A tribute to Marceline Loridan-Ivens
Marceline Loridan-Ivens, French writer & director and Holocaust survivor, died yesterday aged 90.
Marceline Rozenberg was born in Epinal in 1928 in a family of Jewish Polish immigrants. She was arrested by the Gestapo with her father in 1943 during World War II in the Vaucluse region. Marceline was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the same convoy as Simone Veil and Anne-Lise Stern. Unless her father, who sadly perished in the concentration camp, she survived and returned to France in 1945.
She was married to Francis Loridan, a public works engineer for a few years. She kept his name after their divorce.
The public discovered her in the French landmark film Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a Summer) by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. In this panorama of the Parisian daily life in the summer of the conflict with Algeria and Congo, she left a mark on the public's minds with a powerful monologue in which she evoked her deportation with her father.
She met her future husband, Dutch documentary director Joris Ivens in 1963. Among other things, she co-directed a few documentaries with him, including How Yukong Moved the Mountains in 1976, a series of 12 documentaries they directed while living and working in China. The film was criticized by Mao Tzetong's wife Jian Qing and forced them to live the country.
WWII and her deportation in Auschwitz marked her life and her works, including the movie La Petite Prairie aux bouleaux which she co-directed with Anouk Aimée in 2003. Her bestseller book But You Did Not Come Back, translated in English by Sandra Smith, is a breath-taking letter to her father who she never had the chance to see again after that day they were deported to Birkenau. The mission to preserve Holocaust and war historical memory was very dear to her and she testified in many schools and conferences during her life.
Some of her publications:
Et tu n'es pas revenu, with Judith Perrignon, Grasset, 2015
English translation by Sandra Smith But You Did Not Come Back, Faber & Faber
Ma vie balagan, with Élisabeth D. Inandiak, Robert Laffont, 2008
L'amour après, with Judith Perrignon, Grasset, 2018
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