But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens Page A

Rozenberg”—it means “mountain rose” or “a mountain of roses,” it’s very beautiful. I bear the names of the men I married. Neither was Jewish, but don’t hold that against me. The first was Francis Loridan, I met him when I fell off my bike on the way to the château. He helped me get up, and we got married very quickly. He was an engineer, dreamed of going abroad, hoping I would go with him, but I had no desire to live in the colonies where jobs were created by all the construction going on, no desire to be the wife of one of the white masters, and no desire to leave Paris either. He left for Madagascar while I tried to heal in the culturaland political boiling pot of Saint-Germain; I had one little job after another until the day I found work in television. I never joined him out there, but we didn’t get divorced for a long time after our separation, and I kept “Loridan” because it had become my professional name. I must admit that it was useful to me. Anti-Semitism was still very widespread after the war, it was easier to be called “Loridan” than “Rozenberg.” My second husband was Joris Ivens. And I must tell you about him.
    Joris was thirty years older than me. He’d wandered in from Holland, a poet, an artist, a sturdily built man with long white hair—they called him the “Flying Dutchman.” He was born at the turn of the century, like you. During his lifetime, he’d seen the birth of the cinema, he was one of its pioneers, one of the greatest documentary makers, known throughout the world. He’d traveled around the entire planet, told the story of the Spanish Civil War, the struggle of the workers and the liberation of many differentpeoples. He was a man who was haunted by human poverty; he carried it within him and it constantly tore him apart. Like many artists between the two wars, he became a great supporter of the Communist Party, in reaction to the rise of various forms of fascism. He suffered when he saw the party’s ideals destroyed by the Soviet system, but he remained a member. I met him in 1962. He’d seen me in a movie called Chronique d’un été ( Chronicle of a Summer ). I was holding a microphone and asking random passersby, “Are you happy?” Then I talked about you, the camps, your disappearance. It was a completely new way of making film, people told their stories and revealed who they were. The family reproached me for it. “Don’t go and see that movie—Marceline shows off in it,” one of my aunts ordered. Joris saw me in the film showing my tattooed number, talking about how you were gone but without ever looking sad, I think. But I didn’t say I was happy. Joris knew the director and confided in him: “If I ever met that girl, I’dfall in love with her.” And that’s what happened. We were never apart from the moment we first met.
    So he knew my story, and yours. We very rarely spoke about it, we didn’t talk about ourselves very much at all. We behaved in a way so we’d never hurt each other. We thought of ourselves as a two-headed hydra; we traveled, made films together, dreamed of the future. In his memoirs, Joris wrote that we had the same desire: to rid the planet of its impurities. The word may be a bit too strong, but it’s true, it fit with his idealism. We were living in the present, and we even thought we’d have some impact on history. That’s a very strange feeling after you’ve been nothing but a Stuck in Birkenau.
    But I’m talking to you about a time you never knew. Imagine the world after Auschwitz. When the wish to live replaces the wish to die. When rediscovered freedom spreads throughout the entire planet and demands new battles. Imagine Israel finally created! I thought about you so much, about how joyful you would have been. Youhad always been a Zionist. Between the two wars, you’d sent money to the Jewish National Fund to buy back land in Palestine. You dreamed of a future nation. You were investing, your brother was