But You Did Not Come Back Read online

  I especially didn’t think about what you would have wanted for me—I feared the answer too much. The same as Mama probably, a nice Jewish marriage and a lot of children. She used to shout and rip up the pants I wore like all the other liberated young women, and she’d tell me off whenever someone came to the house. Marriage wasn’t for me. I was headed for a life that you probably wouldn’t have approved of. And yet, I like to think that you wouldn’t have complained about me. That after what we’d lived through, you would have wanted me to be free. But deep down, I don’t know what kind of man you would have been. I feel as if I didn’t really know you. We were separated at the very moment when we would have begun to find out about each other. I remember that walk in the woods, the war had already started, you were warning me about boys. I was already pretty shy with other people, and you were very strict. We would have had fights, in any case. I even miss the ones that would have been fierce battles. I would have liked to have doors slammed, to have reconciliations. And then I miss the words we would have spoken as time went on, so we could return to the past and heal its wounds. If I still wonder where I could have lost your letter, if it changes according to the day—Did I hide it under a seat in the steam room when we had to change our clothes? Did I lose it at Bergen-Belsen? In Theresienstadt?—if I still search deep within my memory for those missing lines even though I’m sure I’ll never find them again, it’s because they are etched somewhere in the recesses of my mind, the place where I sometimes slip away with the things I cannot bear to share, a blank page where I can still talk to you. I know all the love those lines contained. I’ve spent my entire life trying to find that love.

  I no longer bear your name, and I miss that. But I often add, “née Rozenberg”—it means “mountain rose” or “a mountain of roses,” it’s very beautiful. I bear the names of the men I married. Neither was Jewish, but don’t hold that against me. The first was Francis Loridan, I met him when I fell off my bike on the way to the château. He helped me get up, and we got married very quickly. He was an engineer, dreamed of going abroad, hoping I would go with him, but I had no desire to live in the colonies where jobs were created by all the construction going on, no desire to be the wife of one of the white masters, and no desire to leave Paris either. He left for Madagascar while I tried to heal in the cultural and political boiling pot of Saint-Germain; I had one little job after another until the day I found work in television. I never joined him out there, but we didn’t get divorced for a long time after our separation, and I kept “Loridan” because it had become my professional name. I must admit that it was useful to me. Anti-Semitism was still very widespread after the war, it was easier to be called “Loridan” than “Rozenberg.” My second husband was Joris Ivens. And I must tell you about him.

  Joris was thirty years older than me. He’d wandered in from Holland, a poet, an artist, a sturdily built man with long white hair—they called him the “Flying Dutchman.” He was born at the turn of the century, like you. During his lifetime, he’d seen the birth of the cinema, he was one of its pioneers, one of the greatest documentary makers, known throughout the world. He’d traveled around the entire planet, told the story of the Spanish Civil War, the struggle of the workers and the liberation of many different peoples. He was a man who was haunted by human poverty; he carried it within him and it constantly tore him apart. Like many artists between the two wars, he became a great supporter of the Communist Party, in reaction to the rise of various forms of fascism. He suffered when he saw the party’s ideals destroyed by the Soviet system, but he remained a member. I met him in 1962. He’d seen me in a movie called Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer). I was holding a microphone and asking random passersby, “Are you happy?” Then I talked about you, the camps, your disappearance. It was a completely new way of making film, people told their stories and revealed who they were. The family reproached me for it. “Don’t go and see that movie—Marceline shows off in it,” one of my aunts ordered. Joris saw me in the film showing my tattooed number, talking about how you were gone but without ever looking sad, I think. But I didn’t say I was happy. Joris knew the director and confided in him: “If I ever met that girl, I’d fall in love with her.” And that’s what happened. We were never apart from the moment we first met.

  So he knew my story, and yours. We very rarely spoke about it, we didn’t talk about ourselves very much at all. We behaved in a way so we’d never hurt each other. We thought of ourselves as a two-headed hydra; we traveled, made films together, dreamed of the future. In his memoirs, Joris wrote that we had the same desire: to rid the planet of its impurities. The word may be a bit too strong, but it’s true, it fit with his idealism. We were living in the present, and we even thought we’d have some impact on history. That’s a very strange feeling after you’ve been nothing but a Stuck in Birkenau.

  But I’m talking to you about a time you never knew. Imagine the world after Auschwitz. When the wish to live replaces the wish to die. When rediscovered freedom spreads throughout the entire planet and demands new battles. Imagine Israel finally created! I thought about you so much, about how joyful you would have been. You had always been a Zionist. Between the two wars, you’d sent money to the Jewish National Fund to buy back land in Palestine. You dreamed of a future nation. You were investing, your brother was already there. Would you have taken us there if you’d survived? Would you have sold the château, your dream that had become a curse, and chosen to leave? I would have gone with you. In 1947, a friend and I went to the office of a Jewish organization that dealt with people who wanted to go. I would have fought or helped there. They said no, we were minors. There were already many survivors from the camps there, and I imagine they didn’t know what to do with them. We were young girls, and damaged.

  The world offered places to flee. While Israel was being born, one after the other the people of the countries colonized by the old European powers stood up for themselves and demanded their independence. I was passionate about these political upheavals and the endless discussions they led to. I thought, If I can’t do anything for myself, I’m going to do something for others. The Algerian uprising became the great cause of my generation, and for me, a test; I became an activist within the independence networks, lived outside the law, even watched the French police search my apartment, and I made a film about it, Algérie, année zero (Algeria, Year Zero), and it was banned for a long time. The more I demanded reparations for the Algerians, the more I felt I was being paid back myself, felt I’d found my place. They were Arabs and I was Jewish, but that wasn’t the problem. I thought that by liberating other people, whether they were Algerian, Vietnamese, or Chinese, the Jewish problem would be solved at the same time. It was a terrible mistake, as the future proved, but I firmly believed it then.

  And yet, years before, after we’d first been arrested, in my cell at Sainte-Anne, the holding place before Drancy and Birkenau, I’d said that I didn’t trust people. I was nearly sixteen and a self-declared Gaullist. One of my fellow prisoners was a Resistance fighter and a Communist, and she asked me why I wasn’t. “I don’t like the working classes,” I’d replied, “because they’re the ones who carry out the pogroms.” I spoke as a Jewish woman, without even knowing where I was being taken. I probably thought a little like you. I didn’t understand much of the discussions I’d overheard at home between you and your brother Herman, a proud Communist who’d gone to fight with the International Brigades in Spain, or with Bill, Mama’s brother, who also went to fight Franco, but I could sense what was at stake—saving the world, saving ourselves, the Jews—and I understood that they reproached you for being a moderate. We’d all listened intently to Radio London, where they broadcast that Jews were being gassed in trucks. You should know that Bill died a hero: He killed the German Gestapo officer who was interrogating him, then threw himself out of the fourth-floor window.

  Fifteen years later, it was my turn to ask myself about the future of man. I hadn’t become an opti
mist. I would shiver in the waiting room of a train station. In hotels, I refused to go into any bathroom that had a shower. I couldn’t stand the sight of factory chimneys. When you’ve come back, you’re aware of such things as long as you live. But in order to live, the best thing I could find to believe in, to the point of obsession, like my uncles before me, was that it was possible to change the world.

  Joris and I filmed the war in Vietnam; there I earned the respect of the fighters for having survived the death camps. And we wanted to believe in the Chinese Revolution. I don’t know what the papers you read before the war said about China, it was so far away, but at that time Joris was already there making a movie; he had filmed the peasants fighting the Japanese invasion and still had contacts there. In fact, when the Communists took control of the country, he was on their side, hoping that this time the ideal wouldn’t turn out to be the totalitarian nightmare it became in the USSR. He took me there. We made about fifteen movies that were very well received throughout the world. In France, we were taken as propagandists for the great Communist devil and its millions of ants in blue uniforms. We wanted to build a bridge between the East and the West, we wanted to study the society that claimed to change the relationship between men, we tried to listen to the Chinese people rather than their leaders, whose censorship and excesses we understood only too well. We were seeking the idea of revolution itself, in vain. Our movies opened with Chinese tales, where people were trying to move mountains.

  I was probably a woman under the influence. I was obsessed with Joris. But I needed that dependency, the strength and convictions of a man like him. He was the school I’d never finished. The love that would save me. He represented a land far away. The antidote to your absence. I often disagreed with him, and told him so. I liked the idea of revolution, but I wasn’t a Communist; I’d spent time with the Party for a few months but rejected it rather than back the Soviet reign of terror. I sowed a seed of doubt in Joris’s mind. He wrote about it in his memoirs. “How could two people who were so close to one another in their aspirations, their revolt, their sense of justice, find themselves so far removed on ideological questions? It was the moment when I had to take a position and try to see what was fair and what wasn’t.” I like those lines—they express how we complemented one another, they show our mistakes and how we tried to find our way, as well as how sincere we were.

  It’s futile trying to describe things to a dead man: years, countries, people, films he’ll never know. And yet, I caught myself, just the other day, talking to you out loud about China. Just like that, alone in my Paris apartment, I was telling you that certain major universities in China have started courses on Judaism and the Talmud. I was forging links and similarities between the Chinese and our people. Between the Chinese people and me. I remembered that even when I was very little, China played a part in my dreams. That in school, we were told to sell the silver wrappers from chocolate bars to send money to the Chinese children who were victims of the famine; and after the war, I liked opening the door to a bookstore in the 5th arrondissement that was full of books with bone clasps; and the first time I went to China and ate wontons, I thought of the kreplach we had at home. I talked to you as if to vindicate myself. I was really only talking to myself. A long time ago, in the middle of my life without you, I cloaked myself in illusions, became frozen on the inside so I wouldn’t have to think about anything anymore, so I could run away. And so I distanced myself from you.

  Joris died in 1989, when China was experiencing the student uprising he’d so hoped for. “What’s happening in China?” he asked from his deathbed. We held our breath with the rest of the world. He died along with the bloody crushing of the rebellion. Victim of a dream that had gone so wrong. The Italian newspaper la Repubblica wrote: “The final crime of Deng Xiaoping was the death of Joris Ivens.” His death devastated me.

  Henri said: “You ended up marrying your father.” He said “your father,” not “our father.” I was shocked at the time. Then I thought about it. He hadn’t taken your place—that was impossible; he hadn’t been a protector—I’d taken care of him as much as he’d taken care of me. We were two artists, two recluses. But I had married a man of your age, an heir to the exalted nineteenth century that believed in the continuous, automatic progression of History. I had loved a man you would have loved. Joris had surely understood that as well, but he never spoke to me about it. And he too left me alone in the ruins of the twentieth century.

  His friend, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, opened a roll of film and wrote a message on it for him. He entrusted me 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 great detail. 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 myself from 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 r
ushes 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, something terrible happened, something unthinkable to me, impossible to describe to you who had left this world so long before: Two planes flown by terrorists crashed into the two highest skyscrapers in New York, the whole world saw it on television, the towers disintegrated, I watched people throw themselves out of the windows to escape the fires, and I was completely torn up inside. But everything became clear as well, the illusions I still had fell from me like dead skin. I don’t know if that horror reawakened the other horror, but from that day on, I felt how much it meant to me to be a Jew. It was as if, up until that day, I’d been avoiding the fact that being Jewish is the strongest thing about me.

  I feel like I’m the disillusioned heir of your illusions, an extension of you, the child born of your escape. You dreamed of America; well, the first time I went to New York, the city drew me in, I never wanted to leave, and I realized I was pursuing your exile. You dreamed of Israel, it exists. I feel good every time I go there, but it isn’t the land of peace we’d hoped for. Israel has been at war ever since it was created. Wars normally end, but not this one, for the Jewish state has never been accepted by the Arab countries that surround it; its borders are never fixed, ever-changing, violent. And the longer this goes on, the more suspect Israel becomes, in the opinion of Europeans as well. I can hear a response in my mind, a film called Welcome in Vienna.† It retraces our history, the history of European Jews. One of the characters says: “They will never forgive us for the evil they’ve done us.” I’ve always been in favor of the coexistence of Israel and a Palestinian state, but I’ve become more and more moved by what is happening and what I’m hearing. I don’t want to judge, I don’t live there, but I will never have a single doubt when it comes to the right of Israel to exist. I will follow your dream.