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

already there. Would you have taken us there if you’d survived? Would you have sold the château, your dream that had become a curse, and chosen to leave? I would have gone with you. In 1947, a friend and I went to the office of a Jewish organization that dealt with people who wanted to go. I would have fought or helped there. They said no, we were minors. There were already many survivors from the camps there, and I imagine they didn’t know what to do with them. We were young girls, and damaged.
    The world offered places to flee. While Israel was being born, one after the other the people of the countries colonized by the old European powers stood up for themselves and demanded their independence. I was passionate about these political upheavals and the endless discussions they led to. I thought, If I can’t do anything for myself, I’mgoing to do something for others. The Algerian uprising became the great cause of my generation, and for me, a test; I became an activist within the independence networks, lived outside the law, even watched the French police search my apartment, and I made a film about it, Algérie, année zero ( Algeria, Year Zero ), and it was banned for a long time. The more I demanded reparations for the Algerians, the more I felt I was being paid back myself, felt I’d found my place. They were Arabs and I was Jewish, but that wasn’t the problem. I thought that by liberating other people, whether they were Algerian, Vietnamese, or Chinese, the Jewish problem would be solved at the same time. It was a terrible mistake, as the future proved, but I firmly believed it then.
    And yet, years before, after we’d first been arrested, in my cell at Sainte-Anne, the holding place before Drancy and Birkenau, I’d said that I didn’t trust people. I was nearly sixteen and a self-declared Gaullist. One of my fellow prisoners was a Resistance fighter and a Communist, andshe asked me why I wasn’t. “I don’t like the working classes,” I’d replied, “because they’re the ones who carry out the pogroms.” I spoke as a Jewish woman, without even knowing where I was being taken. I probably thought a little like you. I didn’t understand much of the discussions I’d overheard at home between you and your brother Herman, a proud Communist who’d gone to fight with the International Brigades in Spain, or with Bill, Mama’s brother, who also went to fight Franco, but I could sense what was at stake—saving the world, saving ourselves, the Jews—and I understood that they reproached you for being a moderate. We’d all listened intently to Radio London, where they broadcast that Jews were being gassed in trucks. You should know that Bill died a hero: He killed the German Gestapo officer who was interrogating him, then threw himself out of the fourth-floor window.
    Fifteen years later, it was my turn to ask myself about the future of man. I hadn’t become an optimist. I would shiver in the waiting room of a trainstation. In hotels, I refused to go into any bathroom that had a shower. I couldn’t stand the sight of factory chimneys. When you’ve come back, you’re aware of such things as long as you live. But in order to live, the best thing I could find to believe in, to the point of obsession, like my uncles before me, was that it was possible to change the world.
    Joris and I filmed the war in Vietnam; there I earned the respect of the fighters for having survived the death camps. And we wanted to believe in the Chinese Revolution. I don’t know what the papers you read before the war said about China, it was so far away, but at that time Joris was already there making a movie; he had filmed the peasants fighting the Japanese invasion and still had contacts there. In fact, when the Communists took control of the country, he was on their side, hoping that this time the ideal wouldn’t turn out to be the totalitarian nightmare it became in the USSR. He took me there. We made about fifteen movies