They were arrested together in 1943. She remembers him telling her, when they were at the Drancy internment camp in April 1944, awaiting transport to hell, “You will come back, perhaps, because you’re young, but I will not come back.”

She writes to her dead father, who thought he could assimilate by buying a chateau in the countryside: “You had chosen France, she isn’t the melting pot you’d hoped for. Everything is getting tense again. We’re called ‘French Jews’; there are also French Muslims, and here we are face-to-face — I who had hoped never to take sides, or at least, to simply be on the side of freedom.”

She feels French, she said in her memento-filled apartment, but has “a very complicated relationship” with France. “It’s the country that returned my father to his birthplace, Poland,” to die. “I can’t say that I’m disappointed with France — I lost any illusions a very long time ago.”

Ms. Loridan-Ivens said she appreciated that France protected her but wished she had no need of such protection.

For her parents, she said, France meant liberty, equality, fraternity. “They escaped Eastern Europe because they wanted freedom, to be able to go to school and university,” she said. “In France there was no pogrom. Life was tough, as they arrived penniless, but they worked hard, they wanted their children to go to school and become French.”

But then came the occupation, and the betrayal. After the war, the family received a death notice from the government saying that her father had “died for France.” But he died “because he was Jewish,” Ms. Loridan-Ivens said. As she wrote to her father: “You did not really die for France. France sent you to your death. You were wrong about her.”

After the war, Charles de Gaulle “said that the arrests of Jews had been done by the Germans, but it was a lie,” she said. “The French gave lists of Jews to the Germans and participated in the arrests. I was arrested by both.”