Maman, What Are We Called Now?
By Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar (Trans: Francine Yorke)
Persephone Books, £12
But You Did Not Come Back
Marceline Loridan-Ivens (Trans: Sandra Smith)
Faber & Faber, £12
Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar's is an exquisite book, a dramatic snatch of history, written in the form of a diary - passionate, indignant and beautifully expressed.
It is Paris 1944, and Jacqueline Amar, a young mother, has arrived from Vichy France with her 10-year-old daughter Sylvie, to link up with her husband, a philosophy teacher and now the leader of the OJC, the Jewish Resistance.
Maman, What Are We Called Now? begins on July 18 1944 with a one-line entry, the chilling words: "André hasn't come back tonight." A week later, he is still missing. Jacqueline is anguished as she hears from street gossip what horrors her beloved husband could be enduring. Seeking news of André, she finds out that he is held by the Gestapo.
The story is almost familiar: hero husband taken, desperate wife exhausted with worry defiantly searching for him. But this is insistently real, more surprising than any artful, fictional account. Her passion exudes from the diary: "My darling, where are you? What are you thinking about in your cell, if that is where you are this dark night? Scattered with the golden pollen dust of memory, I am escaping into the past tonight with you."
She is distracted with worry, but retains a writer's eye for detail: "I have meetings with 'contacts', the ex-mistress of a colonel in the Gestapo (busy painting her toe-nails when I arrived). Lawyers working for the Germans reply condescendingly that 'no one is shot straight away unless they are armed.'"
Yet, despite her pain, she notes that the "elegance of some Parisian women is almost provocative, wearing wide hats with veils and platform shoes and bright lipstick, deliberately nonchalant as they stare coldly ahead on the metro."
And, when she sees her sister, "I noticed a strange patch of embroidery stitched on to her dark blouse which didn't go at all well with her outfit. Horrified, I realised it was the barbaric yellow star; it was the first time I had seen one."
She wanders through her city in the late summer evening, "the dome of the Opéra glimmering with a green halo", praying to the God she has "ignored all my life" to let her see her beloved once more.
This is a breathless, beautiful book, in a lovely presentation from Persephone - though the original French title, Ceux qui ne dormaient pas, is better. And - spoiler alert - the book's forward is fact-packed but detracts from the immersion Mesnil-Amar's sensitive writing demands. It is a perfect piece of written heartbreak.
Marceline Loridan-Ivens's But You Did Not Come Back also takes place in 1944. As the Allies liberate Paris, 16-year-old Marceline still suffers the torments of Auschwitz, her sadistic German captors still in brutal charge of every painful second of her life. Having been snatched with her father from their fine château, detained at the infamous camp at Drancy, and shipped to Poland, Loridan-Ivens brings the clarity of an adolescent's lucid memory to her writing - subtly translated by Sandra Smith.
Addressed to her father, the one who did not come back, from a daughter who did, Loridan-Ivens's account describes both her suffering and her guilt at her own, hard-won survival.
Once, she saw him in the camp and, for precious seconds, they embraced before an SS guard beat her unconscious. In her pocket, she found a tomato and an onion. His tender letter still haunts her, remembering his addressing her as: "My darling girl".
After the war and her unhappy return to her family, no one wanted to hear about the camps. Marceline Rozeburg married twice, became an actress and the wife of film director Joris Ivens, 30 years her senior - the same age as her lost father.
"I was obsessed with Joris," she writes. "But I needed the strength and convictions of a man like him. He was the school I'd never finished. The love that would save me."
She wonders if she should ever have returned. Yet woven into her story is such a lucid, life-giving spirit infusing the tales of heroism she casually tells, as well as the guilty secrets she discloses, that this reader, for one, wants to thank this courageous, honest woman for her transformative story.
