Read Online But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens - Free Book Online Page A

with it, saying: “Do whatever you want with this.” I didn’t read it, I decided it was for Joris. I put it in his pocket so he would be less alone. And from me, a little globe of the world, the world we had traveled and dreamed about together. Then I let them close his coffin.
    Afterwards, without really having made a conscious decision, I returned to you. It happened during a film festival in Warsaw, in 1991. I’d been invited to go and introduce the last film Joris and I had made together. It’s called Une histoire de vent ( A Tale of the Wind ), we’d made it knowing there wouldn’t be another. In it, Joris tries to find the wind, and his breath as well; the story says that when the earth breathes, that’s what’s called “the wind.” At first, I refused the invitation—I didn’t want to set foot in Poland again. They insisted so much that I finally said yes, but on condition that I could go to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
    That was when I discovered something: We’d been so close to one another. I walked on your side, among the barracks and dormitories of Auschwitz. I’d never gone there, I didn’t know which block you were in, I had no reference point. Then I looked for the place where you’d slipped me the onion and the tomato. It was on a road, but which one? I never found it. Then I concentrated on Birkenau. I remembered it in greatdetail. I saw a fox sleeping in the ruins of the crematorium. People who lived nearby went through on bicycles, the way you take a shortcut. I picked up a music stand the camp orchestra had used, and a spoon, so precious in the past—they were both rusted and half-buried in the ground. The place was empty. Then everything came back to me in a rush: the smell, the cries, the dogs, Françoise, Mala, the sky, red and black because of the flames. Then I found my bed and lay down on it.
    Ten years later, I made a movie about that moment. * I wanted to walk through the mirror, clear a pathway, touch the imagination of everyone who hadn’t been there. I’m not sure I succeeded. How can we hand down something we have so much difficulty in explaining to ourselves? I asked the actress Anouk Aimée to take my place, to stretch out on the prison bed and speak the words I’d said to you: “I loved you so much that I was happy to have been deported with you.”
    I’m eighty-six years old, twice the age you were when you died. I’m an elderly lady now. I’m not afraid to die, I don’t panic. I don’t believe in God, or that there’s anything after death. I’m one of the 160 still alive out of the 2,500 who came back—76,500 French Jews were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Six million Jews died: in the camps, killed and thrown into mass graves, gassed, shot at point-blank range, massacred in the ghettos. Once a month, 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. If you only knew, all of you, how the camp remains permanently within us. It remains in all our minds, and will until we die.
    Today, I have a lump in my throat. I often lose my temper. I don’t know how to detach myselffrom the outside world—it kidnapped me when I was fifteen. The world is a hideous medley of communities and religions pushed to the extreme. And the hotter things get, the more unclear and important everything becomes, the more it has to do with us, the Jews. I now know that anti-Semitism is an eternal given; it rushes in waves along with the crises in the world, the words, the monsters, and the means of every era. Zionists like you predicted it: Anti-Semitism will never disappear. It is too deeply rooted in the world.
    When the century stumbled into 2000, then 2001,