Review 26: But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens

But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens is a short but extremely striking memoir. ‘Memoir’ isn’t entirely correct – it’s a love-letter of sorts to the memory of her father, from whom she was separated during the Holocaust.

If this sounds sad – it is. Despite its opening line I was quite a cheerful person, you know, in spite of what happened to us, this is a hauntingly heartwrenching, powerful and upsetting read. It explores in-depth the psychology of the Holocaust survivor, and just how they can start to try to piece things together after they were so comprehensively blown apart.

This isn’t done, as Primo Levi does, through comprehensive and detailed retellings of the camps, and how they worked, although she does recount some anecdotes. Loridan-Ivens instead focuses on the relationship with her father, whom she saw just once after being sent to different concentration camps and how that aborted relationship turned into a driving force that stayed with her throughout the ordeal, and her life.

While this is in translation – and although she's a French citizen she clearly doesn’t identify with France, having been sent to the camps by French officers collaborating with the Nazi regime – she nevertheless writes in a style that feels deeply Gallic in its approach. An example: she talks about being separated from her father at just 15, saying I had so little time to save enough of you within me. There is an essence of French nihilism that threads throughout the book – understandable, given its subject.

Following her miraculous survival, she clearly wants to move her life on, and yet can’t let her past experiences go. She wants people to understand the experience she went through, but how could anyone who hadn’t done so truly understand? Eventually she finds herself channelling her efforts into supporting revolution around the world, contrasting her earlier discussion of the camp prisoners as only able to live minute-to-minute, without the optimism or energy for revolt, with her desire for oppressed people around the world to challenge their oppressors.

Ultimately, this ends not with certainty, but with uncertain hope. At the time of writing, she was 86, having spent the majority of her life as an activist and award-winning film maker, and yet she still needs more validation that her life had given value. She asks someone the question Do you think it was a good thing to have come back from the camps?, and when asked to provide her own answer, says …I hope that if someone asks me that question just before I’m about to die, I’ll be able to say, “Yes, it was worth it.”

A very sad, complex read.

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