But You Did Not Come Back [Paperback] Loridan-Ivens, Marceline and Smith, Sandra

A beautiful and poignant testimony of a death camp survivor, whom beloved father never returned. The author delivers, though a letter to her deceased father, a reflection on what it means to return and learn to live again in a post-war era.

I enjoyed reading the book very much and recommend it to anyone interested in accounts of survivors of this brutal period of history. It is written in a particular style which gives the book a particular flavour. Quite different from other accounts.

The youngest survivors of the German concentration camps were born right before the camps were liberated in 1945. They are now in their early seventies, but when they pass, the living links to one of the most disturbing crimes against humanity will be gone.Perhaps 87-year-old Holocaust survivor and author Marceline Lordian-Ivens realized that the camps that literally killed her father would symbolically do the same to her unless she documented her experience. A crime against humanity would be compounded by the crime of unremembering. In her ninth decade, she bears witness to the horrors of the Holocaust through the simple method of a long-form letter to her dead father. This conversational style makes her story from nearly 72 years ago feel present and intimate.Through a series of small moments, Lordian-Ivens describes a 15-year-old girl whose existence is anchored by the loving and trusting relationship with her father. Their love and trust for one another – even when brutally separated – is what allows her to endure her captivity and become the woman she thinks her father would have been proud. It’s a timeless coming-of-age story but with the Holocaust adding imaginable grief and horror to her narrative.At 100 pages, it’s a short but profoundly moving story of devotion in the midst of great pain. Even though her father did not come back, he lives on forever in Lordian-Ivens’s masterpiece telling.

a must read for persons that are interested in Holocost memoirs.

Very well written story, very sad, but you will feel glad you read it when finished. It's quite a short book on a deep topic. Worth the read.