Status Updates From But You Did Not Come Back: ...

I have dinner with some friends who survived, we laugh together, even about the camp, in our own way. And I see Simone too. 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 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, never, especially not with my new young woman’s body that had just given me breasts and all the rest; modesty was obligatory in the family. So for a long time, I associated getting undressed with death, with hatred, with the icy stare of Mengele