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

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 wheelsthat 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 hewas 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 havingbeen 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 livewith us. She left her soldier after the war, left him in order to be forgiven, to reclaim