"But You Did Not Come Back," Marceline Loridan-Ivens - A Review

When I hear and read of the anti-Semitism that has become rampant in the U.S., but perhaps more particularly in Europe, I cringe. When I hear U.S. politicians condemn Israel for genocide I wonder, what has he or she been smoking? Do they understand the harm they do, the ignorance they show of history? Certainly, there is room for political differences, but these accusations and attacks go beyond what is fair or decent. In seventy-eight years of existence, Israel – a nation poor in natural resources – has created a country with the second highest GDP per capita in the Middle East, second to Qatar, a nation with massive offshore petroleum reserves. It is also the freest and most democratic. 

 

This book, really a memoir, is a reminder that the past is never the past.

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

But You Did Not Come Back, Marceline Loridan-Ivens

June 26, 2026

 

“Writing to you has helped me. When I talk to you, I don’t 

feel consoled. But I release what is clasped tightly in my heart.”

                                                                                                                         Marceline Loridan-Ivens

                                                                                                                          But You Did Not Come Back, 2015

                                                                                                                          Marceline Loridan-Ivens (1928-2018)

 

Around 1950, my father, five years back from having served in the Italian theater with the 10^thMountain Division, admonished me to never forget what the Nazis had done to the Jewish people. And I never have. While there are specific excuses for the rise of Nazism in the 1920s – the humiliation of defeat in the Great War and the subsequent demand for reparations under the Treaty of Versailles – we should not forget that these state-sanctioned atrocities were committed by a country that had produced Beethoven and Bach, Goethe and Schiller, Dürer and Friedrich, Kant and Hegel. Nazism rose not from the barbarism of a tribal people but from the universities, churches and theaters of a civilized nation. The potential for cruelty lies within all of us. We must all be guardians.

 

Marceline Loridan-Ivens story is a reminder that France, another civilized country and the birthplace of Debussy, Hugo, Renoir and Descartes, conspired with Nazi Germany to send Marceline and her father, along with thousands more, to the French internment camp of Drancy. From there she was sent to Birkenau and he to Auschwitz, where he perished. In 1935 Sinclair Lewis published his dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here. It can, and it will – if we lose sight of the past, and if we ignore the responsibility we each bear to continue and pass on the civilization we have inherited. 

 

In February 1944 when they were arrested at their chateau in southern France, she was fifteen and he was forty-three. Yet he suspected what was to come. Her book is a letter to her father, a response to a note he smuggled to her (since lost, but which began “To my darling little girl...”), and to his telling her when they were arrested by French police: “You might come back, because you’re young, but I will not come back.” Marceline’s short (100 pages), haunting story makes clear why memories of the Holocaust should never fade. She writes: “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.”

 

Anti-Semitism has been rising in Europe and in the United States, often masked as anti-Zionism to make it acceptable. Marceline’s memoir is testimony that evil is ever-present. French Jews fared better than, for example, those in Germany or Poland. Even so, according to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, about 76,000 French Jews were arrested by French police and sent to extermination Camps between 1942 and 1944. Only 2,500 survived.. Millions of Jews, from more than a dozen European countries, were sent to mass extermination camps in Germany, Poland, Croatia, Belarus and Serbia. It is estimated that between six and seven million Jews, approximately 70% of Europe’s pre-War population, were killed. Like many of you, I have read several books on the Holocaust. But You Did Not Come Back is perhaps the most moving.