How much devastation can you pack into 100 pages? A lot. Even more when every word is true.
In the vein of Night by Elie Wiesel or Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Marceline Loridan-Ivens recounts her years as a slave (her word) in several prisons and concentrations camps. Loridan-Ivens was arrested with her father in France when the Nazis raided their family’s chateau. They were soon separated – him to Auschwitz, her to Birkenau. Although only a few kilometres apart, they saw each other only a handful of times, mostly from a distance. Loridan-Ivens survived; her father did not.
Written as a sort of letter, a plea, a confession to her beloved father, Loridan-Ivens tells him what life was like for her during her imprisonment, a few of the horrors she saw, what it was like to live under the smoke and smell of burning bodies, how quickly hope does and how fragile it is when it begins, slowly, to return. She tells of her release, her return to her family and the years of waiting to know what happened to their husband and father. She details all the ways the concentration camps and his death tore her family apart, even years later.
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.
There aren’t really words for me to describe what Loridan-Ivens shares in this slim volume. It’s so outside of my scope of experience and it’s so beyond what any human being should have endured. So all I can say is this is an important and powerful book. Loridan-Ivens, still living in France, now in her eighties, is compelled to share her story in the face of continued and rising anti-Semitism. It may be a cliche but it’s painfully true: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
*This edition was translated from the French by Sandra Smith
Karissa Reads Books 
[…] Lewis (Mariner Books, 2012) 58. A Grief Observed – C.S. Lewis (Faber & Faber, 2013) 59. But You Did Not Come Back – Marceline Loridan-Ivens (Penguin, 2016) (translated by Sandra Smith) 60. Last Child in the […]