A vast and ever-growing number of books, films, television programmes, plays and miscellaneous items of popular culture are related in one way or another to the events of the Holocaust, but only a few of them deserve to be included in the canon of Holocaust literature. Indeed, even such classics as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Night by Elie Wiesel have been the subject of rigorous and sometimes rancorous debate, if only because the invocation of the Holocaust in arts and letters is such a morally fraught subject. So it is noteworthy, and even remarkable, that two newly published books about the Holocaust deserve to be considered for places in the canon. 

But You Did Not Come Back takes the form of a letter from a daughter to her father, from whom she was separated shortly after their arrival by train at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a French actress, screenwriter and director now in her eighties, was fifteen years old on