An incredibly moving piece of writing by a Jewish woman trying to analyse her feelings on surviving the death camps of WW2. She came back, her beloved father did not: although they were never able to discover what exactly happened to him. Short and very much to the point, it is easy to read in one sitting. Very much recommended. ( )

I need to come back and really write everything for this book but I devoured it in a single session on a flight and awkwardly sobbed as the person next to me kindly passed me a tissue.
This is more than a letter to a father that long passed away, it is an aching look at the life of a Holocaust survivor, the change in their life, and how they view the world after the war.
Nonchalantly mentioning events in Birkenau while flitting between the profound life she led after the war only serves to make it even more heartbreaking as I quickly realised what I call 'normal' is not even close to the same meaning for Marceline. ( )

> « J’ai vécu puisque tu voulais que je vive. Mais vécu comme je l’ai appris là-bas, en prenant les jours les uns après les autres. Il y en eut de beaux tout de même. T’écrire m’a fait du bien. En te parlant, je ne me console pas. Je détends juste ce qui m’enserre le cœur. Je voudrais fuir l’histoire du monde, du siècle, revenir à la mienne, celle de Shloïme et sa chère petite fille. »
—Johnny Gimenez (Culturebox)

100 pages to tell her story, that's all she took. Written with sadness and yet much strength. Marceline tells her story of survival from Auschwitz-Birkenau with a quiet dignity. This is her personal narrative to her father. They were arrested together but sadly he did not return. She talks to him constantly, telling him all about her life since the camps, all the things he's missed seeing and sharing with her. I thought Marceline's frankness and empathy had a powerful calmness. One passage has really stuck with me, I don't think I'll ever forget it - "Fifteen years later.........I hadn't become an optimist. I would shiver in the waiting room of a train station. In hotels, I refused to go into any bathroom that had a shower. I couldn't stand the sight of factory chimneys. When you've come back, you're aware of such things as long as you live." We have no idea of the horrors endured by these innocents. Marceline died 18th September 2018 ( )

BUT YOU DID NOT COME BACK is a unique and open stor.....i almost wrote story.....MEMOIR. A story has the possibility of being made-up.
As much as we all may WISH away the holocaust and make it a story, it happened. Marceline Loridan Ivens has written from her heart of what became her gut-wrenching life, telling us of what DID happen to her and her father. Their capture, the prisons and camps....of his last message to her. HIStory and HERstory. The evil of the camps, the fears and pain, and unimaginable torture of existence .....
"My memory had to shatter, otherwise I would not have been able to go on living." ( )