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

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 aretoday, 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 toan 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 wasthinking 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