But You Did Not Come Back (2 page)

When we passed by, some of the women would come closer to the electrified fence and whisper questions to us; they didn’t have their children anymore, but still wanted to hope. We’d ask them if they had a number. No, they’d reply. Then we’d raise our arms to the heavens as a sign of despair. Our tattooed number was our opportunity, our
victory, and our shame. I’d helped build the second railway line that led directly to the gas chambers where their children had just been thrown. Now I was going to sort through their clothes.

Death regurgitated so many clothes that I’d been assigned to Canada as an extra worker. We sifted through the skirts, underwear, pants, shirts, shoes of everyone who’d been incinerated and whose bodies gave off the smell of burnt flesh, a smell that hovered over the camp, penetrated deep into our nostrils, our bones, our thoughts, day and night, carrying with it the promise of the same fate. We often sorted through tattered clothes, worn-out shoes in suitcases made of cardboard. And they said the Jews were rich!

The worst of the clothes ended up on us, the nicest ones were sent to Germany. We walked around in the rags of our dead, with a red cross on our backs, like you had too. I wore a dead girl’s vest, another girl’s skirt, the shoes of yet another. But you have to be really alive for objects and clothes to remind you of someone. Back there,
there were too many clothes, they reminded you of no one anymore, the Nazis had turned those clothes into mountains and they rode around them on bicycles, holding a whip, a barking dog in front of them.

And I dreamed of a striped dress like the Aryan women had, that lovely dress was made of a single piece of material, it covered your whole body and had never belonged to anyone outside the camp; I ended up thinking there was something mysterious about that dress—perhaps it was the feeling of belonging that uniforms give you, they tell you where you are and what you are and also that one day you might be able to take them off.

And I stole things. A sweater once. A spoon for a friend. Then the coin, found sewn into a hem, without knowing it would be for you. I remember having no pockets, I didn’t know where to put it. I risked a lot if they found it on me. Who could I trust? The majority of the deported women who were put in charge in the blocks were Aryans.
They would have denounced me or taken everything I had. The anti-Semitism in the camp was terrifying, the Aryans constantly swore at us, the Polish women, Ukrainians, and the German criminals were the worst of all.

And I knew I couldn’t keep the coin for long because once a month we had to send everything to be sterilized to avoid getting lice and typhus. They’d give us dead people’s clothes that never fit me, they were always too big or too long, even the very first ones I got when I arrived. I’ll never forget them: a skirt that went down to the ground, a small vest, a pair of stained men’s underpants that stank of disinfectant, one flat shoe and another with a heel, both too big. I still wear a size two; I haven’t grown much since you last saw me.

I think your letter arrived when I was sent to work on the potatoes. We’d left Canada; some of the women had been caught stealing and sent to the gas chamber, the others were punished and sent to move the potatoes. We walked in single file, unloading the wagons and carrying the boxes
to the warehouse, using makeshift crates with handles at the front and back. There were Nazis everywhere, to make sure we didn’t steal a single potato.

Then there was that day. The little girl. She was holding the front of a crate full of potatoes and I was at the back, she had no strength left, she was shaking and couldn’t keep going, the German SS officer behind me hit the back of my neck so I’d move faster, but I didn’t want to, the little girl in front couldn’t take a single step, I said I could switch places with her, let her take the back, he hit me even harder, called me a dirty Jew, hit me again, so I moved forward and the handle banged into the little girl’s back, every blow to my neck forced me to hurt her; she fell down and couldn’t get up so the Nazi finished her off with the butt of his rifle. I call her a little girl, but she was no younger and no smaller than me, but so fragile, thinner than me, so I remember her as a child, I think she was Greek, and I killed her.

Then we were sent to the ditches. We had to dig them with pickaxes. For a long time I told people they were near the kitchens, for fifty years I stuck stubbornly to that lie, told it to others and especially to myself. It was my friend Frida who made me remember the truth. “They were near the kitchens,” I said. “No, you’re making that up, they were right next to the gas chamber.” She was right. The crematoriums were working nonstop, they were so overloaded that flames shot out of the chimneys instead of smoke, and the flames were too visible, they were a signal to the Allied planes that were starting to bomb the armament factories close by. So they changed their method. The bodies that had been gassed ended up in the trenches I was digging, sprinkled with gasoline and reduced to ashes by a sheet of flames, flames that spread low across the ground and were invisible to the enemy.

After the Hungarians, the ghetto from Lodz arrived. I saw them walking up to the gas chambers. I thought that relatives I didn’t know, my
aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, were probably among them. You were from Lodz. I kept working. I struck the ground without looking around me, with no memories, no future, exhausted by not having enough to drink or eat; I dug the ditches where the bodies of fifty distant relatives from Lodz would burn. I lived in the present, in the next heave of my pickaxe or the moment when Mengele, the camp’s devil, made us undress and decided who would go to the gas chamber.

No one reacted, not me, not the others, when the
Sonderkommandos
‡
revolted. The Jewish women working in the armament factory had given them gunpowder, but the non-Jewish local Resistance members had refused to give them weapons. The
Sonderkommandos
blew up the crematorium, blew away their shame, for every day, they carried the bodies from the gas
chambers and threw them into the fire. They fled toward the forest by cutting through the barbed-wire fences, they called out to us, begged us to follow them, but we just watched them, exhausted, incapable of following. Anything good no longer seemed to apply to us; it was too late. They were recaptured and killed.

Your letter arrived too late as well. It probably spoke to me of hope and love, but there was no humanity left in me, I’d killed the little girl, I was digging right near the gas chambers, every one of my actions contradicted and buried your words. I served death. I’d been its hauler. Then its pickaxe. Your words slipped away, disappeared, even though I must have read them many times. They spoke of a world that was no longer mine. I had nothing to hold on to anymore. My memory had to shatter, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to go on living.

M
ama didn’t come for me in Paris. No one was waiting for me. I’d given the phone number of the château, 58, in Bollène, I still remember that, and she finally answered after they’d tried calling her several times with no success. They told her I’d come back and handed me the phone. I immediately asked if you were there. She didn’t reply, all she said was: “Come home.” I understood by the hesitation in her voice that you hadn’t come back, so I told her I didn’t want to come home. I don’t remember how she reacted. It didn’t matter. You were the one I wanted to see. And I would have happily stayed there, at the Lutetia, that luxurious well-established hotel on the Boulevard Raspail that the Germans had made their
defense headquarters, and which the Liberation had converted into a center for returning deportees. It was like a space between adjoining rooms. We slept two or three to a room, everyone on the floor, at the foot of the empty beds with their white sheets, unable to bear the feel of a mattress. And all we thought about was eating. Our backs were still there, on the wooden slats of our prison beds, but our stomachs were here; we were torn apart, conflicted. We were miracles.

To everyone in the foyer reading the lists, or on the sidewalks waving signs and photos of their families who’d disappeared, I said over and over again: “Everyone is dead.” If they insisted, showing me family photos, I’d calmly say: “Were there any children? Not a single child will come back.” I didn’t mince my words, I didn’t try to spare their feelings, I was used to death. I’d become as hard-hearted as the deportees who saw us arrive at Birkenau without saying a single comforting word. Surviving makes other people’s tears unbearable. You might drown in them. 

Yet all those people stayed, and every time a new bus arrived full of returning deportees, everyone got excited. At the Lutetia, waiting eagerly still seemed permissible. I had even met the man who was in solitary confinement in the cell next to mine in the Sainte-Anne d’Avignon prison, the first stage of our deportation to the camps. And yet, he’d been condemned to death. I’d never seen his face, we couldn’t recognize each other, but in the foyer of the Lutetia, he was looking for me. Everyone was looking for someone, not necessarily a relative, maybe a friend made in a holding camp, or in the hell of a barracks. He was looking for Marceline. I think I told you how I had communicated with him by tapping on the wall of my cell. I used the order of the alphabet since I didn’t know Morse code, A was one knock, B was two, and so on. I’d spelled my first name to him that way. Marceline took eighty knocks. It takes a long time, it forms bonds. “They didn’t kill me,” he said when we found each other, “they deported me to Buchenwald.”

And I would have gladly stayed at the Lutetia, let myself get carried along by his story, by the other stories, fleeing my premonition, your prophecy, trying to believe you were still lost in Russia or some other place. Far from life, the life that was asking me to live again, a life full of silences, missing people, deception. The life where you didn’t exist.

But the hotel couldn’t let me stay. I was given my repatriation papers and put on a train headed south. I didn’t want to go—if you only knew how much. The only possible reunion was with you. Sharing things and talking about what had happened was only possible with you. I went back home, a bit of flesh on my body again, they never saw me really thin, my hair had nearly grown back; I was standing in a jam-packed train car, one of the lucky ones, some people said, because I still had a family. But I wasn’t really there. I was clinging on to you, which meant I was clinging on to nothing. Eighteen hours later, the train pulled into the station at Bollène. Mama hadn’t come to meet me on the platform.

Uncle Charles was there. Later on, he’d tell me what had happened to him, how he’d been at Auschwitz and was then sent to Warsaw to clear away what remained of the ghetto, where the revolt had just been crushed, how he’d run away, hidden in a carriage full of rubble, joined the Polish Resistance, fought with them, all the while hiding the tattooed number on his arm, convinced that they wouldn’t want a Jew with them. Right in the middle of the German defeat, he’d taken a boat from Odessa and disembarked with the others at Marseille, but when they explained where they’d come from, they wanted to lock them up in the madhouse. He’d decided it was better not to say a word. That day, when no one was looking, he showed me his tattoo, saying, “I was at Auschwitz. Don’t tell them anything about it, they couldn’t understand.”

Michel was with him. He’d gotten bigger—he was eight. I knelt down in front of him and asked: “Do you recognize me?” He said no, but a few seconds later, he added: “I think you’re Marceline.”
He looked like a child who’d been abandoned. You were the one he was waiting for.

We set off in silence. Once we’d crossed the bridge over the river Lez, I saw the Château de Gourdon outlined against the hillside. It made me want to turn back. I’ve never understood that place. I remember the first time you took me there, in a horse-drawn carriage, you were so excited and asked, “What is the thing you wish for most in the world, Marceline?” as if you were about to grant my wish. What did I hope for? The end of the war, that we’d be together, no longer apart, no longer hiding, that was what I wished for and nothing else. But you insisted and spoke in a very mysterious voice: “The place where I’m taking you …”

You would have liked to hear me cry out that I’d always dreamed of a house like that. I didn’t say it. I wasn’t old enough to ask questions, but I didn’t understand why you were so excited. We were at war, we were living apart, in hiding, Pétain had come to power, he made us sing
songs at school that I still know by heart, and you had just bought a château. Did you think that by becoming the owners of a château we would no longer be Jews in their eyes? You did know, though, you read every paper you could. But you wanted to believe in this country where you’d settled, you pretended to forget that the château couldn’t legally be yours, for the simple reason that you were a foreign Jew and didn’t have the right to own property. It was Henri, your eldest son, who’d signed the title deeds; he’d become a French citizen when he turned eighteen and had just been demobilized from a war we’d lost. But you had proclaimed: “Here, we are free,” as if to justify not having seen things through, to distance yourself as much as possible from the Polish pogroms. You’d planned to go to America but you’d stopped here, in France, perhaps because of Zola and his “
J’accuse
,” or Balzac, whom you’d read in Yiddish, you must have told yourself that nothing could happen to us here. How naïve you were. Maybe by buying the château and the
vineyards all around it, you were showing some belief in Marshal Pétain, who advocated a return to the land. Or maybe you believed too much in the so-called Free Zone. Or the village’s mayor and police chief, who’d promised you they’d give us some warning. We were Jewish and we lived in the most visible of all the houses.

That château was not for you, not for us. And we spent one night too many there. On that night, we’d warned many people not to stay at home, who knows why we decided not to run away until the next day. One more night in this château. One night too many. Did you see how fast they took it away from us? They put everyone they’d just arrested inside, we didn’t know them, perhaps they were Resistance fighters or people suspected of helping them; they arrived in groups. You were still groggy from the violent blow to your head from the butt of the rifle and I was clumsily packing our suitcases when a German said, “Take sweaters, it’s cold where you’re going.” They confiscated our house in front of our very eyes, and
as Mama and Henriette watched, hidden in the bushes farther away; it was no longer our home, it never had been. Or for barely two years. The Germans set up their headquarters there.

We made our way home almost in silence, me, Michel, and Uncle Charles. Mama was in the courtyard. She took me in her arms. “I can’t stay here,” I said right away. I added that you wouldn’t be coming back. Your prophecy burned in my throat. “Rest for twenty-four hours and then we’ll see,” she replied. That made no sense. She was playing for time. She didn’t know what to say.

She was one of those generous but brusque people, the kind completely lacking in insight, who block out their emotions, transforming them into laughter or anger. You know very well how she used to suddenly get all upset and lash out, how she would shout and pinch us hard. She had always been more caring toward her sons than she ever was toward her daughters, for we were nothing more than an extension of herself. She left it to you to teach us affection and authority. She wasn’t
hard-hearted. I didn’t hold it against her that she hadn’t come to the Lutetia or to meet us at the station. She didn’t understand where I was coming back from, or didn’t want to. She would have had to find words and gestures that were alien to her.

They’d been free for a whole year when I arrived. Mama was often away; she was trying to get back her shop in Épinal, and everything they’d stolen from us, to earn a bit of money. Henri was in Paris about to get married, still thrilled by the months he’d spent with the FFL, the French Resistance, carried along on the postwar wave of amnesia and anti-Semitism that made everyone believe in a heroic France that clashed brutally with every one of my memories. Jacqueline was at boarding school in Orange, Michel was at Henriette’s house; I saw them on weekends.

They had the imagination of the very young, saying that one day you would suddenly appear out of the blue, that now you were just sick and lost, far away, very far away, unable to tell anyone your name or address. Michel often wanted
to go to the station and look for you on the platform. Strangely enough, sometimes I joined them, embraced their illusions, their fantasies, not for long, just for a few hours, to fall back into childhood again. Sometimes Jacqueline came into my room, she was thirteen and asked me questions about what had happened to me, she was the only one who did; I talked to her but I don’t remember what I said, whether I protected her or not. I’d also started writing, but always tore everything up. No one wanted my memories. We didn’t have any memories in common; we should have been able to add our memories to theirs, but instead, they pushed us apart.

So I wandered through the château alone during the week. At night, I had horrible nightmares. I didn’t go out during the day, I was afraid to cross the bridge, to run into the locals. I wandered through the house panic-stricken, the house that was too big with its two stories and twenty rooms, its tower, the enormous vineyards all around it. Everything came back to me, even Henri’s bad
jokes about my frizzy hair—“You have to catch Marceline and stick her at the end of the broom to brush away the spiderwebs!”—because afterwards you told him off and protected me. I wasn’t running away from ghosts, quite the contrary, I was chasing after them, after you. Who else could I share anything with? I told all of them about your letter; they would have liked to hear what it said, but I couldn’t recall a single word, so they finally forgot about it. I was the only one who kept that miraculous feeling I’d had back then, the note I’d held in my hands,
My darling little girl
. But here, nothing had any meaning, not the château, not my return. Henri and I both seemed destined to the same sense of loss, the same curse, destined to dust.

I was too young then to instinctively imagine what that château could tell me about you. I only understood much later: You’d found an estate equal in stature to the man you dreamed of becoming. You have to grow old to truly understand your parents’ thoughts. I know that when
you were a young man in Poland, you loved to wear an English top hat and carry a cane, but in secret, because of your strict, austere, very religious father; you’d shaken off the yoke of arranged marriages, married Mama because you loved her. You wanted to be a modern man. Then you’d fallen madly in love with that château, with its tower that would be the symbol of your freedom, your success. It was your dream, not mine, the one you were pursuing the day you took me there for the first time. “What do you wish for most in the world, Marceline?” No one ever asked me that question again.

What I would have liked when I came back was to be treated like an orphan. The orphans went to a sanatorium, they were still together and I often used to think about them. As for my friends, the ones who had died as well as the ones who’d come back, we were a close group, united by suffering; never had I felt as loved as I had back there. I know now that they were my family, more than my family was. “Say I’m your sister,”
Françoise had whispered to me in the camp when a messenger from the SS had asked for my number. She undoubtedly had wanted to do something to help me, or at least, that’s what Françoise and I thought; when they ask your number, it’s probably a good sign. “Say I’m your sister,” she’d whispered.

We’d been friends since Drancy. When we’d arrived at the camp, she forced me to walk when I wanted to get into the truck that would have taken me straight to the gas chamber, and later, when I was very sick and didn’t want to go to the infirmary, she’d traded my bread for some aspirin, even though she could have just eaten it herself. But I didn’t say she was my sister. I was alone, I was only responsible for myself, my only family then was you. I’ve always thought it was my fault if they sent her to the gas chamber. Françoise and her beautiful blue eyes haunted me for a long time, like a reprimand, a sister in misfortune.

So I would have been happy to be on a bed in a sanatorium, with the others, talking to them about Françoise and about my selfishness, listening to
them tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that we were innocent, watching our hair grow back, pouring out memories to women who could bear to hear them and were able to understand. We were coming back to life again, making different choices, the camp hadn’t wiped out all of our backgrounds and personalities, but I would have really liked to be in the same place as them, just for a little while, far away from the château, from my mother, from the world that looks down so haughtily at the fate of young women.