But You Did Not Come Back.

[Lia]

Some highlights from But You Did Not Come Back
Marceline Loridan-Ivens

I wore a dead girl’s vest, another girl’s skirt, the shoes of yet another. But you have to be really alive for objects and clothes to remind you of someone.


Then we were sent to the ditches. We had to dig them with pickaxes. For a long time I told people they were near the kitchens, for fifty years I stuck stubbornly to that lie, told it to others and especially to myself. It was my friend Frida who made me remember the truth. “They were near the kitchens,” I said. “No, you’re making that up, they were right next to the gas chamber.” She was right.


I dug the ditches where the bodies of fifty distant relatives from Lodz would burn. I lived in the present, in the next heave of my pickaxe or the moment when Mengele, the camp’s devil, made us undress and decided who would go to the gas chamber.



They fled toward the forest by cutting through the barbed-wire fences, they called out to us, begged us to follow them, but we just watched them, exhausted, incapable of following. Anything good no longer seemed to apply to us; it was too late. They were recaptured and killed.


Your letter arrived too late as well. It probably spoke to me of hope and love, but there was no humanity left in me, I’d killed the little girl, I was digging right near the gas chambers, every one of my actions contradicted and buried your words. 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.



Mama very quietly asked me if I’d been raped. Was I still a virgin? Good enough to be married off? That was her question. That time, I did resent her. She’d understood nothing. Back there, we were no longer women, no longer men. We were the dirty Jewish race: Stücke, stinking animals. We stripped naked only when they were deciding when we’d be put to death. But after the war, the obsession of the Jews to rebuild everything at all costs was intense, extreme—if you only knew. They wanted life to continue normally, as before, they went about it so quickly




I’d calmly say: “Were there any children? Not a single child will come back.” I didn’t mince my words, I didn’t try to spare their feelings, I was used to death. I’d become as hard-hearted as the deportees who saw us arrive at Birkenau without saying a single comforting word. Surviving makes other people’s tears unbearable. You might drown in them.




SS Commandant Kramer shouted that none of us would get out alive, we were nothing but vermin, dirty Jews. And while he was shouting, I saw something running down her body—her blood! Someone had obviously given her a blade of some kind, she’d cut the ropes, then slashed her wrists. She was choosing the way she would die. I was fascinated by the blood running down and that they didn’t notice while Kramer shouted how all-powerful he was. Suddenly, one of the officers saw. He grabbed her by the arm, but she broke free, then she slapped him across the face and he fell down, and taking advantage of the few seconds she had during the chaos, she started speaking, in French, “Murderers, soon you’ll have to pay,” then turning to all of us, “Don’t be afraid, the end is near! I know, I was free, don’t give up, never forget...”




After you were gone, our family became a place where you screamed for help but no one heard, not ever. As a young man, he took refuge for a while in the pseudo-lightheartedness of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but your absence was eating away at him. His pain festered and worsened. He started toying with the idea of suicide [...] He held it against me that I went with you, that I’d taken his place, the child who follows in your footsteps. In any case, that’s how I understood it. He was sick from the camps without ever having been there. When he got to be the age you were when you disappeared, he took some pills and alcohol, this time enough so he wouldn’t wake up again.



If we’d had a grave, somewhere we could cry over you, perhaps things would have been easier [...] But it wasn’t death that took you away. It was a great black pit and its smoke, and I had looked down into its very depths



I was the one who cried out that I was thirsty. A man slapped me across the face, “Everyone here is thirsty, so shut up!” and you didn’t react, you were right, I was learning, we were heading for hell and I had to get used to it.



I don’t like my body. It’s as if it still bears the mark of the first man who ever looked at me, a Nazi. I’d never been seen naked before that [...] I associated getting undressed with death, with hatred, with the icy stare of Mengele, the camp demon who was in charge of the selection, who made us turn all around, naked, prodded by his baton so he could decide who would live and who would die [...] The body of a woman—mine, my mother’s, the body of all the others whose stomachs swell up and then empty—was distorted by the camps, forever. I find flesh and its elasticity horrifying. Back there, I saw skin, breasts, and stomachs sag, I saw women hunched over, crumpled up, I saw bodies deteriorate so quickly, become emaciated, disgusting, the road to the crematorium. I hated being herded together, the intimacy that was violated, the deformity, the light touch of bodies nearing the end. We were mirrors for each other. The bodies around us were a forewarning and brought us closer to what we were becoming ourselves. Not a single woman got her period anymore; some of them wondered if they were putting bromide in our food, but it was just that the natural cycles of life had stopped. Motherhood had no meaning anymore: Babies were the first to be sent to the gas chamber.



I’ve watched her take teaspoons in cafés and restaurants and slip them into her handbag; she’d been a minister, an important woman in France, an imposing person, but she still hoards worthless teaspoons so she doesn’t have to lap up the terrible soup of Birkenau


I don’t know how to detach myself from the outside world—it kidnapped me when I was fifteen. The world is a hideous medley of communities and religions pushed to the extreme.


Two planes flown by terrorists crashed into the two highest skyscrapers in New York, the whole world saw it on television, the towers disintegrated, I watched people throw themselves out of the windows to escape the fires, and I was completely torn up inside. But everything became clear as well, the illusions I still had fell from me like dead skin[...]You dreamed of America; well, the first time I went to New York, the city drew me in, I never wanted to leave, and I realized I was pursuing your exile. You dreamed of Israel, it exists. I feel good every time I go there, but it isn’t the land of peace we’d hoped for[...] Wars normally end, but not this one, for the Jewish state has never been accepted by the Arab countries that surround it; its borders are never fixed, ever-changing, violent.


I’ve heard people shouting “Death to the Jews” and “Jews, fuck off, you don’t own France,” and I’ve wanted to throw myself out the window. Day by day, I’m losing my convictions [...] Everything is getting tense again. We’re called “French Jews”; there are also French Muslims


“do you think it was a good thing for us to have come back from the camps?” “No, I don’t,” she replied, “we shouldn’t have come back”

Source: Marceline Loridan-Ivens. But You Did Not Come Back.