Filmmaker, screenwriter, actress and author, Shoah survivor, Marceline Loridan-Ivens was a remarkable witness to the memory of the deportees. She passed away on 18 September 2018, the evening of Yom Kippur, at the age of 90. Both through her literary and cinematographic work, as well as through her testimonies and her speeches, the "daughter of Birkenau" did not cease 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 up when we try to define Marceline Loridan-Ivens, yet one must not 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, she took refuge in Lyon with her family and was placed in a private boarding house, separated from her parents. Then, in 1941, the family moved to the Château de Gourdon in Bollène, in the Vaucluse, where they joined a boarding school for young girls. Already rebellious, she will be excluded for having kept a newspaper deemed subversive. In March 1944, Marceline was arrested with her father in Bollène by theGestapo, following adenunciation. First interned in 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 pits for murdered Hungarian Jews, hides her wounds to escape the selections of Mengele, 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 suffering from scabies, she returns to Paris in August 1945, then to Bollène. Her uncle finds her on the platform and assures her: "Don’t tell anything, they can’t understand." Marceline will however 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 manages 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 even co-directed with her husband films about the Vietnam War and Maoist China.
It is also through cinema, then writing, that Marceline Loridan-Ivens finally manages to free her word on the Shoah. In 2003, she directed a feature film, La petite prairie aux bouleaux and later co-authored 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 told AFP in June 2017, after the death of her friend Simone Veil: It is the end of an era, that of witnesses to the extermination of European Jews 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 up when we try to define 
