Jewish deportee Marceline Loridan-Ivens, on persecution, past and present

 

Deported to Birkenau at 15, she last saw her father in the camps when he slipped her an unimaginable onion and a tomato, before he was murdered at Auschwitz.

 

Now 87, with failing eyesight and a renewed dread about Jewish life in Europe, Marceline Loridan-Ivens believes that the lessons of World War II are not being forgotten, because “these lessons were never learned.”

 

In today’s France, after the Islamic State attacked ordinary Parisians in November and killed 130, she said in a recent interview, there is only a slow understanding that French society itself is at risk.

 

“We kept saying, ‘It starts with the Jews and it will end with you,’ because the problem is serious and deep,” she said. “But no one wanted to hear the truth in the name of political compromises” after last January’s attacks by radical Islamists at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket.

 

“That situation led to the attacks of Nov. 13, and it’s only the start of it,” she said. “Now they target everyone, not only the Jews.”

 

Ms. Loridan-Ivens, who has now written a memoir of her childhood experience in Auschwitz-Birkenau and her effort afterward to find a reason to live, has been provocative before. She shocked France after the Charlie Hebdo killings when she went on France Inter radio, in what was supposed to be a discussion of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and accused France of indifference to a new anti-Semitism.

 

The French president, François Hollande, had called a huge rally in support of the values of the French Republic after the January killings. But, Ms. Loridan-Ivens asked, “do you believe the French would have gone into the streets if only Jews had been killed?” The interviewer was reduced to silence... Read more.

 

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/02/books/a-french-deportee-life-at-auschwitz-and-history-repeating.html