Simone Veil, the Jewish lawyer and politician who had survived Auschwitz but on her return to Paris found her father, her brother and one sister had been killed, spoke of ‘being forgotten’ as a second death. Marceline Rozenberg (later Loridan-Ivens) felt muted in the same way. ‘Don’t say anything, they won’t understand,’ she was told when she arrived back. Just fifteen years old when she was arrested with her Polish-born father, she had witnessed more horror than any child (or adult) could cope with, together with the knowledge that an uncle, who had killed a German in Paris, had subsequently jumped out of a window at the Rue des Saussaies rather than confess under torture. In the next eighteen months she managed to survive three camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen and finally Theresienstadt.
‘When I returned in July 1945 to the Lutetia I had become a savage. I was like a wild child. We were rock hard, like stone – we had to become human again.’ Similarly another woman, explaining that the reason she had survived deportation was because she had learned to steal, never forgot how shocked her aunt had been to hear that her well-brought-up niece had become a thief. But in the camps stealing was merely taking whatever you could find in order to survive. It was called ‘organizing’, and life or death might depend on being able to organize a spoon.
Marceline was able to articulate only much later, aged eighty-six, how after the camps there could be no more humanity inside her: she had killed off the little girl she had been. When she finally wrote her memoir, Et tu n’es pas revenu (You Did Not Come Back) – a reference to her adored father – published in 2015, she explained that in order to survive it was necessary to destroy memory. ‘If you cried for others, you would drown in tears.’ She had, she explained, been forced to do the work of death itself in the camps. She had become death’s tool. For years, she was never able to talk of the work she had been forced to do in the camps: dig shallow trenches in which to burn the corpses of women. She would say instead she had dug trenches in which to grow vegetables. Only very recently was she able to admit: ‘I didn’t have a choice but I did it. And the simple act of doing it has meaning. I participated like the collaborators did.’
Marceline wrote movingly not only of the guilt of survival but of why it was impossible for others, even close family, to understand. ‘Very quickly, Mother asked me in a low voice if I had been raped. Was I still a virgin? Good for marriage? That was her question.’ She believed that the intense postwar desire to rebuild, to let life continue its course with weddings and babies, even when many of those who should have been there to celebrate were absent, was a Jewish madness. Two years after her release from Theresienstadt, the year her brother married, Marceline threw herself into the Seine. Saved by a stranger, she later suffered from TB and was sent to recover in a sanatorium in Switzerland.
Marceline was one of a convoy of 1,500 sent out to Germany of whom 100 returned, a statistic that illustrates one of the lingering problems in France, arguably never resolved: the disparity among those who came back. Half of those deported for resistance activities returned, but only 3 per cent of the Jews (2,500 out of 76,000 deported), an unwelcome statistic for those in France denying that a genocide had taken place. Yet the attitude which saw resisters as patriots who had been involved in combat entitled to a higher level of compensation than the deported Jews, perceived as victims, persisted at least until the end of the twentieth century in some quarters, and derives from the problem of what the French historian Henry Rousso later identified as résistancialisme to describe the myth which exaggerated French involvement in the resistance to the Nazi Occupation and played down the role of collaboration. But it also fed into the notion that to have been deported as a resister was noble, but to have fallen into German hands as a victim was shameful. ‘Even the dead, guilty of passivity, were not immune from this shame, for they had allowed themselves to be corralled by the anti-Semitic laws.’*
Philippe de Rothschild was another who went to the Lutetia that summer, seeking news of his wife.
A group of French women had just arrived not long out of Ravensbrück. They looked as if they had risen from the grave. Among them one recognized me. I looked again, it was Tania, Comtesse de Fleurieu, a brave woman in the resistance. She had been very lovely but now all her teeth were smashed. They had beaten her across the mouth. She knew about Lili [Elisabeth], she had been there, in the same hut. Beaten, degraded and too broken to move, Lili had been dragged from her plank bed by the hair of her head and thrown into the oven alive. She died because she had borne my name. There was no doubt about that … I did not make any more enquiries and to this day I have never received official notification of her death … poor pretty woman, until they came for her that morning her life had been so easy, all silk and roses.