Read But You Did Not Come Back for Free Online Page A

document arrived, three years later, we were still hoping you’d come back, but without really expecting you to. Michel stopped asking to go to the station. Henri had married Marie. It was a big wedding. I wore a blue dress, like my sisters.
    We’d gone to Paris, stayed at the Hôtel Terminus near the Gare de l’Est. You would have loved their Jewish wedding, you would have been proud of your eldest son, a hero of the Free French Forces, walking down the aisle to his new life with Marie, who’d been arrested with us at our house but who’d come back alive along with the rest of her family. The wedding dinner was held at a fancy restaurant, the Palais d’Orsay. Everyone around the tables avoided talking about the camps. But the dressy clothes were nothing more than armor. Their armor. I didn’t believe in Sunday weddings, in some white dresses thrown over the clothes from Canada; I still carried the mountains of clothes that we’d sorted through on my back, and the stench of burnt flesh that would stay with me forever. I was resisting their demand that I live.
    Mama also remarried. She did it in secret, without saying anything. She only told us afterwards. I didn’t hold it against her. It was the man she chose and the way she did it that I didn’t like.He’d lost his wife and five children in the camps. He played cards and sponged off Mama. We didn’t like him. How could we? It was a time when I had strange dreams, I think. I went into their room, took down the pictures, especially the one of you and the one of our grandparents. I got you out of the room where she no longer slept alone. I realize now that it happened when your official document arrived. 1948. Maybe Mama needed that document to get remarried.
    This is what it said: “ By writing a brief letter to the State Prosecutor, the family may request either a statement declaring a person missing, which, after five years, will be replaced by an official Death Certificate, or they may request an official Death Certificate if the missing person is a French citizen and belongs to one of the following categories: mobilized, prisoner of war, refugee, deportee or political prisoner, member of the Free French Forces or the French Resistance Army, conscripted to do hard labor or refused to work in Germany. ”
    But you weren’t French. You’d made many requests before the war to get the citizenship you’d dreamed of. In vain. You loved this country, I’m not sure it was mutual. I remember your voice, your accent, the words you mangled—you spoke French both well and badly. You were a foreign Jew, that was your only official title, according to the state. So we had to wait five more years for you to be officially declared dead. Mama became a French citizen because she was your wife, the widow of a hero. As for me, I was considered a soldier.
    Your name is on the monument to the fallen in Bollène. It was inscribed there a very long time after its construction. It was the mayor who suggested it, but he didn’t want your name to stand out as different at all; he wanted you to be included among the men who died for France. I told him it was important that it also said you’d been deported to Auschwitz. He said that wasn’t necessary. So I told him I preferred you weren’t named at all in that case. In the end, he gave in.That was less than twenty years ago, just before we were about to enter the twenty-first century; even so long after the war, he didn’t want any trace of Auschwitz on the village monument. You didn’t really die for France. France sent you to your death. You were wrong about her.
    As for everything else, you were right. I did come back.
    * Technically, Lager Blb (Trans.)

4
    J acqueline always sends me flowers on May 10, as if it were my birthday. Every year and that moves me very much. We’re very close, different but considerate of each another. We’re the only two left. May 10 is the date the Russians liberated me from Theresienstadt. I