolutely singular, will stun and chill the reader.”—*Le Banquet des Mots*
“This book shook France, and it will shake Germany too . . . A declaration of love to the father she lost in the camps that will leave no-one unmoved. Above all, But You Did Not Come Back is the testimony of a relentless fighter, describing in hard-to-bear detail her survival of the barbed wire, the railway platforms, the crematoriums, and also what came after that: the life as someone who survived. The arc that Marceline Loridan-Ivens traces in her book reaches from the early postwar period to the Paris of 1968 to post-Charlie-Hebdo France . . . That her return from Auschwitz did not bring her peace is the dark core of her account.”—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany)
“Simultaneously cynical and ardent . . . hypnotic.”—*Globe and Mail*
About the Author
MARCELINE LORIDAN-IVENS was born in 1928. She has worked as an actress, a screenwriter, and a director. She directed The Birch-Tree Meadow in 2003, starring Anouk Aimée, as well as several documentaries with her late husband Joris Ivens. In 2014, she returned to Avignon in the south of France to make a film about the prison where she was detained before being deported with her father to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Now 87 years old, she lives in Paris.
SANDRA SMITH is the translator of Suite Française and eleven other novels by Irène Némirovsky, as well as a new translation of Camus's L'Etranger. She has been awarded the French-American Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize and the PEN Translation Prize. She divides her time between Cambridge, England, and upstate New York.