But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens

Author:Marceline Loridan-Ivens [Marceline Loridan-Ivens]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571328031
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2015-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Jacqueline always sends me flowers on May 10, as if it were my birthday. Every year and that moves me very much. We’re very close, different but considerate of each another. We’re the only two left. May 10 is the date the Russians liberated me from Theresienstadt. I was born that day. I know that Jacqueline sends the flowers for me but also for her father.

My return is synonymous with your absence. To such an extent that I wanted to obliterate it, to disappear like you did. I tried to drown myself in the Seine two years later, the year Henri got married. It happened a little farther along from the Quai Saint-Michel: I’d climbed over the parapet and was about to throw myself in when a man stopped me. Then I got tuberculosis; I was sent to a chic sanatorium in Montana, Switzerland. Mama sometimes came to see me. I couldn’t stand her impatience, the way she had of ordering me to get well and to forget. I was such a burden. I tried to kill myself a second time.

Yet in the camp, I did everything I could to stay alive. Never allowed myself to believe that death would mean peace. Never became that girl I’d seen throw herself against the electric fence. She wasn’t the only one, it had become a common expression “to go to the fence,” to die quickly, electrocuted or riddled with bullets from the machine guns in the watchtower, ending up in the deep pit dug just in front of the barbed wire fences. Never gave up the will to live, never became like the women who let themselves go, choosing to neglect themselves, a gradual detachment from their bodies, a slower death. They began by not saving some of the water from the bottom of their bowl to wash themselves with, they stopped eating, withdrew. They were called Muslims, I don’t know why, another word the Polish women used, perhaps because of the blankets they pulled over their heads. Soon they were even more emaciated than us; they couldn’t work anymore and were sent to the gas chamber.

I held on. I did. I fought off sickness and the temptation to let myself go under. For the first time in my life, I fasted on Yom Kippur, to feel more Jewish, to remain dignified in the face of the SS. I made up all sorts of strategies to survive. I might have even started to do that in the train. Do you remember? We had just arrived somewhere, we were exhausted, silent, it was dawn, the train slowed down, I climbed up on someone’s shoulders, looked out of the small window; I saw a group of women walking in rows of five, they all seemed to be wearing the same dress, they all had red scarves on their heads, so I said: “We’re going to have costumes here.” I used words from civilization to describe what would happen to us; I preferred that to the absolute silence that had overwhelmed you and the others.

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