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

motor from molds. I was very tiny, so they had me stand on a bench, but the moving assemblyline seemed to want to devour me; it dragged me along one day and injured me, but someone’s hands grabbed me and pulled me back, the hands of fate. I would make it out alive. In the factory, the workers were a mixture of Jews and German civilians. I remember the time one of them gestured that he’d left something for me in a drawer. It was a bag full of cooked potato skins.
    Did I feel hope again? I did dare to hide when it was time to leave again, to take a train from Leipzig to some unknown destination. The Americans were only eighteen kilometers away now, we knew that. Renée and I hid in a casket in the detention camp—a casket, even though for the first time in a very long time we imagined we might survive! But they counted everyone again at the Leipzig station; two were missing, they came back, looked for us, found us, threw us into a truck. There were fires everywhere, the Allies’ bombings never stopped, Germany was being reduced to ashes. And I thought about Mala, who’d told us to hold on and live.
    She was our heroine at Birkenau. She was a Belgian Jew, she spoke several languages, and because of that, she had the right to move around freely, and she took advantage of that to help as much as she could. One day, she ran away with her lover, a Polish Resistance fighter who’d been deported, they disguised themselves as SS officers and left in a car. You must have heard this story: Two people were missing when they took roll call. You know how the Nazis became furious if they lost two people, even if we were already fifty or a hundred thousand—how could we know?—behind their barbed wire. You probably stood for hours on end, like us, while they counted and recounted; I wonder if that wasn’t the time when they left us kneeling outside on the ground all night long, fighting with all the strength we had left against the temptation to fall down and be killed.
    Mala was caught three weeks later at the Czech border, denounced by Polish farmers. Her lover gave himself up; he didn’t want her tothink he’d talked. He was hanged right away. She was put in a bunker for weeks, in one of those cells you have to crawl into and where you can’t even sit down. And then one day, they ordered the Aryan women locked in their barracks and the Jews brought out in the courtyard in front of Lager B. * There were thousands of us in rows of five, me in front, as usual, since I’m so small. The gallows had been set up, the noose was ready, and the camp’s SS officers were right in front of it. Mala arrived standing up in a cart pulled along by some prisoners, she was dressed all in black, her hands tied behind her back—the staging was complete. SS Commandant Kramer shouted that none of us would get out alive, we were nothing but vermin, dirty Jews. And while he was shouting, I saw something running down her body—her blood! Someone had obviously given her a blade of some kind, she’d cut the ropes, then slashed her wrists. She was choosing theway she would die. I was fascinated by the blood running down and that they didn’t notice while Kramer shouted how all-powerful he was. Suddenly, one of the officers saw. He grabbed her by the arm, but she broke free, then she slapped him across the face and he fell down, and taking advantage of the few seconds she had during the chaos, she started speaking, in French, “Murderers, soon you’ll have to pay,” then turning to all of us, “Don’t be afraid, the end is near! I know, I was free, don’t give up, never forget.” They rushed her back into the cart, ordered that we all be locked in our cell blocks. Blocksperre ! Many rumors followed about how they’d finally killed her, that they’d hanged her somewhere else, or even thrown her into the crematorium while she was still alive. We talked about her for a long time. But we didn’t believe her promises.
    In the truck taking us to