A Return to Birkenau

Ginette Kolinka and Marion Ruggieri

(Grasset, 112 pages, 2019)

***Long-listed for the Prix André Malraux 2019***

With the help of journalist Marion Ruggieri, ninety-four-year-old Ginette Kolinka delivers with simplicity and strength a poignant account of her deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Arrested by the Gestapo in the free zone in March 1944 along with her father, her 12-year-old brother, and her nephew, Ginette Kolinka was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was the only one of them to return. Like most survivors of the Shoah, for many years she did not want to recount what she witnessed and lived through: the blows, the constant hunger, the naked and emaciated bodies, the hatred, the cruelty . . . the unspeakable but also sometimes the courageous solidarity between female prisoners, exemplified by the time when Simone Veil saved her life by gifting her a dress.

After the war, Kolinka rejoined her sisters and mother, and tried to return to a normal life. But she continued waking up at night to go through the garbage, and eat vegetable peels. She nonetheless went on to have a happy marriage and build a family.

In her seventies, by then a widow, through Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation she opened up about her experience in the camps. Since then she has become one of the most vocal Holocaust survivors in France, tirelessly talking to students in classrooms and accompanying them on field trips to Auschwitz.

On her first trip back, she was profoundly unsettled by how the setting had been wiped clean and village life had sprung up—quaint houses, children playing, a woman jogging—along the infamous Judenrampen where she last saw her male relatives. She tells the students: “Close your eyes, don’t look! . . . Under each of your steps, there is a dead body.”

Return to Birkenau is not an exhaustive recounting of life in the extermination camps. Kolinka retells with raw honesty and without sentimentality all that she remembers; what she saw in Birkenau, all that her body went through, how she had to learn to live with these memories, so that we will never forget, and never cease to believe that it actually happened.

The last sentence in the book asks the reader: “I hope you don’t think I exaggerated, do you?”

Born in Paris in 1925, Ginette Kolinka has lived in the same apartment since she was 12 years old. After the war, she resumed her life as a market vendor. She has been visiting schools on a daily basis to recount her experiences to the youth. 

Marion Ruggieri is a journalist and writer.