Loridan-Ivens has produced a searing, blazingly honest, angry miniature; already an international bestseller, it’s a letter to an adored father, who, on the way to the Nazi concentration camps, told his 15-year-old daughter “You might come back because you’re young, but I won’t be coming back.” Captured (by French soldiers, on French soil), transported – he to Auschwitz, she to Birkenau, they meet once again – clutching each other in the midst of hell “the smell, the cries, the dogs”. She is beaten so fiercely she faints. Miraculously he manages to send a note, all of which she forgets except for “My darling daughter . . .” Much of what she describes mirrors that other great chronicler of hell, Primo Levi: the brutal destruction of self and hope, and the deceptions which allowed one to survive.
