But You Did Not Come Back Read Online Free PDF

days later of typhus, on thefrozen ground of the camp. They had walked so far. They told us how they’d emptied out Auschwitz and Birkenau before the Russians arrived; the ones who could still stand were forced along the roads by rifles prodding them forward.
    You were probably among them. But you were walking in a completely different direction than me. You were going south. I was headed north. I rolled around in the snow naked to kill the lice and get warm. There was nothing to eat anymore, starvation and epidemics took over the work of extermination. The worst butchers from Birkenau had also arrived, and they’d reinstituted their filthy methods, counting and recounting us, still obsessed with numbers, with killing Jews even during their defeat; that’s what drove them to make you all die on the roads rather than leaving you in the camps where the Allies could have saved you.
    I imagine your body among a column of staggering, emaciated men pushed to the limit by the SS. Auschwitz. Mauthausen. Then Gross-Rosen,according to the death certificate. How far you traveled! Hundreds of kilometers toward the south, then suddenly circling back toward the surrounded Reich, going north again, even farther north than Auschwitz. That means that you held up, you walked without falling, without giving them the chance to kill you along the way. You must have had some strength left when you left Auschwitz. You really might have survived.
    Where were you when I was leaving? All hell broke loose at Bergen-Belsen. But I was put on a train again with my group of French women. We were going to a Junker airplane factory in Raguhn, near Leipzig. We were leaving to make machines for a lost war. My path was like a horrific decrescendo—Birkenau-Bergen-Belsen-Raguhn—from an extermination camp to a factory concentration camp. It fits with the promise you made me: “You’re young, Marceline, you’ll make it.” But where were you? It was February 1945. According to the history books, that’s when the Russian Army liberated the camp at Gross-Rosen. Andaccording to your official document, that’s the last place there was any trace of you. Were you killed and thrown into the communal graves by the desperate Germans?
    Maybe not. Mama insisted on believing someone who said he’d seen you at Auschwitz and that you’d left the camp before the death march in January of 1945, that you’d been seen at Dachau and should have stayed there but that you’d started walking again to help a man who couldn’t keep going without you and whom the Germans would have killed. According to Mama, you hadn’t been selected to keep walking—you sacrificed yourself. I didn’t believe it. In the camps, you didn’t choose anything, not even the way you died. But Dachau, that was possible; I read that many people from Gross-Rosen were transferred there. It doesn’t matter if we didn’t have that in writing. It wasn’t possible to establish a real inventory anymore, not in the postwar chaos. The French government probably sent out certificates in bulk, writing down likely names,places, and dates that weren’t necessarily verified. I don’t believe a word of the official history written by France.
    But what does it matter today whether you died in February or April? Why drag out your suffering? I don’t know. It’s as if I’m still fighting your prophecy. My life for yours.
    I would like to think you didn’t die that February. I was no longer wearing dead people’s clothes then. In Raguhn, I was given a striped dress, like the one I used to dream about in Birkenau. There was still a red cross on my back, a yellow star on my chest, but I didn’t notice them anymore: I had the dress I wanted, and there were even women guards from the countryside who gave us needles and thread so we could make them fit. They also gave us each a whole loaf of bread. We ate it all at once, even though it was our ration for a week.
    On the assembly line, I cut out pieces of a