But You Did Not Come Back Read online

  But you weren’t French. You’d made many requests before the war to get the citizenship you’d dreamed of. In vain. You loved this country, I’m not sure it was mutual. I remember your voice, your accent, the words you mangled—you spoke French both well and badly. You were a foreign Jew, that was your only official title, according to the state. So we had to wait five more years for you to be officially declared dead. Mama became a French citizen because she was your wife, the widow of a hero. As for me, I was considered a soldier.

  Your name is on the monument to the fallen in Bollène. It was inscribed there a very long time after its construction. It was the mayor who suggested it, but he didn’t want your name to stand out as different at all; he wanted you to be included among the men who died for France. I told him it was important that it also said you’d been deported to Auschwitz. He said that wasn’t necessary. So I told him I preferred you weren’t named at all in that case. In the end, he gave in. That was less than twenty years ago, just before we were about to enter the twenty-first century; even so long after the war, he didn’t want any trace of Auschwitz on the village monument. You didn’t really die for France. France sent you to your death. You were wrong about her.

  As for everything else, you were right. I did come back.

  * Technically, Lager Blb (Trans.)

  Jacqueline always sends me flowers on May 10, as if it were my birthday. Every year and that moves me very much. We’re very close, different but considerate of each another. We’re the only two left. May 10 is the date the Russians liberated me from Theresienstadt. I was born that day. I know that Jacqueline sends the flowers for me but also for her father.

  My return is synonymous with your absence. To such an extent that I wanted to obliterate it, to disappear like you did. I tried to drown myself in the Seine two years later, the year Henri got married. It happened a little farther along from the Quai Saint-Michel: I’d climbed over the parapet and was about to throw myself in when a man stopped me. Then I got tuberculosis; I was sent to a chic sanatorium in Montana, Switzerland. Mama sometimes came to see me. I couldn’t stand her impatience, the way she had of ordering me to get well and to forget. I was such a burden. I tried to kill myself a second time.

  Yet in the camp, I did everything I could to stay alive. Never allowed myself to believe that death would mean peace. Never became that girl I’d seen throw herself against the electric fence. She wasn’t the only one, it had become a common expression “to go to the fence,” to die quickly, electrocuted or riddled with bullets from the machine guns in the watchtower, ending up in the deep pit dug just in front of the barbed wire fences. Never gave up the will to live, never became like the women who let themselves go, choosing to neglect themselves, a gradual detachment from their bodies, a slower death. They began by not saving some of the water from the bottom of their bowl to wash themselves with, they stopped eating, withdrew. They were called Muslims, I don’t know why, another word the Polish women used, perhaps because of the blankets they pulled over their heads. Soon they were even more emaciated than us; they couldn’t work anymore and were sent to the gas chamber.

  I held on. I did. I fought off sickness and the temptation to let myself go under. For the first time in my life, I fasted on Yom Kippur, to feel more Jewish, to remain dignified in the face of the SS. I made up all sorts of strategies to survive. I might have even started to do that in the train. Do you remember? We had just arrived somewhere, we were exhausted, silent, it was dawn, the train slowed down, I climbed up on someone’s shoulders, looked out of the small window; I saw a group of women walking in rows of five, they all seemed to be wearing the same dress, they all had red scarves on their heads, so I said: “We’re going to have costumes here.” I used words from civilization to describe what would happen to us; I preferred that to the absolute silence that had overwhelmed you and the others. I was already resisting. And when the doors opened, I heard the deportees in their striped clothing whisper to me: “Give the children to the old people, say you’re eighteen.” I had just turned sixteen at Drancy and I was smaller than normal. An SS officer made me open my mouth three times in a row to see my teeth, and I lied about my age.

  Why was I incapable of living once I’d returned to the world? It was like a blinding light after months in the darkness, it was too intense, people wanted everything to seem like a fresh start, they wanted to tear my memories from me; they thought they were being rational, in harmony with passing time, the wheel that turns, but they were mad, and not just the Jews—everyone! The war was over, but it was eating all of us up inside.

  I would have liked to give you good news, to say that after having lived through the horrors, waiting in vain for you to come back, we recovered. But I can’t. You should know that our family did not survive. It fell apart. You had so many wonderful dreams for all of us, but we couldn’t live up to them.

  After Henri’s wedding, we stayed on to live in Paris, on the second floor of 52 Rue Condorcet. Little by little, we abandoned that château you’d fallen in love with. It became a vacation home, even somewhere that felt was a punishment. Mama sent me there every time I wasn’t doing well, as if to harden me up in the atmosphere of your authority and your dreams, which were probably hers as well. We sold it in 1958.

  You should have come back. I’ve always thought it would have been better for the family if you had come back instead of me. More than a sister, they needed a husband, a father. Ever since that prophecy you made at Drancy, I’ve always thought it was your life for mine. And that’s what I could see in Michel’s eyes on the platform when he came to meet me with Uncle Charles. You were the one he was waiting for. In Birkenau, I’d forgotten his name, I already told you that, but I associated him with you, like a leg or an arm. I could picture him in his dark velvet short trousers, dragging a toy stick with little yellow chicks as wheels that moved as he walked. The two of you strolled across the fields that surrounded the château, he wouldn’t let go of you. Your arrest was an amputation for him. He must have asked for you, they probably told him you’d be coming back. But I was the one he saw on the platform. He was still so small, so fragile.

  Very soon afterwards, he started showing disturbing signs that we didn’t take seriously enough. He didn’t manage to stay at boarding school for long, he kept to himself, refused to wash. So Mama brought him home and left him with Henriette. They dealt with his sadness the way they did with my memories. 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 ended up becoming a manic-depressive. I tried to take care of him, but when he was having a crisis, I was the one he targeted: He drew swastikas on my letter box or left messages on my answering machine, imitating the voice of an SS officer and barking, “You will be on Convoy 71 with Madame Simone Veil.” He even had “SS” tattooed on his arm. He played at being the executioner to be closer to the victim, closer to you. 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. We only broke down his door and found his body inside a full month later. We buried him in the Jewish cemetery in Pantin. He’d always said, “I’ll die at the same age as my father.”

  Mama died two years after him. Then Henriette, a few weeks later. She committed suicide when she was sixty. The same cocktail as Michel. She also died from the camps without ever having been there. Died because she couldn’t talk to you, explain anything to you, be with you again. You never should have thrown her out the way you did at the beginning of the war because she’d fallen in love with that soldier who was her pen friend; he
wasn’t Jewish, she was afraid you’d be angry, so she’d married him in secret. You were furious, threw her out. You shouldn’t have done that, just as you shouldn’t have taken her out of school when Michel was born so she could take care of him. She was so brilliant. I’m writing to you from a time when women have earned their place in the world; I would have liked you to experience it, to be moved by it, so you could hear and understand the dreams of your daughters: Henriette, Jacqueline, and me. Henriette had great courage. She’d joined the Resistance. When I came back, I found out that when we were arrested, she’d managed to learn that we’d be transferred to Marseille by bus before being sent to Drancy. So she’d tried to mobilize her network to rescue us, she wanted to attack the bus, free us, and come back home to live with us. She left her soldier after the war, left him in order to be forgiven, to reclaim her place in the family, but there was no place to reclaim. Because there was no family without you.

  If we’d had a grave, somewhere we could cry over you, perhaps things would have been easier. If you had come home, weak, sick, to die like so many others—for coming home didn’t mean surviving—we could have watched you leave us, we could have held your hands tightly until there was no strength left in them, watched over you day and night, listened to your last thoughts, heard your final goodbyes, the words you whispered, that would have made me forget, once and for all, the letter I miss so much today; it would have appeased Michel, reassured Henriette, given all of us the same single image of your death. And we would have closed your eyes while saying Kaddish. As children, we knew about death and its rites: the black flag, the hearse that moves slowly down the street. We would encounter death and respect it, we were much stronger than people are today, they’re so afraid of death—if you only knew how much. 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. It hadn’t yet finished its evil task: Even when the war was over, it still seemed to be sucking us in.

  Michel and Henriette died because you disappeared. They always missed the last words you never said, words they would have remembered all their lives, words that would have explained their place in this story and in the world. I have a story. I do. I’m the survivor. I know where you died and why. Most importantly, I have pieces of you that belong only to me. Your last steps, your last words, even if I’ve forgotten them, your final gestures, your last kisses.

  We’d both run to the back of the garden that night, and the French policeman caught us behind the gate. We were transferred together to the Sainte-Anne prison in Avignon. There, you’d kissed me, you said we’d try to escape, you wrote letters to Mama, one of which got sent thanks to an Austrian soldier in the Wehrmacht; he’d cried when he saw us arrive—I reminded him of his little redheaded girl. “You won’t be coming back from where you’re going,” he’d said to you, “you have to escape before you get there.” We were able to see each other once in the outhouses, I knew where your cell was, so when I was sent to mop the floors in the hallways, I’d sing “O sole mio” really loud, so you’d hear me coming, and one of my girl scout songs too, “We can only see the sky, only feel the sun, Goodbye, goodbye, We’re off to find the wind, the mountain road is long.” Why can I still remember that stupid propaganda song but none of your final words to me?

  I don’t think I ever told you what I scratched on the wall of my cell in Sainte-Anne. It’s almost a joy to know how unhappy a person can be. I don’t know what the prisoners who took my place afterwards thought, the ones there during the war, or in peacetime, whether they agreed or not, if they understood what it meant. For the happiness I was thinking of was the joy of being with you. I didn’t yet know where I was going, the bus that would transfer us to Marseille, the third-class carriage on the train to Drancy, then Convoy 71, at least fifteen hundred people deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, you and me and about sixty others in a cattle car with all those useless suitcases, and at the end of the first day, 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. But I said what I’d written again, after the war, in spite of the consequences, in spite of my fear of the gas chamber, the crematorium, the indelible scars on my body and in my mind, I said it again, even more clearly: I loved you so much that I was happy to be deported with you. And I can say it again now. For with time, the darkness of the camps over my life has merged with your absence. And it is having to live without you that weighs down on me.

  Your picture is in my room now. I inherited it after Mama died. It’s a photo taken in the 1930s: All you see is your chest and head; the picture doesn’t show that you were of average height. You’re wearing a dark pin-striped suit, you look strong. I put it above my dresser. On the opposite wall, I hung a drawing of a naked woman—she’s lying stretched out, smiling, languorous; I left it to her to entice you. So that you’d stop looking at me. So I could get undressed in peace without you seeing me.

  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, 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. I think he inspected me when I first arrived and again when I left the camp. The others said, “That’s Mengele,” I didn’t know what he looked like, but after the war I recognized him: his black hair with not a single strand out of place, his cap tilted slightly to one side, his eyes that looked right through you, then sent you to the right or to the left, without you knowing which of the lines would lead to death. I used to pinch my cheeks to give them some color before standing in front of him and his team of SS doctors as they sized us up, scornful and mocking; I tried to hide my wounds, my infected, festering boils, I wanted to show him a body that was still beautiful, still strong.

  My frozen toes will be numb forever. The infections left whitish circles on my arms and legs where the skin is fine and limp. For a long time, I had marks on my neck where I’d been hit with batons. And if I’ve remained hard, thin, it’s because I’ve often stood in front of my mirror, ten, twenty, or thirty years later, and thought, Have to stay slim and svelte so I don’t get sent to the gas chamber next time.

  I never had children. I never wanted any. You would have reproached me for that, of course. 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. Once in a while, beauty remained intact somehow, leaving some bodies more dignified than others. “You’re too beautiful to die,” Stenia had said to my friend Simone. She was a Polish criminal who’d become second in command of the camp. There came a time, though, when you couldn’t tell us apart, except to distinguish between those who were holding up and those who’d given in. I was holding up. But I had nothing good to pass on to a child. I’ve even found it difficult to warm to the children of my brother, my sister, and my friends.

  It took many experiences
with other people to get used to living, get used to myself. And a lot of time to be able to love. I got involved in other eras, other lives, love affairs that you don’t tell your father about, in struggles and revolutions intended to wipe away the past.

  Little by little, I allowed myself to be carried along by my generation, its chaos, and I felt what it was like to be young. I wanted to make something of myself, without really knowing what, I wanted to become part of a story that was greater than my own, discover the world, learn, laugh a little, join in the endless discussions in the bistros of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. From the Rue Condorcet where we lived, I’d take the 85 bus to the Latin Quarter, full of students and intellectuals, but also dropouts like me. I could feel the desire to live stirring within me, the desire that made me sing while we were shivering in the snow at Bergen-Belsen.

  I tried to push Birkenau into the past, I never talked about it anymore, I hid my number. I was often with a friend, Dora, who had also been deported and come back; she’d lost her mother and her little sister there, she was unhappy, I could sense it. I knew that unhappiness was deeply rooted within us, whatever happened. So, to distance myself from unhappiness, I became the opposite of Dora. She was frightened at the idea of going into cafés, I pushed the doors open proudly in a way that was unusual for girls in those days. I can picture both of us sitting in the Dupont-Latin. She tried not to draw attention to herself, I sat up tall. Boys came to talk to us, they were carefree, funny, I could have dived into their laughing, joking mouths, I thirsted for lightheartedness and knowledge, two words that summed up Saint-Germain-des-Prés. There we found everything the war hadn’t taken with it; anti-Semitism was still strong, but what was important was to talk about things. It was a strange mixture: the bourgeoisie, left-wingers, former Resistance fighters. All around me were a circle of orphans I felt close to, and at the same time, I was fed up with the Jews, fed up with being crowded in, a legacy from the camps. I needed to be with other people.