But You Did Not Come Back Read Online Free PDF Page A

understood me better than anyone and forgiven me everything. I’m dreaming, no doubt.
    But there would have been two of us who knew. Maybe we wouldn’t have talked about it often, but the stench, what we saw, the foul smells and the intensity of our emotions would have washed over us like waves, even in silence, and we could have divided our memories in two.

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    T he official document arrived at the château on February 12, 1948: “ The Minister of Former Combatants and Victims of the War confirms the death of Szlhama Froim Rozenberg, born on March 7, 1901, in Nowa Slupia, Poland.”
    The minister could have simply said you were missing, but he decided you were dead. An administrative slip of the pen by a country that declares your death as if it had arranged it.
    I still have that document, with the words “ République Française ” and “ Acte de disparition ” at the top of the page, then the sentence that comes next: “ The Minister officially declares that Szlhama Froim Rozenberg is missing and presumed dead in the following circumstances: Arrested in March 1944 at Bollène. Interned in Avignon, Marseille, then Drancy. Deported to Auschwitz in the convoy that left Drancy on April 13, 1944. Transferred to Mauthausen and Gross-Rosen.”
    I read those words and picture our arrest, the Frenchman who was with the Milice hitting you on the head with the butt of his rifle at the back of the garden, where he stopped us from running away. I see our prisons, the uniforms of the Frenchmen who were our guards at Drancy. I recognize our convoy, number 71. Then your prophecy that comes true. Our paths that go in different directions as the war is ending.
    In November 1944, you were still in Auschwitz, me in Birkenau, but not for much longer. I’d been prodded by Mengele’s baton and had to turn around, like when I’d first arrived—another weeding out. I thought my time was up, my stomach was bleeding internally from my herniated umbilical cord—the one I’d had the operation for, do you remember? It had opened up again,Mengele couldn’t see it, but when he told me to stand in one of the lines, I thought it was the one going to the gas chamber. But I found myself with some of the others in a freight car instead. I was leaving Birkenau. I was going farther away from you.
    I didn’t even know which direction the train was headed. After two or three days, it finally stopped in the middle of nowhere. It was very cold. We walked another ten kilometers or so through the forest—the sea wasn’t far away, we could smell it through the trees—and we finally arrived at Bergen-Belsen. Once we were there, our eyes and noses knew even before we were told: There was no gas chamber.
    No gas chamber. No open jaws where they could throw us at any moment. We young women from Birkenau had escaped the largest death camp. No chimney. No crematorium. No stench of burning bodies. That’s why I was singing in the tents they’d set up for us in the snow, even though I was shivering. Nothing more thanthe usual barbarity: hunger, beatings, sickness, the cold. Even the orders were less strict. We still had chores, but the work details were gone, along with roll call for hours on end in the freezing cold. They’d regrouped us, putting all the French women together.
    In my unit we’d elected a leader who spoke German, Anne-Lise Stern. She’d grown up in Germany, her father was a student of Freud, her mother a Socialist; they’d fled to France, where Nazism had caught up to them. Anne-Lise behaved in a way that was compliant but protected us at the same time. Humanity seemed to be stirring once more. It wasn’t yet hope: We were sure we wouldn’t be gassed, but still not certain they wouldn’t kill us.
    Two months later, in February, we saw the exhausted faces of the people on the death marches arriving from Birkenau. Among them, I recognized my friend Simone, her sister, and their mother, whom I called Madame Jacob; Madame died a few