Filmmaker, screenwriter, actress and author, survivor of the Shoah, Marceline Loridan-Ivens was a striking witness to the memory of the deportees. She left us on September 18, 2018, evening of Kippur, at the age of 90 years. Both through her literary and cinematographic work and through her testimonies and speeches, the "daughter of Birkenau" will have continued to be involved in the memory of the Shoah. She was also supposed to participate on November 25 in two events during the Documentary Film Month at the Shoah Memorial. We will pay tribute to him.
If there are too many words that come when we try to define Marceline Loridan-Ivens, one must not however choose, she would not have liked to be "put away". Born in 1928 in Épinal into a familyPolish Jew, the little girl is left-handed and red-haired. At school, she is beaten and humiliated because she uses her left hand. In 1940, having taken refuge in Lyon with her family, she was placed in a private pension, separated from her parents. Then, in 1941, the family settled in the castle of Gourdon in Bollène, in the Vaucluse, where she joined a boarding school for young girls. Already rebellious, she will be excluded for having kept a journal deemed subversive. In March 1944, Marceline is arrested with her father in Bollène by theGestapo, following adenunciation. First interned at the camp ofDrancy, she will be deported toAuschwitz on April 13, 1944 by the convoy No. 71, in which was also his future "deportation comrade" and then unwavering friend,Simone Veil.
Registration number 78750, Marceline Rozenberg knows the hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau: she digs graves for murdered Hungarian Jews, hides her wounds to escape Mengele’s selections, suffers from hunger, thirst, malaria, knows the revolt of the Sonderkommando, Bergen-Belsen, the factories, the blows, the last deportation to the horror of Terezin. But she escapes the gas chamber. Covered with lice and affected by scabies, she returns to Paris in August 1945, then Bollène. Her uncle finds her on the dock and assures him: "Don’t tell anything, they cannot understand." Marceline will nevertheless end up testifying, to the point of relentlessly denouncing injustice and violence, leaving a work with a taste for revenge and reopening a wound: «I did not bring back the father».
Between cynicism and self-mockery, Marceline will manage to regain the joy of living by immersing herself in a hectic Parisian life, hanging out in the clubs of the Left Bank, frequenting jazzmen, filming in a film with her great love, the documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, militant as soon as she can for abortion or against a dictatorship, as gouailleuse as disenchanted. She will even co-direct with her husband films about the Vietnam War and Maoist China.
It is also through cinema, then writing, that Marceline Loridan-Ivens will finally manage to free her words about the Shoah. In 2003, she made a feature film, La petite prairie aux bouleaux and later co-wrote three books: Ma vie balagan (story written with the journalist Élisabeth D. Inandiak, Robert Laffont, 2008), Et tu n'es pas revenu (story written with Judith Perrignon, Grasset, 2015) and L'amour après(story written with Judith Perrignon, Grasset, 2018).
She confided to AFP in June 2017, after the death of her friend Simone Veil: It is the end of an era, that of the witnesses of the extermination of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis.
The day of November 25, 2018 will be an opportunity to pay tribute to him through two screenings at the Shoah Memorial:
If there are too many words that come when we try to define