But You Did Not Come Back

The year has barely started but already one of the most beautiful books of the year has been published. Short, dense, powerful, in a word: overwhelming, with a simplicity of expression and a skill for creating an image ... you will read it in one sitting. An arrow launched by a keen memory.

Film-maker, writer, activist, Marceline Loridan-Ivens was deported at the age of 15, together with her father. She survived, but he did not. Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, she takes up a dialogue with him, in But You Did Not Come Back ... This book is a letter. The letter of a little girl to her father, the man with whom she was deported at the age of 15, in 1944. Then she was four feet eight inches, her shoe size 1.5. She has not grown much since. You can still see this little girl very clearly in the rebellious, cheerful, and slightly cloaked face of this petite woman of eighty-six.

Marceline Loridan-Ivens gives us a valuable lesson. ... A lesson of survival and of life, describing ... how one can cope with the worst of all things without ever losing your dignity. You read this with tears welling up in your eyes. ... I'll say it again: read it. ... [An] important book, [one] book you'll never forget.

In literature, every so often, there comes a miracle, a book, a text, an author, a writing style, a way of recounting something, refusing any pathos and any exposition, saying things about life and death. I'm evoking But You Did Not Come Back.