Marceline Loridan-Ivens’s memoir of being sent with her father to Auschwitz-Birkenau is exquisitely written and unwaveringly honestMarceline Loridan-Ivens was 15 when,in April 1944, she was arrested along with her father by the Nazis and sent from occupied France to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marceline would do it home. Her father would not.
But You Did Not Come Back is Loridan-Ivens’s extraordinary, and unflinching and deeply moving memoir of the year she spent in Birkenau,her liberation by the Russians and her return home to France. She describes her experiences with a resolute commitment to detail; there is the brutal, visceral truth approximately her enforced labour in the camp – “I dug the ditches where the bodies of 50 distant relatives from Lodz would burn” – and there are harrowing stories of murdered children and savage violence. But there is no room for sentimentality in Loridan-Ivens’s honest and self-aware prose: the facts of her incarceration speak emotively enough.
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Source: theguardian.com