But You Did Not Come Back Read online

  Almost immediately, 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. They wanted weddings, even though people were missing from their photos because they hadn’t come back—weddings, couples, singing, and, soon, children, to fill the void. I was seventeen, no one even thought about sending me back to school and I didn’t have the strength to ask. I was a young woman, soon they’d marry me off.

  If you had been there, you wouldn’t have been able to bear her questions, you would have told Mama to be quiet. You also would have told her to let me sleep on the floor. She didn’t want to understand that I couldn’t stand the comfort of a bed anymore. “You have to forget,” she’d say. Maybe you would have found it difficult to lie in a bed beside her. You would have wanted to sleep on the floor like me, you would have run away from the nightmares that catch up to us and punish us when the sheets are too soft. I even sometimes tell myself that you would have sent me back to school, I missed it so much afterwards; you would have understood me better than anyone and forgiven me everything. I’m dreaming, no doubt.

  But there would have been two of us who knew. Maybe we wouldn’t have talked about it often, but the stench, what we saw, the foul smells and the intensity of our emotions would have washed over us like waves, even in silence, and we could have divided our memories in two.

  The official document arrived at the château on February 12, 1948: “The Minister of Former Combatants and Victims of the War confirms the death of Szlhama Froim Rozenberg, born on March 7, 1901, in Nowa Slupia, Poland.”

  The minister could have simply said you were missing, but he decided you were dead. An administrative slip of the pen by a country that declares your death as if it had arranged it.

  I still have that document, with the words “République Française” and “Acte de disparition” at the top of the page, then the sentence that comes next: “The Minister officially declares that Szlhama Froim Rozenberg is missing and presumed dead in the following circumstances: Arrested in March 1944 at Bollène. Interned in Avignon, Marseille, then Drancy. Deported to Auschwitz in the convoy that left Drancy on April 13, 1944. Transferred to Mauthausen and Gross-Rosen.”

  I read those words and picture our arrest, the Frenchman who was with the Milice hitting you on the head with the butt of his rifle at the back of the garden, where he stopped us from running away. I see our prisons, the uniforms of the Frenchmen who were our guards at Drancy. I recognize our convoy, number 71. Then your prophecy that comes true. Our paths that go in different directions as the war is ending.

  In November 1944, you were still in Auschwitz, me in Birkenau, but not for much longer. I’d been prodded by Mengele’s baton and had to turn around, like when I’d first arrived—another weeding out. I thought my time was up, my stomach was bleeding internally from my herniated umbilical cord—the one I’d had the operation for, do you remember? It had opened up again, Mengele couldn’t see it, but when he told me to stand in one of the lines, I thought it was the one going to the gas chamber. But I found myself with some of the others in a freight car instead. I was leaving Birkenau. I was going farther away from you.

  I didn’t even know which direction the train was headed. After two or three days, it finally stopped in the middle of nowhere. It was very cold. We walked another ten kilometers or so through the forest—the sea wasn’t far away, we could smell it through the trees—and we finally arrived at Bergen-Belsen. Once we were there, our eyes and noses knew even before we were told: There was no gas chamber.

  No gas chamber. No open jaws where they could throw us at any moment. We young women from Birkenau had escaped the largest death camp. No chimney. No crematorium. No stench of burning bodies. That’s why I was singing in the tents they’d set up for us in the snow, even though I was shivering. Nothing more than the usual barbarity: hunger, beatings, sickness, the cold. Even the orders were less strict. We still had chores, but the work details were gone, along with roll call for hours on end in the freezing cold. They’d regrouped us, putting all the French women together.

  In my unit we’d elected a leader who spoke German, Anne-Lise Stern. She’d grown up in Germany, her father was a student of Freud, her mother a Socialist; they’d fled to France, where Nazism had caught up to them. Anne-Lise behaved in a way that was compliant but protected us at the same time. Humanity seemed to be stirring once more. It wasn’t yet hope: We were sure we wouldn’t be gassed, but still not certain they wouldn’t kill us.

  Two months later, in February, we saw the exhausted faces of the people on the death marches arriving from Birkenau. Among them, I recognized my friend Simone, her sister, and their mother, whom I called Madame Jacob; Madame died a few days later of typhus, on the frozen ground of the camp. They had walked so far. They told us how they’d emptied out Auschwitz and Birkenau before the Russians arrived; the ones who could still stand were forced along the roads by rifles prodding them forward.

  You were probably among them. But you were walking in a completely different direction than me. You were going south. I was headed north. I rolled around in the snow naked to kill the lice and get warm. There was nothing to eat anymore, starvation and epidemics took over the work of extermination. The worst butchers from Birkenau had also arrived, and they’d reinstituted their filthy methods, counting and recounting us, still obsessed with numbers, with killing Jews even during their defeat; that’s what drove them to make you all die on the roads rather than leaving you in the camps where the Allies could have saved you.

  I imagine your body among a column of staggering, emaciated men pushed to the limit by the SS. Auschwitz. Mauthausen. Then Gross-Rosen, according to the death certificate. How far you traveled! Hundreds of kilometers toward the south, then suddenly circling back toward the surrounded Reich, going north again, even farther north than Auschwitz. That means that you held up, you walked without falling, without giving them the chance to kill you along the way. You must have had some strength left when you left Auschwitz. You really might have survived.

  Where were you when I was leaving? All hell broke loose at Bergen-Belsen. But I was put on a train again with my group of French women. We were going to a Junker airplane factory in Raguhn, near Leipzig. We were leaving to make machines for a lost war. My path was like a horrific decrescendo—Birkenau-Bergen-Belsen-Raguhn—from an extermination camp to a factory concentration camp. It fits with the promise you made me: “You’re young, Marceline, you’ll make it.” But where were you? It was February 1945. According to the history books, that’s when the Russian Army liberated the camp at Gross-Rosen. And according to your official document, that’s the last place there was any trace of you. Were you killed and thrown into the communal graves by the desperate Germans?

  Maybe not. Mama insisted on believing someone who said he’d seen you at Auschwitz and that you’d left the camp before the death march in January of 1945, that you’d been seen at Dachau and should have stayed there but that you’d started walking again to help a man who couldn’t keep going without you and whom the Germans would have killed. According to Mama, you hadn’t been selected to keep walking—you sacrificed yourself. I didn’t believe it. In the camps, you didn’t choose anything, not even the way you died. But Dachau, that was possible; I read that many people from Gross-Rosen were transferred there. It doesn’t matter if we didn’t have that in writing. It wasn’t possible to establish a real inventory anymore, not in the postwar chaos. The French government probably sent out certificates in bulk, writing down likely names, places, and dates that weren�
��t necessarily verified. I don’t believe a word of the official history written by France.

  But what does it matter today whether you died in February or April? Why drag out your suffering? I don’t know. It’s as if I’m still fighting your prophecy. My life for yours.

  I would like to think you didn’t die that February. I was no longer wearing dead people’s clothes then. In Raguhn, I was given a striped dress, like the one I used to dream about in Birkenau. There was still a red cross on my back, a yellow star on my chest, but I didn’t notice them anymore: I had the dress I wanted, and there were even women guards from the countryside who gave us needles and thread so we could make them fit. They also gave us each a whole loaf of bread. We ate it all at once, even though it was our ration for a week.

  On the assembly line, I cut out pieces of a motor from molds. I was very tiny, so they had me stand on a bench, but the moving assembly line seemed to want to devour me; it dragged me along one day and injured me, but someone’s hands grabbed me and pulled me back, the hands of fate. I would make it out alive. In the factory, the workers were a mixture of Jews and German civilians. I remember the time one of them gestured that he’d left something for me in a drawer. It was a bag full of cooked potato skins.

  Did I feel hope again? I did dare to hide when it was time to leave again, to take a train from Leipzig to some unknown destination. The Americans were only eighteen kilometers away now, we knew that. Renée and I hid in a casket in the detention camp—a casket, even though for the first time in a very long time we imagined we might survive! But they counted everyone again at the Leipzig station; two were missing, they came back, looked for us, found us, threw us into a truck. There were fires everywhere, the Allies’ bombings never stopped, Germany was being reduced to ashes. And I thought about Mala, who’d told us to hold on and live.

  She was our heroine at Birkenau. She was a Belgian Jew, she spoke several languages, and because of that, she had the right to move around freely, and she took advantage of that to help as much as she could. One day, she ran away with her lover, a Polish Resistance fighter who’d been deported, they disguised themselves as SS officers and left in a car. You must have heard this story: Two people were missing when they took roll call. You know how the Nazis became furious if they lost two people, even if we were already fifty or a hundred thousand—how could we know?—behind their barbed wire. You probably stood for hours on end, like us, while they counted and recounted; I wonder if that wasn’t the time when they left us kneeling outside on the ground all night long, fighting with all the strength we had left against the temptation to fall down and be killed.

  Mala was caught three weeks later at the Czech border, denounced by Polish farmers. Her lover gave himself up; he didn’t want her to think he’d talked. He was hanged right away. She was put in a bunker for weeks, in one of those cells you have to crawl into and where you can’t even sit down. And then one day, they ordered the Aryan women locked in their barracks and the Jews brought out in the courtyard in front of Lager B.* There were thousands of us in rows of five, me in front, as usual, since I’m so small. The gallows had been set up, the noose was ready, and the camp’s SS officers were right in front of it. Mala arrived standing up in a cart pulled along by some prisoners, she was dressed all in black, her hands tied behind her back—the staging was complete. 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.” They rushed her back into the cart, ordered that we all be locked in our cell blocks. Blocksperre! Many rumors followed about how they’d finally killed her, that they’d hanged her somewhere else, or even thrown her into the crematorium while she was still alive. We talked about her for a long time. But we didn’t believe her promises.

  In the truck taking us to Leipzig, I finally believed what she’d said. Once we got to the station, they threw us into a freight car with the people who had typhus, just like they would have thrown us into the gas chamber if we’d still been at Birkenau. That was the beginning of ten very strange days in our locked freight cars. We hardly noticed there weren’t many female German guards anymore; all we did was count the dead bodies that were piling up; there were 120 of us, the disease spread like wildfire, the number of dead grew very quickly, we piled their bodies up against the door, I was alive, breathing, right next to them. But you, where were you? With the dead or among the survivors? In the freight car, that was the only demarcation line that counted while the bombings raged above our heads.

  One day, as the train crawled along, as the days seemed to drag on forever, I felt a bit of bread in someone’s pocket. It took me some time to get it; I’d rummaged through the pockets of the dead in Canada, but their bodies were no longer there. Finally, I stole it from the dead woman and shared it with Renée. Sometimes the train stopped, they opened the doors, and we begged for some of the water they used to cool the train’s engine; I looked for some dandelions, the only edible plant I knew.

  When we stopped for good, there wasn’t a single German left on the train, just us and the driver. We’d arrived at the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Its remaining inhabitants opened the doors of the freight cars, saw the dead bodies roll out, then saw us, the starving animals, eyes enormous in our emaciated faces, and they understood what had happened to everyone who’d been taken away, and what was going to happen to them. They rushed to find us something to eat. Just like animals, the young women in the freight cars started fighting each other for the food. I just watched it all, I didn’t fight. That doesn’t mean I was better than the others. Or maybe I fought too, but I prefer to forget that. I’m no angel.

  I came out of a car full of dead bodies. Alive. “You’ll come back, Marceline, because you’re young,” you’d said. But what about you? Were you still breathing that April of 1945? Typhus took Renée. I had scabies and a bleeding stomach. The Russians finally liberated the ghetto. They immediately decreed that we should be put into quarantine because of the typhus. I fled, because another war was starting that you would never know about, one we could already feel coming. The world was being divided into two blocs—soon the East would be under the yoke of the Soviets and the West under American control.

  I walked toward Prague with some others, sixty kilometers away. Once we were there, someone dressed the wound on my stomach. I took the road toward the American zone; we kept walking without knowing where we were going, without knowing how many days we’d been walking, without understanding or realizing what we’d lived through, we dragged ourselves along. We knew the Nazis had lost, but it was too late, much too late to rejoice, our suffering had been too great, all we had left was a feeling of horror and loss. Where were you? All I could think about was you. But I didn’t try to find you among the others. That’s not how we’d be together again.

  We ended up in the Pilsen repatriation camp. There, one of the employees said: “We don’t repatriate Jews, just prisoners of war.” The prisoners stood up for us, refused to leave without us. I’d gotten to Sarre before anyone asked our address; I was given a skirt, underwear, and an official deportee card. And that was the first time I gave the phone number of the château, 58, in Bollène.

  You were already dead. I imagine you looked just like all the corpses I saw scattered along the road as I returned. I can picture your arms outspread, your eyes wide open. A bo
dy who’d seen death and then watched himself die. A body no one would ever return to us. When your official document arrived, three years later, we were still hoping you’d come back, but without really expecting you to. Michel stopped asking to go to the station. Henri had married Marie. It was a big wedding. I wore a blue dress, like my sisters.

  We’d gone to Paris, stayed at the Hôtel Terminus near the Gare de l’Est. You would have loved their Jewish wedding, you would have been proud of your eldest son, a hero of the Free French Forces, walking down the aisle to his new life with Marie, who’d been arrested with us at our house but who’d come back alive along with the rest of her family. The wedding dinner was held at a fancy restaurant, the Palais d’Orsay. Everyone around the tables avoided talking about the camps. But the dressy clothes were nothing more than armor. Their armor. I didn’t believe in Sunday weddings, in some white dresses thrown over the clothes from Canada; I still carried the mountains of clothes that we’d sorted through on my back, and the stench of burnt flesh that would stay with me forever. I was resisting their demand that I live.

  Mama also remarried. She did it in secret, without saying anything. She only told us afterwards. I didn’t hold it against her. It was the man she chose and the way she did it that I didn’t like. He’d lost his wife and five children in the camps. He played cards and sponged off Mama. We didn’t like him. How could we? It was a time when I had strange dreams, I think. I went into their room, took down the pictures, especially the one of you and the one of our grandparents. I got you out of the room where she no longer slept alone. I realize now that it happened when your official document arrived. 1948. Maybe Mama needed that document to get remarried.

  This is what it said: “By writing a brief letter to the State Prosecutor, the family may request either a statement declaring a person missing, which, after five years, will be replaced by an official Death Certificate, or they may request an official Death Certificate if the missing person is a French citizen and belongs to one of the following categories: mobilized, prisoner of war, refugee, deportee or political prisoner, member of the Free French Forces or the French Resistance Army, conscripted to do hard labor or refused to work in Germany.”