10—
Genocide
"Lebn vi got in Frankraykh," "Happy as God in France?" Then came the French capitulation of June 1940, the Vichy regime, the German occupation. In everyone's memories, whatever the individual's age (adults as well as children), World War II is a point of convergence and defines the structure of the narrative. Often, before approaching the black years, there is a silence, then the tone of voice changes. They recount their trials and tribulations, their tragedies, the twists and turns of their personal histories. In the unfolding of memories, when they finally get to the end of the war and the Liberation, it seems that there is nothing left to tell. The tale has reached its conclusion: "What more is there to tell you?" In the time of memory, even for the survivors, the end of the war marks the end of life, of a certain life, that of the world before: afterward, a different life, an afterlife begins.
In fact, we generally had to press our informants to get them to talk about the postwar years; they then quickly skimmed over the course of a "normal" life, somehow without history, reduced to a curriculum vitae: stages of professional life, marriages, births. They dwelt more on the development of their political or religious convictions in a general way. Their memories turn into a reflection on the inevitable problem of Jewish identity. This reflection then brings them back to the war, and it is that which remains at the center of their memory: recollections of those who disappeared, of waiting for those who never returned, more stories of survivors, or sometimes even ghosts. For the trauma that sundered their lives is genocide. It is, for the survivors, the torment of mourning, an impossible mourning.
Threat of Death
Under the German occupation, difference came to be experienced as the threat of death: one was aware of an absolute and irrational otherness that questioned the very essence of the individual's being. Moreover, the permanent threat was inscribed in material signs, the "Jew" stamped on the identity card, and especially the yellow star, which stigmatized those who wore it in the eyes of everyone. Mathilde R. (psychoanalyst) accompanies her memories with almost professional commentaries (which might no doubt apply to many other cases), while intensely reliving the anguish of those days. The yellow star seems like the external and literally unbearable manifestation of a secret blemish, a blemish buried in the unconscious and then ignominiously revealed to expose the truth about the person.
I also remember the star I wore, which was sewn on a jacket, a jacket I carried on my arm. Always with the idea that if someone said to me "You're a Jew. Why aren't you wearing the star?"— I could show that everything was in order. What did I do with the jacket during class? Damn, I don't know; I think I never let anyone in school see that I had that star, but I did have it with me.
I also remember that the word "Jew" was written on the star with somewhat strange letters, shaped like Hebrew letters, and I found them terrifying. It was a stigma that revealed something scandalous about me, something I might analyze today, almost in psychoanalytical terms. Something scandalous not only in the eyes of others but also in my own eyes; something unknown, hidden from me yet manifest to others. And, indeed, I couldn't bear to show myself with that because it was a display of something . . . absolutely scandalous, ignoble, shameful, dark . . .
Does the knowledge of the outcome inflect the tone of memories? The danger of death was not clearly perceived at the beginning of the Occupation, either by French Jews (who could consider themselves protected by the Vichy government) or by immigrant Jews. Up to the middle of 1941, German policy was still limited to effecting the expulsion of the Jews from Germany and the territories she controlled.[1]In the
[1] Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews .
census required by the regulation of September 27, 1940, in the occupied zone, and by the law of June 2, 1941, in the free zone, most (about 90 percent) declared themselves to the authorities:[2]indicative of naïveté, fear, obsession for legality, of course, but also testimony to a certain trust. The most urgent problems for most of them at that time were practical and material: exclusion from public jobs and the liberal professions, and Aryanization (i.e., confiscation) of businesses or workshops forced them to seek new means of existence.
Foreign Jews were threatened most directly. The Vichy government promulgated a decree on October 4, 1940, declaring them liable to house arrest or internment. It is estimated that at the beginning of 1941, forty thousand of them were held in various camps in the free zone (Gurs, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet, Les Milles, etc.).[3]Foreign Jews were also victims of the first waves of arrests in Paris, on May 14 and August 20, 1941: close to eight thousand were interned in the camps of Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande, and then Drancy (under French administration).[4]They remained there for several months under increasingly intolerable conditions, but their families still harbored hopes of seeing them freed. However, on December 13 and 14, 1941, the arrests in Paris extended to seven hundred distinguished Jews of French stock. And we now know that the Nazi leaders decided in January 1942 on the means of the Final Solution. Its execution began in France during the spring and summer of 1942, which marks the "great turning point" in the history of genocide.[ 5]The first convoy of deportation left Drancy on March 27 for Auschwitz, followed in May by convoys from Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.[6]Then came the infamous roundup of the Vel d'Hiv, on July 16 and 17, 1942, when French police arrested more than twelve thousand people, sparing neither women nor children nor old people. From August 14 on, Jewish children were also deported.
[2] Ibid., pp. 99–100; Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz: Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France, 1942 [Vichy-Auschwitz: The Role of Vichy in the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in France, 1942] (Paris: Fayard, 1983), pp. 24–25.
[3] Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France, p. 158.
[4] Jacques Adler, Face à la persécution: Les organisations juives à Paris de 1940 à 1944 [Confronting Persecution: Jewish Organizations in Paris from 1940 to 1944] (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1985), pp. 57, 63.
[5] Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France, pp. 203ff.
[6] Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz, Vol. I., pp. 59–60, 191; Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France, p. 212; Adler, Face à la persécution, p. 20.
Why were they taking so many people unfit for work? The situation was such as to arouse the worst suspicions.
But how could one imagine the Final Solution? The official version—that they were being transferred to "labor camps" in Poland—seemed plausible. When information filtering out of Auschwitz began to appear in France and was circulated by the underground press at the end of 1942, it generally encountered only skepticism and disbelief.[7]If not pure propaganda, was it not at least exaggerated rumor? People certainly suspected that terrible things were taking place in "Pichipoi"; but what? Surely not the systematic extermination of all the Jews! Despite the anguish, people could not, did not want to believe it, even though they knew "in a certain way": reality surpassed understanding.
Mathilde R.:
You know, if I go back to that time, I have the impression finally (I can't speak for my parents or my aunt), I have the impression that somewhere we knew that the horror was there. In a certain way, we always knew it, from the time the Germans first came. But in each instance, we didn't quite want to know.
Tribulations
If our witnesses often violently denounce the scandal of the laws of Vichy in the country of the Rights of Man as well as the participation in genocide of the French police and administration, they also pay emotional homage to those sympathetic French people who sheltered them, helped them, saved them. These judgments are mixed with the memory of the ever-recurring, sadly banal tribulations: exodus, roundups, camps, flights, clandestine shelters, false identities, failed arrests, more flights, final arrest. As the rhythm of the episodes accelerates, the intensity of the reexperienced dramas and the very surge of memories slow down the time of the narrative: once again (even more than for the period of arrival in France), memory dwells on details and follows events day by day, hour by hour, restoring with amazing precision
[7] Ibid., pp. 194–195. On the first publication of information from Auschwitz, see the narrative of Adam Rayski in his memoirs, Nos illusions perdues [Our Lost Illusions] (Paris: Balland, 1985), pp. 124–125.
the schedules, places, vicissitudes, dialogues, and even emotions of the moment.
We return to Charles and Hélène H. They met at school in Nancy and finished their medical studies in Paris. Charles H. was naturalized in 1931, and they were married. After Charles H. did his military service, they moved to a little town in Brie (between Meaux and Melun). In 1941, with the promulgation of the statute of the Jews, they were forbidden to practice medicine. In November, they decided to escape to the "free" zone.
Charles H. : I stayed in hiding for a week. I had given up my office, but there were still a few things to do. We decided to leave separately, I, by one route, she, by another; and we sent Guy [their son ] by yet another road.
Hélène H. : We had a friend, Doctor V. One of his relatives was an official of Vichy. It was agreed that when he would take the train to go across the line of demarcation,[8] he would ask the German officer if the child could go see his grandmother. I accompanied them and I left Guy in Vierzon. He asked his question; [the German officer answered ]: "Yes, why not?" Guy was five years old and he was terribly upset by this business, leaving with a gentleman he didn't know at all. Doctor V. had warned his mother, a lady of seventy-five. This lady wasn't informed at all, she didn't know what a Jew was; she didn't know why these people were hiding. So she smelled something fishy. Finally, since it was a child who was coming, she agreed. Guy kept on crying nonstop for twenty-four hours. They told him he would see his father there; but my husband hadn't come.
Charles H. : So I decided to go across. My contact was the address of a pharmacist in Beaune who knew a network that worked for prisoners of war. I took the train; I saw the pharmacist. The contact was very simple: he was a gentleman who lived on the line of demarcation and had stone quarries on the other side.
[8] The line that separated the northern part of France, then occupied by the German army, from the southern "free" zone. After the armistice of June 1940, Pétain set up his government in Vichy.
[ . . .] In the end the pharmacist couldn't get confirmation [from the network ]. When I left, he did give me the name, but he didn't know if it would work. But I was in a hurry because I knew that Guy was waiting for me at Chateauroux. I had to rush.
I left Beaune by train to get to that little town on the line of demarcation, near Chalon-sur-Saône. I chatted with the people in the train. I was scared of an inspection when I got off the train. That was very dangerous. So somebody proposed a car that was waiting at the station before Chalon-sur-Saône. I was going to Buxy. Normally, you went to Chalon and then you took the train for Buxy. I decided to get off at the station before Chalon, about fifteen kilometers earlier, in order to avoid the inspection.
The people I met had a car waiting for them at the station and they took me to a crossroads a few miles from Buxy. From there, I went on foot. I already had a winter overcoat (it was November), a briefcase with some sandwiches the pharmacist's wife had generously made for me in Beaune, and a Chaix, a railroad timetable. There was a fog you could cut with a knife, which suited me just fine. It was between five and six o'clock in the morning, and you couldn't see six feet in front of you.
I was almost two kilometers from Buxy, when all of a sudden, the fog lifted and I found myself face-to-face with two Germans on a bike! They stopped me: "What are you doing here?" I gestured to them that I didn't understand any German and I explained:
"I'm building a house and I'm going to buy stones. I need materials and they told me there's somebody who has quarries over there." "No, you're going to cross the line of demarcation!" "Of course not; I would have asked for an Ausweiss and I would have sat quietly on the train. No, somebody put me down there (I pointed to the Chaix): this way I save a day." In fact, it would save a day if I were going round trip; my answers were plausible. And he repeated: "Comrade, shoot, comrade shoot, if you go over the line of demarcation."
He had my papers. I had a card without the Jewish stamp but with my name. The boss read: "Holzberg" and he said: "Ah,
these French names, it's a real pain!" The other one said to him in German: "We're going to take him to the station; the officer will get it out of him." As for me, I told my story in gibberish. The one who couldn't read my name finally said: "Lass ihn laufen!" (Let him go!) When I heard that, I didn't react at all. There was a great silence: "You still need my papers?" He gave them back to me and repeated: "Good, but comrade shoot!" I kept wondering: I don't know if he thought I was a Jew, but he certainly suspected that I was going to the other side. From the fact that he repeated: "Comrade shoot," with the gesture.
OK, I left again. The village was at the end of the road I was taking. Before entering the village, I saw a kind of hut in the corner. That's the gentleman I was looking for. I went into his house, into the office. There were people there, and I waited for them to leave. Then I got straight to the point! "It's to cross the line of demarcation." "Just to go and come back next week?" "No, for good!"
I had the impression he was going to do something. In fact, he said to me:
"This contact isn't working anymore; it's finished. I'm under surveillance myself, to such an extent that if a German were to come in now and find you here, he'd ship you off."
You could see the road through the window.
"You see the line of demarcation—that's the road in front of us, the one that passes under the window. All you've got to do is jump over the ditch. The Germans never cross to the other side, but they do shoot."
From his house the width of the road was almost thirty feet, maybe twenty-five feet, and then the ditch. The house was on a rise, and the road was on the side of a hill. There were fields, since we were on the edge of the village. At the end of the road, there was a steep drop.
"You'll be exposed for two hundred yards. Once you're on the sloping ground, it's all over."
He proposed that he go his own way into the fields toward the hills.
"Go along with the story you told. Pretend you're returning to take the train to Chalon. Go almost two hundred yards. I'll
be up above. I'm going to go in front of you. You'll see me on top. And I'll start pissing; that will be the sign that there's no patrol in sight, that you can go. Then jump."
Fine. You see, the fields were bordered with hedges of hawthorns, which go down. I went, I can't say how far, maybe I walked too fast or maybe he was arrested, I don't have any idea. Or maybe he got cold feet. I don't know. I never saw that man again. I went about a hundred fifty yards. Nothing in front of me. No gentleman pissing, nothing at all. I didn't see anybody. He had told me: "Most important, don't look around. That would be suspicious." I did it anyway. I didn't see anything in front of me. The road was straight. I looked to the left, the right, in back, and didn't see anybody. So, without hesitating, hop, I jumped, and I started running along a hedge, like that, bent over, telling myself they didn't see me on the other side.
And then I heard shots. I didn't know if it was for me. I didn't look behind me. I didn't hear the whistling. Were they hunting a rabbit in back, or was I the rabbit? The hedge was to my left as I ran. I am telling you they couldn't see me on the other side, but they could have seen me if someone was on top or to my right. I had my overcoat on my arm. It was a hedge of hawthorns. While I was running I threw my coat onto the hawthorns, lengthwise. I let myself roll over to the other side on my coat. I grabbed my coat and ran to the other side.
I heard another shot. There were two to three hundred yards, once I reached the slope. I was out of the woods. He had told me that, at the bottom, at the edge of the river, I would find a farm where they would give me directions to the road. I reached that farm through the fields. My hands were full of thorns. There was a little girl. Her parents weren't there. She asked me if I wanted something. There was a basin with water. I washed my hands. I started pulling out the thorns. She said to me: "Your hands are shaking!" I still remember the child's comment.
Inducted into the French army, Robert S. was taken prisoner in the Vosges in June 1940. With the other prisoners, he was held in a barracks in Strasbourg. Thanks to his commander—a Frenchman—he
succeeded in concealing the fact that he was a Jew and then in getting free. A dentist, he managed to work in Clermont-Ferrand at the beginning of 1941.
I worked for B., as an assistant. He was a bachelor and a libertine. He lived at night and rested during the day. It suited him to have an assistant. He admitted he never had an assistant like me because he had more customers than ever before. Moreover, there were customers from the prefecture, who had good positions. We agreed that if there was ever any danger, he would warn me by telephone and tell me: "Get out, there's danger."
I worked for a year and a half until '42, and then, things started heating up because it seemed that the Germans were invading the free zone. The situation was becoming dangerous. I had to leave B., and I found another dentist, K., who had a friend who was a district attorney in Riom. So he was covered and I was too, indirectly. But, one day, at ten o'clock in the morning, two delegates of the Jewish Commissariat[9] came looking for me. The nurse called me, and I found myself facing two gentlemen, one old and one young. The old one asked me: "Monsieur, you're a Jew. Don't you know you don't have the right to work?" So I played my last card: "Monsieur, I am the head of a household. I have a wife and a child to feed. And I am a Jew. You've found me out. My fate is in your hands." So the young one—a piece of filth, the Nazi type in the French militia—interjected: "So, do we ship him off?" The other one said: "Leave him alone!" And to me: "I'm going, but you, disappear."
That meant: Don't stay in Clermont. He left. I went and got my wife and child, and we left for Giat, where I knew a dentist who had a skin disease on his hands. He had to work with gloves, something that's hardly practical for the mouth. He kept a place for me as prosthesis technician. It wasn't far from Clermont, but it was in the country, and the Germans couldn't be everywhere. Moreover, the Resistance was well established. And that was a land of milk and honey. There was no lack of
[9] In March 1941, the Vichy government organized the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, a commission to deal with Jewish affairs.
bread or meat or milk. There were other problems, however, and I still had to be careful.
One day at the dentist's, the police sergeant, a swindler who was trying to make money on the backs of the Jews, came to have a gold bridge made. I quickly understood that he had no intention of paying for it. Blackmail, but done subtly—you had to understand it and not expose yourself to something that could have been disastrous. I saw who I was dealing with; I did the work and explained to the dentist that it was at my own expense. I met that police sergeant later on, after the Liberation. He trembled when he saw me.
A few months later, the dentist didn't need me anymore. He fired me. We had to eat. So I took a bike, put my instruments in the saddlebags, and played the traveling dentist, doing sixty miles a day on my bike. Every day, I went to take care of the peasants in their houses, which suited them because they didn't have to go anywhere. You know that you have to wait at the dentist's. For the peasant, that was a day lost. I didn't ask for payment in money, I didn't care about that. It was for food supplies.
When I made my rounds on the bike, I couldn't tell people what I was doing. It was a very risky business. People began to gossip, saying that I was doing black market business in my saddlebags. A Jew doing black market. There was always anti-Semitism. You had to be on guard. One Sunday, the village priest said this in his sermon: "If the Jewish people are suffering, they deserve it. It's because they are the people who committed deicide!" In Giat, there was also an aviation officer who asked the mayor one day: "How come that kike is there?"—meaning me. The mayor made it clear to him that he was interfering in things that were none of his business and that, if he made a move, the Resistance would intervene.
[ . . .] We really weren't in danger because, in that section of Auvergne, with the forests, the Resistance was well established. Every time it looked like danger, we were warned: "Get out to the fields, scatter, the Germans are coming to Giat!" We were warned—my wife who was pregnant with Dany—we ran like crazy people into the fields.
When I told the head of the Resistance that I wanted to participate actively, he told me: "We don't have enough weapons, and you can help us as a dentist. First because when we have guys who are in pain, we really can't take them to the dentist. And you know Russian, Polish, and, most important, German." So I served as an intelligence agent.
Georges F.:
I left Paris after the roundup in the XI arrondissement in September '41. There was the big roundup and, just by chance, I don't know how it happened, at noon, they stopped. There were maybe three houses they hadn't gotten to. I left the next day, with a woman, a Frenchwoman, who took charge of me and got me into the free zone. She didn't take a cent. She just did it for her personal glory.
Georges F. went to Lyon, where he was joined in July 1942 by his wife, Martha, his three-year-old daughter, and his mother-in-law.
In Lyon, we were also pursued, worse than in Paris. I continued to work illegally, hiding, hugging the wall to go to work. I lived near the railroad station of Perrache, and I went to work on the other side, at the Croix Rousse. I had to take the trolley and try to get through the nets. Sometimes there were roundups. I couldn't get back home again; I had to stay there. The boss knew who I was. He let me stay one night when there was danger. Then, leaving, I took the trolley with another worker; and the Gestapo stopped the trolley to check if there were any Jews inside. He got scared. He jumped off the train, and they killed him. They shot overhead and he died, in front of me. Then, they had to deal with the corpse. They let the trolley go on, and I got through like that, without being touched.
[ . . .] So I lived on that Rue des Trois-Maries, in Lyon, with my wife and my mother-in-law, in the house of an old Frenchwoman. When I came to her house, I introduced myself as an escaped prisoner. Maybe she knew I was a Jew, but she never said anything. From time to time, when she knew there were roundups, she told us: "If anybody knocks during the night, don't open the door. I'll get it."
And once, there was a very big roundup. She wasn't there. The area was surrounded, in old Lyon. It was very easy for them when they took up their positions. There was no way to escape them. It was over. It's a city of bridges, Lyon. There are a lot of bridges. Our daughter was placed in the country. We put an iron bed in front of the door, and we said: "If they knock, we won't open the door. Let them do what they want, but we won't open the door. If they break down the door, we'll play it by ear." They came. They went from one house to another on Rue des Trois-Maries. Our house was the only one that wasn't broken into. There was no exit on the other side. Across from us, they deported a family with maybe ten children. We never saw a trace of them. No one came back. And when they came to our house, they thought they had already done it on the other side. They stopped there and it was over.
There was a whistle. They left, and we were saved just like that, without doing anything at all. That's how we escaped [laughter ].
Then we started that terrible life again. It can't be described. We lived like moles.
Martha F. : And then there was my mother, who went on talking Yiddish as if nothing was happening.
Georges F. : She couldn't speak anything else. It was terrible.
Martha F. : There was no use begging her. There was nothing to do.
Georges F. : Most of the Jews who came from Paris met on a commercial square, the Place des Terreaux. It was a place like the Pletzel, full of Jews, who managed to do a bit of business to survive. I never went to that square. That's why I escaped.
One day, my wife sent someone to me to tell me not to come back, that there were Gestapo in the little square.
Martha F. : When I saw that, I was scared. We had a prostitute in the house, who lived right upstairs. She was very nice, very devoted, very decent. I went up and I said to her: "Listen, Georges isn't back yet. He's going to come any minute, and,
look, there are Gestapo downstairs"—still on the pretext that he was an escaped prisoner, but everybody knew. So she said to me: "Don't worry, I'm going to go ahead of him and I'll tell him what's happening." She did, in fact, meet him on the bridge, and he went back to his boss.
Georges F. : I went back and slept there that night. Another time, it was a really unbelievable story. In that house on Rue des Trois-Maries, there was an old maid who had cats. I don't know what got into her. One of her cats climbed up onto the roof. He fell and died. And she thought it was the Jews who cast a spell over him. She went out howling that the Jews cast a spell over him. Just that echo, that "the Jews cast a spell over him," that forced us to leave and go sleep at the Croix Rousse.
Martha F. : It sounds like a novel, this stuff.
Mathilde R.:
Finally the war came. It was obvious that we had to leave. We were part of the exodus like everybody else. What I can tell you first is that (including also schools before the war), I went to eleven schools up to the university, which represents a certain number of moves. We left the Parisian region in '40. We went to Normandy, where my parents had a little house. Then we really left on the exodus: we wound up in Bordeaux and then in the Tarn. As for school, I don't know, I must have spent a month or two in each one and then we came back to Paris.
So I entered the Lycée Racine in the seventh grade. Then we lived in Paris until the roundup of the Vel d'Hiv', doing all the absurd things Jews did, that is, declaring yourself, having a stamp put on your identity card, bringing your radio to the police station. For reasons of provisinos, penury, and economy, we went to live with my doctor aunt, the one I just talked about, who lived on Avenue Carnot, one of the avenues of the Étoile. We were right in the heart of the occupation. When I read Patrick Modiano's La Place de l'Étoile,[ 10] it really struck me: the at-
[10] Patrick Modiano, La Place de l'Étoile (Paris, 1968), is a novel about German occupation in Paris. There is an obvious double meaning to the word Étoile [Star] in the title.
mosphere he describes is what I saw at that time. I was twelve years old in '40. You couldn't help but feel the mood of things: I saw German soldiers marching every day at noon; the cinemas of the Champs Élysées, which were forbidden to Jews, the cafés, the restaurants. It wasn't always obligatory, but some of the French people did it zealously and put up: "Jews Forbidden." I also remember when they showed Jud Süss, because of those terrifying posters in the subway. In short, that very special and yet very familiar atmosphere, very familiar for me because of that sense of proximity to danger: you were in the wolf's maw. At the same time, at school, I hid the fact that I was a Jew. That's what's so crazy about the whole thing. Because, obviously, I had a name that aroused all sorts of suspicion . . .
I also remember one moment. . . . There were some moments that shone like little lights in that world where Jews quaked every time the doorbell rang at an unseemly hour. One day I saw my father coming out of the Gare du Nord or the Gare de l'Est, I don't know anymore, he must have made a trip—perhaps he simply went to a suburb—I think in fact that I was with him. In any case, I saw him coming out of the railroad station and a plainclothes policeman asked to see his papers. My father took out the identity card with the stamp, and the guy—and I'll never know if he was French or German—put his finger on the stamp and let my father go. And he was there for a roundup. I also remember how naïve we could be; namely, with my father we said: "It's really extraordinary—he put his finger on the stamp, and he didn't see it!"
I think they must have made us wear the star a little while before the roundup of the Vel d'Hiv'. And I remember the bizarre tricks we did, really bizarre tricks. We had the absurd idea that the men were threatened and not the women. And the children, obviously, even less. So my aunt [whose specialty was tuberculosis ] walked in front, with her star. She walked as some sort of courier, in front of my father, who walked a few meters behind her. My father didn't wear the star. She looked to see if they were arresting people. And my father took the subway every morning. But why the devil did he take the subway? He wasn't working. I think that by that time he was hiding from
the neighbors that he wasn't working. We lived for some time like that. It seems completely absurd because my aunt could have been taken—she was arrested later on . . . There.
After the roundup of the Vel d'Hiv', Mathilde R.'s family escaped first to a village of the Cher, and then they went to Toulouse, in the southwest of France.
Why Toulouse? Because my father had gone to school in Toulouse and he still had very fond memories of his landlady. Such tenuous things. The landlady, meantime, had aged a lot. She had started listening to Vichy radio and found that the Jews and the terrorists (what they called "terrorists" on the radio)[11] were awful.
I was put in boarding school. It was strange, at school. The atmosphere was different from Paris before the Germans had invaded the zone. There were a lot of girls who were Jewish. Most of them hid it. I hid it too. There was one girl named Markestein and, one day, a school monitor said to her: "People of your race—we can't expect anything of them!" There was also a girl named Dreyfus, who really looked as Jewish as a synagogue, and she didn't admit it either. Then another one, named Barque, yes, that's Jewish, she was from Bordeaux, and everybody thought she was Catholic. One day, she came in tears. She hadn't gotten any letters from her parents for some time, and that's when she told us her father was a Jew. It was a big surprise for me. She played the French girl like nobody's business. Another girl was called Ciezanowska—what names!—but for me, that was a Polish name; she was a pretty blond girl with ringlets, big blue eyes, absolutely adored by everybody. One day, she came in tears, saying: "They arrested my parents!" They had been arrested in Paris. They were leatherworkers. And that's when she told us she was a Jew. It was a surprise for all of us, for me as much as for the others. There too, there was a kind of process of blacking things out: it had happened to them; was it going to happen to me? It wasn't obvious that
[11] The Resistance movements were labeled "terrorist" by the Vichy press and radio.
there was a connection. It's hard to resituate yourself in that kind of double situation in which we lived.
Mathilde R.'s family continued its wandering and escaped to a village of the Cantal in the center of France. The father left on a bicycle every morning, pretending to go to work, while the daughter went to the convent school.
Again, I went to a school run by nuns, what was called a convent. Thanks to my Catholic education—a partial education, but it had some impact—I didn't have any trouble reciting the prayers. I must say that my parents, while having funny ideas, had nevertheless been good for something. So I could do the prayers. Moreover, I had presence of mind, which seemed to surprise only the adults. It is, after all, a fact that children got through this period with much more craftiness in general than grown-ups. Anyway, I was no longer a child. This must have been at the end of '43; I was fourteen years old. For example, when the priest who taught us Latin and Greek asked me: "Ah, you're from Paris. What parish?"—I answered immediately, like this, smartly, which really wasn't obvious (my parents wouldn't have known if I had asked them): "The parish of Saint Ferdinand-des-Ternes." Fortunately, he didn't know the priest. That would have caused me trouble.
The suspicion was there nevertheless, I must say, because my parents had an accent. Maybe I could have passed, but with my parents it was harder. OK, we were in the Cantal. The atmosphere was strange, very anti-Semitic, openly anti-Semitic.
Marc B.:
I enlisted as a volunteer. I went but they sent me away, saying that the quota had been filled. Twice like that, I don't know, they didn't want me.
Later, when the exodus started, I wanted to leave. Only, I had the feeling that I wouldn't get far and that they would catch me on the way. So I said to myself: It's better to stay home. I returned home. Little by little, we started organizing ourselves. That is, even during the war, at least at the beginning, you could get books at the library. Later on, they closed it.
To earn a living, we started making little purses at home for a person who gave us work.
Later, on May 14, 1941, all foreigners received a summons to appear. We didn't know what to do. We got the summons at seven or eight o'clock at night, to appear the next day at eight o'clock in the morning. We didn't even know who to ask for advice, what to do, if we should go or not. I said to myself: "I'm not going." I had my wife and daughter to worry about. "Maybe they'd take it out on them. But where could we hide?" At that time, we didn't have so many contacts with French people. Today it's different. So I went. It was too late to get away. They told my wife to go gather the necessary things. They didn't tell us where we were going, and they sent us to Beaune-la-Rolande.
Down there, the first week, we learned what it meant to be hungry. Later, we could receive little packages. What kind of food did we get? Twice a day, a soup of white beets. And one loaf of bread for eight of us. To divide it, what did we do? A little scale with pieces of wood and string; if there was an extra piece of bread for one person, they took it away to give to somebody else. Later, they sent us to Sologne, supposedly to work on the abandoned farms. I was miserable, because they had started allowing visits from wives, families, and me, it was just my turn to have a visit when, without notice, they send me to Sologne. We were guarded by French policemen. They let us buy food from the peasants. We were able to write, and when the wives found out where we were, they came, they were allowed in. Once my wife came to visit with my daughter. We were afraid because we knew at that time: roundups, other roundups, had already started. The police rotated every month, and they too were trying to get food to send packages to their families. So we had a certain freedom of movement. We took them to the farms and they could buy food to send.
There were guards in front of the farms. The policemen laughed if someone escaped. But not the guard, because he was punished or fired. In short, we saw that the situation couldn't go on like that. I escaped. I was lucky, because only a week after my escape, all of those from Beaune-la-Rolande were deported.
How did I escape? I went to this farm, several miles away, to get food. I struck up an acquaintance with a gamekeeper. We started talking. He needed shirts, he didn't have enough fabric; because, at that time, to buy a shirt or something else, you needed coupons. So I wrote to my wife, she bought some shirts, sent them, and he got me some food.
[ . . .] To escape, you had to go to Orléans to take the train to Paris. But the train went through Orléans at nine o'clock in the morning and roll call for us was at eight; if anyone was missing, they would call Orléans. Someone explained how to do it. I don't remember the name of the station, but you had to walk all night to get there. I left with a friend at ten o'clock at night. We got to the station about five in the morning. At 5:30, there was a train, and, when they made the roll call down there, we were already in Paris.
"Let Us Avenge Our Jewish Brothers"
The struggles of the Resistance left a deep trace in memories: despite a certain myth to the contrary, the Jews in fact did not submit passively to genocide. From the outset of the German occupation, mutual aid organs were set up: in Paris, the Committee of the Rue Amelot, established by the leading community workers, Bundists and Left and Right Labor Zionists functioning in semisecrecy, providing solidarity and assistance (canteens, clinics, financial help, contacts, false papers, etc.).[12]As for the Jewish Communists, by the summer of 1940, they too organized neighborhood committees, groups of women and young people, gathered in the Solidarity movement. They would supply the Resistance with some of its first fighters the following year.[ 13]And despite the silence of the "official" versions, we now know that the activists of the M.O.I. (Immigrant Labor), composed mostly of Jewish Communists from eastern Europe, especially Poland (along with Spanish, Italian, and Armenian activists), formed the vanguard of the armed
[12] Adler, Face à la persécution, p. 158.
[13] Ibid., pp. 161ff.; Maurice Rajsfus, L'An prochain la révolution: Les communistes juifs immigrés dans la tourmente stalinienne, 1930–1945 [Next Year the Revolution: Immigrant Jewish Communists in Stalinist Torment, 1930–1945] (Paris: Mazarine, 1985), pp. 125ff.
struggle against the Nazis, in Paris as well as in Lyon, Grenoble, Marseille, and Toulouse.[ 14]
Politically and geographically, Bernard P. and Maurice N. followed analogous itineraries: their troubles first took them to the Lyon suburb, where they found each other, in the summer of 1942, in the same networks. First they belonged to Jewish youth groups affiliated with the Communist party and naturally went from the U.J.J. (Union of Jewish Youth, one of the components of the Solidarity movement) to the U.J.R.E. (Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid), when the latter was formed in the summer of 1943 to provide a wider, united base for Jewish resistance. Henceforth, the new organization gave priority to specifically Jewish problems and led to the formation of a big "national" movement.[15]In his memories, Bernard P. speaks very lucidly of a "kind of excitement of the special activity of each group. Because the U.J.R.E. corresponded to a return to nationalism. Though not Zionism, it was nevertheless an assertion to the effect: let us avenge our Jewish brothers. A mobilization, as the Soviet Union mobilized Yiddish writers."
I had an education that was both Zionist and Marxist, since, in Poland, I had been active for many years in the Hashomer HaZa'ir movement. I read a lot as soon as I started reading French. This was in '40 and '41. I read a lot of books on the French Revolution, which led me to discern parallels with the Bolshevik Revolution. The German-Soviet pact had already occurred, but that didn't keep me from reexamining my assumptions. It was a purely intellectual process that led me to try to get close to the Communists.
To get close to the Communists, in Roanne, there wasn't much choice, I didn't have much, three or four Communist Jews, so they were reputed to be, who kept their distance from the community. I must say from afar they didn't seem to be such sterling Communists. You mustn't forget that the Communist party was outlawed, so that was the only contact I could have. So I made contact with those Jews, all of whose activity
[14] Adler, Face à la persécution, pp. 203–204; Rajsfus, L'an prochain la révolution, pp. 142ff., 176ff.
[15] Ibid., p. 149; Adler, Face à la persécution, pp. 201–211.
consisted of a cautious wait-and-see. I must say that that corresponded to the general wait-and-see attitude of the majority of the Party at that time, between the Pact and '41.
I was looking for a chance to act, but I didn't find any immediate opportunities with those Jewish Communists of Roanne. So I started on my own. Anyway, act is a very grand word. I wrote a little newspaper and produced twenty copies by hand. I must have put out three or four issues, which were probably full of mistakes. I distributed them in mailboxes, and I think I gave a copy to one of the Jewish Communists I was in touch with. Because of this "initiative," he put me in touch with one of his authorities in Lyon.
"You took the initiative alone?"
Alone, absolutely alone. This wait-and-see attitude didn't satisfy me. It was about March or April of '41. There was in particular the watchword of making peace with the German people by going over the heads of the leaders. Let's say that I never expressed an opinion, but I never quite understood what that meant in practice.
I have an excellent memory. I am telling you this because it left a mark on me. I can't forget it. It was June 21, the date of the German invasion of Russia. It was a Sunday. We were together with a comrade from Lyon, I can tell you his name, he's well known, R. He was there to try to explain to us what making peace with the German people over the heads of the leaders was all about. And Paulette came in. Paulette was the wife of the Communist in whose house we were gathered. And she said: "The Germans have attacked the Soviet Union!" That ended that: the meeting was adjourned. He was a bit sheepish. He explained that the world is dialectic. Dialectic explains a lot of things. In short, the business of making peace was over.
I don't remember very well anymore what I was doing between '41 and August of '42. Comrades from Lyon came to Roanne. The watchword was no longer the same: it was war against the occupier. But we still weren't doing anything. During that time, I was working as a farmer because I didn't have any papers.
I went underground in July of '42. I had my first forged iden-
tity card made. At that time, you could buy cards in every tobacco shop. I filled it out as an Alsatian and used a false stamp I made with a child's printing set. Alsatian for my accent, of course. I got in touch with the first groups of young Jews attached to the Jewish organization, the O.J.J. which later became the U.J.R.E. A while later, I found myself appointed to lead that group of young Jews. It wasn't yet the Southern Zone; it was only Lyon. We printed tracts, and we distributed them. We wrote graffiti with chalk. They were already beginning to look for the first recruits to go into the combat groups, for armed struggle. A fellow like Simon Fried, who was guillotined in Lyon in '43, I think, came from that first group. It wasn't a very heroic act, but a useful act. He was caught stealing food ration cards in city halls. And he was guillotined.
In that first group, there was L., who is still around; there was Simon Fried. You could say that was the leadership. There was Fred, a zoot-suiter, a terrific guy, who joined the F.T.P.[16] very quickly. He stupidly got himself killed in the fights for the Liberation of Paris. There was C., who joined the F.T.P. He's alive. I think he's still a Communist. There was N., who also went to the fighting groups and the F.T.P. Yes, they were all Jews.
As for me, I still had political work, publishing tracts and then publishing a newspaper, Young Combat . The newspaper began publishing in '43, I think, the same time the U.J.J. became the U.J.R.E. I think there was a connection with the dissolution of the Komintern and with that kind of excitement for the special activity of each group. [ . . .]
We recruited especially, though not exclusively, among Jews. During '42 and the beginning of '43, we spread rapidly, and we had groups of young Jews throughout Lyon and its environs. From the beginning of '43, I started traveling to organize groups in Grenoble, Marseille, Nice, Toulouse, Perigueux, and Limoges.
From '43 on, I can't say precisely when, there were changes in the leadership of the U.J.J. With the big downfalls in Paris,
[16] F.T.P: France-Tireur et Partisan, the Resistance movement led by the Communists.
and the danger for the leadership of remaining in Paris, the most celebrated members of the Jewish organization came to the Southern Zone. A whole team came with Rayski. Kowalski was one who came. I think he's living in Israel now. Earlier he had gone to Poland. Then he left there at the time of the outbreak of anti-Semitism.[17] At the same time, I had a chance to meet once or twice with the person in charge of M.O.I., who was Rayski's superior.
So, with the arrival of the Parisian group, the whole structure of our organization was changed in the direction of greater vigilance. Vigilance as regards security. We were an underground organization, pursued by the Germans. That's one thing. But also vigilance over ideological purity. That was copied from the party's organization. They appointed people responsible for the cells. They started checking peoples' personal biographies. That vigilance went too far, extending even to family and origins. It was political vigilance. For example, if people started in the A.J.,[18] you couldn't give them responsibilities because they were considered to be under Trotskyite influence. In short, what I mean is that it went beyond the question of security.
I had a hard time swallowing that. In short, we had some points of disagreement. We didn't really click with Feld. At any rate, my main activity was editing Young Combat, traveling, liaison with the provinces. Besides, at the beginning of '44, I was removed from Lyon and sent to Marseille. That was after the American landing in Italy, after the landing in Corsica, I believe. They predicted there would be a landing in the south before the landing in the north, and we had to strengthen the leadership of the movements, that is, of the Party, in the zones where the Americans would appear first.
In Marseille, I got in touch with the adult Jewish organizations, perhaps it was the M.O.I., to coordinate activities. And
[17] Most of the leaders of the M.O.I. (Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée, a Communist organization for migrant workers), did indeed return to their homeland after the Liberation and then came back to France, especially in the wake of the wave of anti-Semitism in 1968 in Poland. But Edouard Kowalski did in fact remain in Poland, according to the testimony of Louis Gronowski-Brunot, collected by Rajsfus, L'An prochain la révolution, pp. 345–347.
[18] Youth organization.
in June, right after the landing, they told us: "You're going back to Lyon." I was then with my wife. She wasn't yet my wife, but we were living together. She had come to Lyon in December of '43. She was my liaison and quite naturally. . . . Anyway, we went back together on June 7. I almost got myself arrested by the Gestapo when I arrived in Lyon.
I was arrested in a roundup while getting off the train. I was usually quite careful. I looked around but didn't see anything. Then a guy in civilian clothes came up to me, a Frenchman of the P.P.F., I don't know. He said to me: "Please follow me." I had papers as a liberal arts student or some such gimmick. It was at the railroad station of Brotteaux. My wife was with me. She started grumbling. He said: "Listen, it's an identity check." Finally he saw her—I tell you this because it's important for what comes later. It was three in the afternoon. He took me to a Red Cross hut, toward Brotteaux. There were about fifty of us there, guarded with submachine guns. Since morning, they had been making roundups because some guy, I don't know who, had thrown a grenade. It was the day after the landing, don't forget. They took my papers. The first thing, I went to the bathroom to eat all the little papers on me that might have been at all compromising. What are we waiting for? The arrival of the doctor for the medical checkup. I took that to mean deportation. There had been roundups at all the railroad stations and especially at Perrache. Therefore the doctor was late. During this time, I started talking with the fellow who had arrested me, this guy who worked for the Gestapo. He gave me some advice: "If you want quiet, come with us to Doriot, you'll be fine." OK, I went along with the game: I listened to what he said, how they could win. . . . And the time passed. In the meantime the doctor still hadn't showed up because he was busy in Perrache. And there was only one doctor, but I guess I was just lucky. They decided: "You're going to spend the night in the depot of Saint-Jean." So they phoned for the Lyonnais buses to take us to the depot. I don't know if it was sabotage or bad will, another hour, hour and a half, passed before the bus came. It came from Perrache half full, so there wasn't room for everybody.
I was already in the car to be taken to the depot of Saint-Jean. They were beginning to release certain categories, people who worked for the railroad factories, who had certificates and therefore worked for the Germans, or heads of large families. I had nothing to lose. I went to the window of the car. There was the boss who had all the papers. I said to him: "Listen, my wife is pregnant and if I don't come back, she's going to be sick." And on the side, thirty feet away from him, was the fellow who had arrested me and who had seen my wife. He said: "Yes." And the other man understood that he saw she was pregnant. So then, listen to this, he took my papers, which were of course forged; they weren't the papers I had made myself, they were a little better than that. And he said to me: "You're what? You do what?" "I'm a student." "Student of what?" "Liberal arts." "What arts?" I shrugged my shoulders. "You're French at least?" Imagine that, given my accent. I just shrugged my shoulders again. And he had my card, on which my life depended. He says: "Get out!"
I got out of the car and took back my papers. Then I took to my heels because there was a curfew. I caught a trolley that went to Décines, for the workers on the night shift. A worker gave me a ticket because you had to have special tickets. In short, an hour after the curfew, I arrived at Décines, to Gabriel, whose only concern was to know whether I had been followed. He was right, of course.
Anyway, I had enormous luck. I had enormous luck because, as I think about it today, I should have been dead for forty years already.
Maurice N.:
Yes, the census was taken in '41, before the Germans attacked Russia. We didn't know how to react. We discussed Marxism, we liked to be together, we engaged in propaganda against the imperialist war, but we didn't know how to react against the occupier. So we went to be recorded and once you had the stamp . . .
Things went on like that until June of '41, when Russia entered the war, at which time the whole policy, our policy,
changed. Work started completely different—instead of just talking, we started acting. That was in the Communist party. We were in a cell organized by four, five, six—all Jews. It was deliberate because, in general, they always formed separate cells. When Jews entered the youth movement or the Party, you know, they didn't speak French very well. They did much better among themselves. At that time, I didn't know of any other cell than the Jewish cells. We tried to work; we started distributing tracts. That was a completely different work. There weren't any Frenchmen in the first groups.
[ . . .] In February of '42, we left for Lyon. I had been summoned to the prefecture, and they wanted to take away my naturalization. My wife pushed me to leave and so did my parents. I left for Lyon, in the free zone. In the free zone, I remained French.
In Paris, my mother, my two sisters, and my brother were deported on July 16, 1942. All that remained was my father, who left on July 14 or 15 to come to me in Décines, near Lyon. He came to join me. In Décines, we lived together, in the same house, with my father, my in-laws, and my wife's two brothers. My mother was deported in '42 with my brother and two sisters. I remained alone with my father.
In Lyon, we continued to work. I got in touch with P., then with Charles L., who was called Émile. He was a very skillful speaker; he was very capable. There was Henri L., Charles B., Henriette, Ernest. That was the first group. They started organizing the youth in Lyon. I was assigned Décines. We printed pamphlets ourselves, at Fred's house. Our work consisted mainly of propaganda and military training. They were preparing people to join the F.T.P. There are many people like Charles who joined the F.T.P. We had one woman friend, Pierrine, yes. We didn't even know if that was her real name. There was P.—he became the leader of the whole Southern Region. He also lived in Décines. They knew I was in Décines, but they didn't know where he lived.
Then, right on the eve of the Liberation, I was denounced and they took my father, my mother-in-law, and my two brothers-in-law from our house. One of them came back, the
younger one. At the age of eleven, he was the youngest deportee from France.
[ . . .] There were cases when the police helped us. For example, a police sergeant was in front of the trolley and when he saw a Jew get off, he told him to go back. Moreover, I have an interesting case to tell regarding that police sergeant. It was the last year of the war, right before the Liberation of Décines. There was a woman who lived with the Germans, and the Maquisards,[19] friends, came and threatened the woman. She started shouting: "Help, stop, thief!" The police sergeant came. He ordered them to stop. They didn't stop and he drew his revolver and killed one of them. Subsequently, at the Liberation, the same Maquisards came and arrested him. I thought that police sergeant had done a lot to help Jews and others so I owed him something. I went to free him. I went to a lot of trouble; I had to fight to get his freedom. I thought I owed him something, not for myself, but as a Jew and as a man.
A month before the Allies entered Lyon, there was the uprising at Villeurbanne. That must have been the end of August '44. We occupied the skyscrapers. We fought. And, as the German army was retreating after the landing at Marseille, we were obliged to give way to the Germans. We were the ones who liberated Décines.
Miracles
How did the survivors escape persecution? They are still amazed at it today. If they express their gratitude for French friends who generously agreed to help them, often at great peril, almost all the survivors ultimately reckon that they owed their salvation to chance, to luck, luck bordering on the miraculous. On such and such a day, some policeman came to warn them that it was better not to stay home in the next few hours, since there was going to be a roundup: "Look, I have an order to arrest you. I'll say I didn't find anybody!" Or (as Mathilde R. tells) some policeman, apparently inadvertently, covered over the "Jew" on the identity card with his finger; or even some German soldier, to whom
[19] Translator's note: French Resistance fighters.
you had dared to speak German, took pity; or you managed to trick some French militiaman (like Bernard P.). So many survivals, so many miracles.
Here is how Mathilde R., who hid in a village of the Cantal, escaped arrest. As she recalls the episode, she truly relives the events, the gestures, the words, the thoughts, and even the perception of the landscape in a time that becomes almost unmoving, suspended.
One day, they arrested all the Jews of the village, right in the middle of the morning. One of the daughters of a collaborator came to school saying to somebody: "This morning, they arrested all the Jews of the village" or "They're going to arrest all the Jews of the village." And then it's the intensity of . . . I don't know what. This mechanism, I really want to call it denial, but really you mustn't show anything. I didn't show anything, but more than that, I didn't feel anything—consciously felt nothing. That didn't bother me. And I knew that, in the morning, my father was supposed to come get my bicycle either to pretend to go to work or to get cheese. I left school, and the bicycle was in front of the door. I didn't realize what might have happened to me. I took my bicycle and went home. And as usual, I stopped at all the farms along the way, to ask if there were eggs, milk, cheese, whatever you could imagine finding and never did find, but which you did find nevertheless from time to time.
And I stopped. While I was asking a woman if she had any eggs, I was aware that I had the handlebars of my bicycle in my hands and that I shouldn't have had them, that my father should have come to get the bicycle. And while I was asking her if she had any eggs, I was thinking: "Well, my parents have been arrested, obviously, since the girl said to the other one that they arrested all the Jews this morning. So, I'm alone. What am I going to do?" Really, in a flash: "What am I going to do? I'm going to try to go find my aunt in the Vaucluse. So, I've got to shift for myself to find some money for the trip." My mind was working to figure out how to get money for the trip. Absolutely no emotion. Nothing. Up until the moment when, approaching the house, I saw my father, and then and there I
started crying. Up until then, I hadn't felt anything. Nothing but practical things.
Later, they told me that the owner of the house where we were living, a marvelous house in an absolutely spendid landscape overlooking the distant mountains of the Cantal—it was very beautiful, there was a green meadow—so, the owner had gone to get the police to tell them: "I don't understand, you arrested all the Jews but you didn't arrest mine!" And among those policemen was one whose little girl my mother had taken for a walk just by chance. He answered: "You tell me that those are Jews, but I don't know anything about it. I don't have any proof."
Mourning
The miracle, alas, didn't always take place. We know the figures today, thanks to the labors of Serge Klarsfeld: of the 300,000–330,000 Jews in France just before the war (190,000–200,000 French Jews, 130,000–140,000 foreign Jews), close to 80,000, that is, 25 percent, perished. Those who disappeared include 56,500 foreign Jews and 24,500 French Jews. The latter included 8,000 children of foreign parents and 8,000 naturalized French citizens.[ 20]In other words, 10 percent of French Jews and 40 percent of immigrant Jews were victims of genocide.[21]
Memories indicate an immeasurable void. There is practically no family that was untouched: almost always, several close relatives died, plus all those who stayed in Poland and the other homelands. The survivors suffered a trauma that cut their lives in two: when memory of the catastrophe, of the arrest of loved ones returns, it is once again stupor, the sense of a rupture, a tearing apart, something unfinished. Likewise, the children of deportees who could talk to Claudine Vegh after forty years of silence and confess their private break constantly repeat the same lament, like a tragic refrain: "I didn't say good-bye."[22]
[20] Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz: Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France, 1943–1944 [Vichy-Auschwitz: The Role of Vichy in the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in France] (Paris: Fayard, 1985), pp. 179–181.
[21] Ibid.; and Adler, Face à la persécution, p. 29.
[22] Claudine Vegh, I Didn't Say Goodbye. [Je ne lui ai pas dit au revoir ]. Postface Introduction by Bruno Bettelheim (London: Caliban Books, 1984).
It's the same laceration that Golda R. recounts at the time of her husband's arrest:
You had to register at the commander's office. I didn't let my husband go. I took his identity card and I went with mine and his. I come to Rouen. They registered me and that was that. Then they couldn't find my card. They looked and didn't find it.
So they sent police to Elbeuf to arrest me and take me to the commander's office. The police were my husband's best friends. They used to eat and drink in my house. They came in the morning, very early. I was still sleeping. My husband went out. Two policemen came.
"We have to examine your wife's identity card."
I threw on my dressing gown. They said to me:
"Unfortunately, Madame R., we didn't come to get the identity card, we came to get you."
And my husband cried out:
"You came to get my wife? What has she done? They're not taking women yet! Why are they taking you? Did you do something in Poland? Were you a Communist?"
They forced me to go. I got dressed. I wanted to take the child (Madeleine was six months old at the time), but my husband didn't want me to. The two boys had already left for school. I asked permission to go say good-bye to the children. My husband went to get them at school. They were crying. All the people who saw the police taking me insulted them: "What do you want with that woman? She never hurt anybody!" I said to the policeman: "You ate with my husband, you drank with my husband, I set the table for you."
That was in '40. They weren't yet taking women at that time. I came to the commander's office. My husband telephoned to ask them to release his wife. He said that he wanted to go in her place. They answered him that his wife was going to return and that when they needed him, they would take him.
[ . . .] We had a dog. He'd bark when a child passed by. But when the police showed up at the door, he didn't budge. He remained silent. There were two exits. When the dog barked,
I said: "Avrom, go out the back and go to Suzanne's house." I didn't know they were police, and my husband was at home.
"Unfortunately, R., it's you we've come to get. You telephoned that we should release your wife and take you."
I begged;
"Listen, you're my husband's best friends. You ate and drank in my house. You know he's sick. You can say he wasn't there."
"You want them to shoot us instead of your husband?"
My husband got dressed, and they took him away. That was in 1942. They took him to Drancy . . .
The days of the Liberation brought with them an indescribable burst of joy in August and September of 1944—short-lived joy that would be shattered when the survivors, along with the rest of the world, discovered the horror of the Nazi camps. In truth it was but a half-revelation, for, more or less consciously, they suspected, they knew, that horror. But then the emaciated skeletons of survivors returned and told of it, and the photos were published, and the films showing the heaps of corpses at Auschwitz, the piles of shoes and eyeglasses, the crematoria. And there was the waiting, the long, interminable, desperately futile waiting, the pitiful lines at the Hotel Lutetia[23]in search of news of those who had disappeared. Nothing, no one. You waited, however; you kept on waiting, stubbornly, silently clinging to a futile (though unspeakable) hope. You watched for the mailman, the sound of footsteps on the stairs; in the street, you rushed toward a stranger because you thought, in the distance, you recognized a profile. Mute grief that you didn't talk about even with those who were close to you because you knew that the hope was mad, that the return of those who disappeared was unlikely, more and more mad, more and more unlikely with the passing of the months and the years. But you still waited, you waited incessantly, for the rest of your life. This "unspeakable secret," this waiting, never failed to disappoint and inevitably recurred. It gave rise to uncannily similar formulations.
Mathilde R.:
I dreamed of that aunt I loved so much, who was a very important figure for me in my childhood. I dreamed for years and
[23] A large hotel in Paris where the survivors of concentration camps were gathered after their return in the spring of 1945.
years, and, every now and then, it still comes back to me. It's a recurring dream: I enter her apartment and she's there (that apartment where I lived with her during the war). She's there, yet, at the same time, I know it can't be. In the dream, there's something of a doubt about that possibility, so that it won't be so hopeless on waking.
Mourning was impossible, for it was denied in its proper time. In a way, the survivors continue to live in an extension of the moment when they couldn't say good-bye. How could the process of mourning be done without knowing when and how loved ones died, when there is no tomb, no body, and no traditional funeral rites? Hence, one encounters a fixation on the past, the perception of the present "through a special prism,"[ 24]and this interminable waiting mixed with a sense of guilt. Of what are these victims of Nazi crimes guilty? Simply put, of living or, rather, of surviving. The uneasiness is especially strong in those who were children at the time and lost their parents: they have a sense of owing their lives to them a second time, of having survived only at the cost of their parents' sacrifice. Similar feelings are expressed by those who remember the family they left behind, in Poland—family who were trapped by the genocide.
Mathilde R.:
We had to go back to Paris in October [1944]. Returning to Paris was also something wonderful. To return to Paris was another July 14, another landing. It was wonderful, except that my aunt, meanwhile, had been deported.
She was deported under truly senseless conditions. First, she stayed in Paris longer than we did. She didn't want to leave. In retrospect, I understood why. I understood later on that my aunt was involved in the Resistance. She had a friend who lived downstairs from her, a doctor and a Communist. I understood because my aunt used to type things all day long on the typewriter. I guess she must have been making pamphlets. Then, at a certain moment, they crossed the line of demarcation and went to the free zone. And the people whose house they were hiding in were denounced, or they were denounced themselves.
[24] Vegh, I Didn't Say Goodbye, p. 171.
She stayed in Drancy for several months—I know the date she arrived and I saw in Klarsfeld's book the date the convoy that took her to Drancy left. She wasn't very old, fifty some, but she had dyed her hair. I think that her hair turned white during those months in Drancy, and I suppose she was put into the gas chamber almost immediately because of that.
OK, when we returned, she wasn't there anymore, and we knew that she had been deported. We harbored vague hopes; I must say that I never really mourned for that aunt. I think, besides, that nothing is harder than to mourn for someone whose body you haven't seen.
What more can I tell you?
Reaching the end of her memories, Mathilde R. returns to her parents from Poland. Their story had inspired the opening of her narrative, but they had almost been forgotten since. And this return takes the form of a funeral litany, a monotonous enumeration of the dead: memory itself becomes a memorial.
My family in Poland was entirely. . . . My grandfather, my grandmother, ninety years old, were . . . according to different versions, either deported to Treblinka or shot. That uncle I talked about just now, who was a doctor in the Warsaw ghetto; his son who was half-Jewish was also shot in the ghetto. His wife, who was a Christian Armenian, went mad as a result of those two deaths. She threw herself into the Vistula. . . . So it goes, pathetic stories, but that's reality. Several of my father's sisters were killed by the Germans, one in Treblinka, the other, no one knows where. She was in Bialystok; she had returned to Judaism.
Really, it's a family that was snuffed out. On my mother's side, I talked about that uncle with bright yellow gloves and a cane with a knob: he and his wife died in the Warsaw Ghetto.
With Robert S., we find the same morbid preoccupation, tinged with a sense of uneasiness at the idea that he couldn't get all the members of his family out in time. At the same time, this man, who evinced such admirable moral rigor and humanist ideals in the course of his memories, questions himself in anguish: Can we, must we, forgive?
Not forget, but forgive? This problem of the relationship between ethics and memory still gnaws away.
When the war was over, I wanted to know what had become of my parents in Poland. So I wrote a letter to the Polish embassy, and they confirmed that my parents died in the crematorium, at Auschwitz. This happened on a Thursday morning, at ten o'clock. The postman brought me the letter, and tears ran down my face as I read it. At the same moment—you'd say the devil plays these tricks, unthinkable tricks, on you—there was a German prisoner who was working on a farm who just showed up with a bad tooth. He came in, sat down. I had just read the letter, and my first impulse was to take the forceps and, without giving him a shot, pull the tooth so he'd cry out in pain. Telling it makes it endure, but the thought passed quickly. I said to myself: Brute, what do you blame him for? Being a Nazi? It may hurt you that he killed your parents, but if you commit the barbarism of pulling the tooth without a shot, you're a barbarian like him. You are no better than he. I pulled myself together. I gave him a shot, then did the operation. I wouldn't have done it better for my own father.
And when I finished, I said to him in German: "You see, I got a letter that confirms the death of my parents, dead in the crematorium." I waited. If he had said something to try to clear himself, I would have punched him in the face. I was absolutely sure of that. Fortunately, he was prudent; he bowed his head and left. I never saw him again [long silence ].
I asked myself the question: If I had seen my parents die, would I have been able to forgive so easily? Because I bear forgiveness inside me, but not forgetting. You can forgive; you can never forget those things. But I wonder: If I had witnessed my parents' death, would I have had the strength to forgive? I admit that, even now, I don't have the answer, and I think that I'll die without answering the question.
Ghosts
As the narrative draws to a close, when there is nothing more to say because their previous lives really seem finished, they go back again,
to another comeback: that of survivors who helped them uncover some traces of those who disappeared (a date, a meeting, some information about the way they died) or told the tragedy they went through. Survivors emerge as ghosts from another world.
The one Yacob-Jacques L. met right after the war revealed strange coincidences to him. His memories unfold with episodes embedded within other episodes, and shift from third person narratives to first person identification with those recalled.
One day, I had a client at Sèvres-Babylone—you know? There's the Hotel Lutetia. It was right after the Liberation. I was passing by the Hotel Lutetia, and a girl was staring at me. She asked me: "Do you speak Polish?" "Yes." "Oh, I'm saved, I'm saved." "What's going on?"
We went into a café and she told me a story like this. Her father lived on a main street in Warsaw, not in the ghetto. They had a clock shop, a big one. I was the only daughter, and I was already in my last year of law school when the war broke out. On the first day the Germans sent planes to bomb Warsaw, my mother happened to be in the street; she was killed. I don't have a mother anymore, she said to me, and she stopped. She couldn't talk anymore.
"Easy," I said to her.
So the day came when we had to go to the ghetto. We had a little money but the merchandise—we hadn't hidden it—the Germans took everything. We found a hole with some other Jews. I didn't speak Yiddish, very little anyway. What could we do? They thought and thought, and they found out that you could get forged papers, identity cards with certificates of baptism, all that, but it was very expensive. My father said to me: "Listen, my child, I won't survive the war but I want to save you. Take this money. You're to go to this place I know. They'll make you an identity card and a certificate of baptism, and you'll go to work. I don't know how, but you'll survive the war."
I didn't want to, I didn't want to. Then my father died too. I was alone, all alone. I took the money I had. They made papers for me; that wasn't easy. Now, what did I do? I looked for
work. As a housekeeper. She found it right away. They sent her to a Polish lady. A big woman with three or four children. I didn't see the husband there. In the morning I started working, but the woman looked at me suspiciously. She never did that, you understand? At night, she was already sure I wasn't Polish: "Come, my dear, you're—(she says the Polish name, I don't remember anymore) like I'm a ballerina at the Warsaw Opera! You think I'm going to keep Jewish blood in my house? Get out at once!"
It was already night, eight o'clock. What could I do? I left. In the main entrance, there was a guard, a caretaker: she opened her door and then she closed it. And all of a sudden, a Polish policeman passed in the street, and she cried out: "Come here, there's a Jewish woman who wants to hide in my house!"
OK, she went with the policeman. In the middle of the street, the policeman stopped and said: "My God, just like my daughter, just like my daughter. She was killed in a bombing two days ago!" "So, Monsieur, that being the case, how can you turn me over to the Gestapo?" "No, I won't give you to the Gestapo. We have to think something up. Here's what I'm going to say: I was passing by, there was a scuffle, there was shouting and crying. I went back to ask what was going on. And the woman said to me: she stole a watch, something. And then one of her children came and said: here, Mama, I found the watch! I have to take you to the police station. I'll tell that story."
He went with her to the station. He told this story. So the chief said: "But why did you bring her here?" "Why? Because there's a curfew. She's a proud Polish woman. As soon as she was suspected of a theft, she didn't want to stay with her boss anymore. Since there's a curfew, I thought she could spend the night here, and tomorrow, she can go wherever she wants."
On the way again, he had said to her: "Mademoiselle, do you have any money?" "No." "I'll give you some. I don't know how much, but something. When you survive the war. . . . I'm going to tell you why: among your own people, you'll tell them you found a Pole, a policeman, who was a decent person. My sister lives about fifty kilometers from Warsaw. She is a green-
grocer. You tell her everything, the whole truth, and she'll look after you."
So, she spent the night in the police station, and, in the morning, she went to the railroad station. She bought a ticket, and she went to the policeman's sister. She told her everything. "Mademoiselle, I have to hide you in my house for three days. I'll tell all my neighbors I'm expecting a niece." She stayed hidden for three days, until the fourth day. She helped sell all the time, throughout the war. That's how she was saved.
Later on, I couldn't stay there. My father was dead; my mother was dead. I had a brother in Australia. I wrote to him, and he answered me. I'm waiting for the papers he's supposed to send me.
There were other cases like that, but very few, very few. After the war, I wrote to the city hall there to ask what had become of my brothers and sisters. They answered kindly: "They were taken on October 10 or 20, 1942, and, unfortunately, have not been seen since. But you have a cousin who lived in Lublin. He left us an address in case someone asked for him." I wrote right away: "What do you need?" He answered me right away. He didn't want money. "Send me papers." And he came.
Wait, that's not all. What a small world it is! I was in Menton on vacation. There was a big park and Jews there with whom I could discuss Talmud, Bible—who still knew. This couple came and sat down. They were speaking Polish. I was curious: Polish in Menton? So I was bold: "Monsieur, you're speaking a language I understand very well." He told me: his wife was Jewish, he wasn't. They had known each other before the war, but not well enough to get married. In Warsaw, during the war, she hid in some hole. She stayed there for months. And then, before the ghetto uprising, he (her husband now) helped her run away. It was very difficult. He had to pay off the guards. She stayed with his family throughout the war, and after the war, they got married. They live in Mexico now. He's an engineer.
When I heard that she had hidden in a hole. . . . My cousin I just mentioned, he also was hidden in a hole. "Madame, can you tell me who you hid with?" "Oh, yes, wait. There was
Monsieur Z. and another man with a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old son. He was called . . . oh, yes, F.L." That was my cousin! In the same hole, you realize? What a world . . .
We listen now to the voice of another "ghost" who tells her own story. Of all the people from central Europe whose memories we have gathered, she is the only one who came to France after the war. With her, we find ourselves in the very heart of the genocide, in Poland.
Anna D.:
Hitler had already started. From '38 on, the Poles stood in front of stores to keep people from going in. They said: "You mustn't buy from the Jews." The pogroms had already started.
When Hitler entered, in the early days, they took the men to work. Once, a German came to my house, in the courtyard. He went to all the apartments and took all the men. My husband didn't move fast enough so the German kicked him. The next day, he escaped. He came back, saying: "I don't want to work there anymore. I'm going away. Come if you want. If not, I'll go by myself. If I stay, I'll resist, and they'll shoot me."
At that time, my children were very little: two, four, six years old. It was cold, 27 or 28 degrees below zero. I didn't want to go with him because I had heard people say that they couldn't get through, that they had to stay on the border. Many children didn't have anything to eat, were frozen. I said to myself: "Where am I going to go? I'm going to lose my children." So I stayed. In my house, there were twenty-seven Jewish tenants. There were women with children; one of them was pregnant. The men all left together. We women stayed. What could we do?
A week later, they announced that if you had family outside of Lodz, in the country or in another city, you should go to them because they didn't know what was going to happen in three days.
What to do? If you had seen what was going on in the street! Everybody was wailing, crying in the street, with children. It was terrible to hear that. There is no good God. I wondered what to do, all alone with three children. I went up to my aunt's
house and asked her: "Where are you going? What should we do?" So my aunt started crying over me: "What did you do? Why did you let your husband go? You're left with three children, all by yourself. We don't know what's going to happen." She was yelling at me, I didn't know what to do. I left.
I didn't have a lot of money. We dealt in wholesale goods. There were seasons, and we bought inventory for the whole season. So we didn't have much money left. I suggested to a neighbor to leave with me, to go to my in-laws outside of Lodz, about a hundred miles away. The Germans weren't there yet. I thought that would be good and I wouldn't be all alone.
It was Friday, the last day. There was a Pole who lived outside of Lodz, in the suburb. He had a cart with two horses. I put everything I could on it—linen, blankets; the neighbor did too. We set out. A while later, the owner of the cart said: "We have to go through customs. Thousands of people are waiting to go through. It's cold, the children are cold. Let's go back to my house. We'll spend the night and leave tomorrow."
The children were crying. They were freezing. Even the birds were dropping dead. He took everything I had put in the cart back to his house, the children went to bed, and I stood off to the side. Then he talked with the neighbors and saw that he had taken less money than the others. About midnight, one in the morning, he went to bed, and I stretched out next to the children to spend the few hours until the next morning. After getting the children ready to leave, I knocked on his door: "It's light already, we have to leave." No answer, I knocked three times, four times: "We have to leave, I can't stay here!" "I'm not leaving." "What? I paid you, I gave you what you wanted and you don't want to leave? It can't be." "No, I'm not leaving."
What could I do? I went out to the road. There were people who were going back to Lodz because things had been extended to three months. So I went back to his house and asked him to take me back to Lodz.
"No. I'm not going anywhere."
I went back out to the road and asked some people to take me. Someone had pity—the children were crying, it was cold.
I went back to get my things. He kept everything. Some of his neighbors treated him like a murderer: "You see a woman alone with three children and you do that?" Since he was ashamed, he left me some blankets and linens and he kept all the rest. I said "My tough luck!" and I returned to Lodz. I met a neighbor, who took my packages. Another person I knew took the youngest child home to warm him up. All of a sudden, about ten German soldiers arrived. They started knocking people on the head, everywhere, with their rifles. Fortunately, we had just reached the house. He gave me tea to warm me up. Then I went to get the child who was warmed up and had slept.
Then I went home, to my house. When I came, there was already somebody inside. I couldn't get back in. It was all over. I didn't have a home anymore. Where could I go in this terrible cold with my children? There was a neighbor to whom I explained:
"I don't have a place to live. I can't go back."
"I have a neighbor's key. If you want, go in there."
She gave me the key of the neighbor, who had left with five children. There was a bed, a cupboard, a little stove. I found some coal, a little wood, and I lit a fire. There was a bucket of water—it was a piece of ice. It was night. I put the children to bed and I went to bed, crying.
The next day, I asked the neighbor to watch the children so I could try to earn a few cents to be able to feed the children. I washed laundry. I washed the ground. I was happy to have found that. On the fourth day, the neighbor said to me:
"A Polish gentleman sent by your father-in-law came to look for you."
At that time, Jews couldn't leave anymore. They didn't give them tickets; only Poles were allowed. Knowing that, that I was alone, my father-in-law had paid a Pole to come get us and take us there, to them. I was happy. I wept with joy. I had to be ready to leave the next morning.
Very early, it was still dark, he brought me the tickets, helped me put the bundles in the droshky, and we left for the railroad station. I thought he was going to accompany me all the way.
No. He gave me the tickets and said: "You're on your own." With the children, and it was so cold! I came to the railroad station. There were Germans, inspections. A German woman felt my bag, searched, and let me go through. I was happy. Behind me she kept a woman with a big bundle from going through. I got to the platform and what did I see? Thousands and thousands of people. They were on the roof of the train, in the doorways, on the steps. Impossible to get on. The train left and I was all alone with the children.
Someone who worked on the trains came up to me, took the bundles, and asked me to follow him. He took me to the last train, and I got on. We left, but not for long. The tracks were broken. We had to walk three kilometers to the other station. I couldn't get there with all the children and the bundles. I rented a cart for a few pennies; I went through three stations like that. It was cold. The Poles took pity. They took each of the children to warm up in a little cafeteria. They ran with them, they were very nice. One of them helped me climb up onto the roof of the train.
I still had fourteen kilometers to go, and I had to change trains. I got off; the platforms were crawling with Germans. We had to wait all night until the next day to take another train, and we couldn't stay on the platform. What to do? I had an aunt who lived in that town, so I decided to go find her. Seeing children, outside, people wouldn't say anything: I left the two younger ones with the bundles, and I took the oldest one with me.
It was dark. It was midnight or one in the morning. Winter. I knew she lived in a new house. I walked, I walked. I saw one house. It wasn't finished. I went back and fell into a hole. The child remained on the side. How I got out of it I don't know. I got out and looked around. There was still a long way to go. I searched some more and found the house. I found it because he was a shoemaker and there was a little sign outside. Only I didn't know which door. I went into the courtyard, and I heard Germans talking and singing. "That's it, it's all over. If anybody comes out, he'll take me." I hid in a corner and waited. Some lights went on, and somebody came down the stairs. "If it's a
German, I'm finished. Whatever he'll do he'll do." It was my cousin:
"What are you doing here?"
"Don't say anything. Let me in."
I went in, she woke everybody up. I explained. Her two sons, who were fifteen and thirteen, went with me to get the children at the railroad station, all alone among the Germans. I brought the children back, I put them to bed on chairs, and I stayed next to them. The next morning, the two boys took me to the railroad station and put me on the train.
I arrived. It was Shabbat, but at that time, nobody cared. Pious or not, this was war. They knew I was coming. They were glad about it, and so was I. That lasted for a week or two, no more.
My husband had two younger brothers, one fifteen, the other twenty, who worked with his father, a tailor for the peasants. One day, he said:
"I don't want to work for strangers' children."
"They're not strangers, they're your brother's children."
What could I do? I tried to earn a few cents. I offered to help a dressmaker. She agreed. I was pleased. I could buy the children something to eat.
Some time went by like that. The Germans started deporting people for labor. The brothers left. I did dressmaking in exchange for a sack of potatoes. But I didn't want to stay there. I felt unwanted. There were three rooms and a kitchen. They closed the door of the kitchen. They didn't heat it. My iron bed was next to the door. It was so cold there was ice on the walls. The parents were in a heated room, and their married daughter with a child in the other room. I was in the kitchen. It was so cold!
Badly received by her family, Anna D. did piecework for the Polish peasants:
By then, we weren't allowed to go more than a mile outside the town. The last peasant where I worked lived near the railroad station. There were two Germans who came to eat in his house. The first day, when they came in, they shook my hand.
They didn't see that I wasn't Polish because I wore a scarf on my head, a long skirt with an apron, like the other women. The second day, the German asked: "Who is that woman with the child?" My son had black curly hair, not like the Poles, who are blond. The peasant had enough sense to answer: "It's my daughter-in-law, who came to rest here for a few days." Later, he told me to leave because he was scared for me and for himself. He could be shot. I took the child and left.
Later, we weren't allowed to go out. The police were guarding the street. There was no work. It was lousy. There were roundups all the time. One day, I decided to go to the market to buy some potatoes. A German arrested me. I started shouting. My father-in-law told me not to get upset, that I would only get two weeks and would then return. But it didn't turn out like that.
They put me in the police station. It was full of people, women, girls, men. A military truck, covered with a tarpaulin, came to get us. They forced us to get in. The police were guarding us with rifles. When I saw that, I started crying, shouting that they should let me go. Everybody said: "Stop it! They're going to shoot all of us because of you!" Because of me? I stopped.
They took us to a camp, at Skarzysko, almost ten miles away, and they separated us. There was my mother-in-law's cousin on one side and me on the other. So I said to myself: "I'm going to go with her. That way we'll be together." And I went over to her, to her side. And on her side, everybody said to me: "Why did you come here? Over there, they're sending people home, but us they're taking for labor." When I heard that, I wanted to go back to the other side but there was a soldier who prevented me. So I stayed. And the next day, they told me: "You know what happened with the others, where you were? They deported them all. They're going to the ovens."
They put us in camps. We were maybe four hundred women, separated from the men, not in the same camp. We slept on boards put on top of one another, without anything at all, only on the boards. They took us to work, you had to walk two,
three miles every day to go work. Soldiers guarded us with rifles, on all sides. By now, it was winter. There was a lot of snow. We had wooden clogs, open in back. Those who couldn't walk were shot.
Later on, they built huts. By then, there were fewer people, maybe thirty, forty women in a hut. Every day, we got up at six o'clock to go to work. One week we worked during the day, one week at night. Everybody had a number. Those who tended the machines were on their feet all night long. When you were tired, when you closed your eyes, you were beaten. That went on for three and a half years. For food, they gave us soup that smelled bad, dry beets. You couldn't eat it. A lot of people got sick, they had diarrhea and were taken to the hospital. That was the end. From the hospital, they were deported.
I was lucky, I had seven machines. There were big barrels. You had to fill them with fourteen thousand pounds of stuff a day. The others had four or six. I had seven! One day, the boss made a cross on a barrel, and that meant sabotage. I really didn't pay attention at the time. There was a German inspector who spoke Polish. When she saw that, she told the Pole that I had committed sabotage. (With us, there were some Poles who were mechanics.) The Pole took me to the manager, to his office, thinking he was going to beat me on the spot. He wasn't there. We waited and waited. He didn't come. The Pole was so hysterical that he took a very hard belt and beat me, shouting: "Dirty Jew, you call that work?" That hurt. I didn't say anything, I cried. Then the boss came, and the Pole pointed to me and said: "There, she's the one. Sabotage, sabotage!" He thought the boss would take me out and kill me on the spot. But the boss didn't say anything because he knew how I worked. The Pole was furious. A few days later, the top brass—commanders of the camps—came and beat the Pole. All the Jews were happy. He had beaten me. Now it was his turn. Two days later, he disappeared.
At that time, the Russians were starting to advance. They selected people to send to Germany. I was in the last group. As the Russians advanced, the Germans got scared. All of a sudden,
they were there—while the boss was reading the list of all the names, we saw Russian airplanes coming. When the boss saw them, he disappeared and we never saw him again. A soldier took us to another place. We had to cross a river, the Wartha. They put us in a kind of cellar. I don't know what it was. We went in there like animals. Men were praying, women were crying. We thought we were waiting for the train: "They're going to send us somewhere, we don't know where." It was dark; a German came: "Everybody has to get out; in five minutes, everyone must be outside!" Everybody started trampling over everyone else, over legs, over heads. They were scared of being shot; it was atrocious. We went out; we were put in groups of five. They took us in the direction of the bridge. We all looked at each other: "That's it, it's over. They're going to throw us in the water. This is the end."
But it wasn't that. They took us back to the camp. There were still bosses, police. They opened the door: "What's going on, everybody's coming back?" When we returned, everyone in his hut, it was already dark. The lights were out and every time you heard "zzz, zzz," it was airplanes passing, shrapnel whistling. We were all women; the men were separate. We said: "We're going to go to the men; we'll be safer." We weren't allowed to move. About four o'clock in the morning, all at once, everything stopped. We didn't hear anything anymore. It was calm. It was in January. Some men who weren't afraid said to each other: "This calm, it can't be, we've got to get out." To get out into the street, you had to pass through seven gates. One man went through a gate, where a soldier was lying. Nobody. Everything was open. He looked under the bed—he was afraid that somebody was hiding there. There was a rifle; he took it: "What's going on? There's no one here." He went through all the gates: nobody. So he went out into the street. "Come on, come on, we're free, nobody's here!" "Nobody? It can't be!" Everybody was scared. He came back and started shouting: "Come out, come out, we're free, free, nobody's here!" Some men came out and started shouting the same thing. Some of them went crazy with joy. They shouted, sang. They didn't know what to do. Joy!
The survivors of the camp of Skarzysko were liberated by the Russians and then put in other transit camps. Six months later, they were released.
Where to go? We had never gone out into the street. We didn't know where to go. Some of us women went out looking for a place to move into. We meet some Poles and we asked them: "Where are the Jews who came out of the camps?" They pointed to a house the Germans had left. We went there. What did we see? Jam-packed with women, maybe a hundred women, one on top of the other. It was so small. So we just lay down on the ground. There wasn't anything at all. What did we hear at night? Somebody knocking: "Open up or you'll all be shot!" One woman said: "Too bad, let them do what they want." She opened the door. There were two Russian soldiers with rifles. They came in, took two women, and went away with them. They brought them back the next morning. When I saw that, I said: "I don't care where I go, but I'm not staying here. Who's coming with me?"
The trains weren't back on schedule yet; everything had been destroyed. We left half on foot, half on the train. You had to jump onto the moving trains. We left anyway. We got to Czitloviesco, where my parents were. They were all deported; there wasn't anybody left. I said: "Let's go to the small town. There are people who came back." On the way, I recognized a woman I had worked for during the war. It was a Sunday. I stopped her: "Do you recognize me?" "No. Who are you?" "You remember your dressmaker who worked for you?" "It's you, it's you, you're . . ." "Yes, it's me." She knelt down and started praying right in front of me.
After much more wandering, Anna D. finally returned to Lodz.
We got to Lodz. I went out of the railroad station, into the street. I didn't recognize anything at all. Everything was changed. I didn't know where to go, although I knew the city. I showed the address. They pointed the way. I went up to that woman's house. She was very comfortable . . .
I went to look for work. I asked at the committee, and they
gave me an address. I got there and knocked. Nobody there. They gave me another address, nobody again. I tell myself, "I'm going to the ghetto, maybe I'll find someone." Who do I see? A gentleman next to a door. Is it him or not? How am I going to ask? It's a Pole, a neighbor who lived in the same house. I stood next to him, looking at him and said:
"You recognize me?"
"No. Who are you?"
I told him.
"Oh! You're. . . . It's you? There is a neighbor—if you want to go to her, I'll take you there."
It was the neighbor who had once given me the keys of the apartment. We go up, the door was closed. "She has a little bakeshop; we'll go there." We went down, she came out. I recognized her right away, but she didn't recognize me. He talked with her, I stood off to the side. I heard everything. When he saw that she didn't ask who I was, he asked her:
"Do you know this lady?"
"No, I don't."
He told her my name. She looked at me and started crying:
"You know, your husband was here, dressed as a soldier. He said that if he didn't find anybody, he wouldn't stay, but he would send word from wherever he was."
When I heard that, I couldn't believe it. What to do? Where to go? There was a Russian headquarters. I went there and asked if they knew the name, if it was possible to get information. They didn't know. What could I do? I'd have to wait, maybe he'd write. And, so, every day, I went to the ghetto.
Anna D. received help from a "Czechoslovakian caretaker," who got her a room and dressmaking work as well.
At that time, there were Russian women soldiers who had military coats. They brought them to me, and I made skirts and jackets out of them, whatever I could. They were happy to be able to change their clothes. When there was a piece of leftover fabric, they gave it to me. I made myself a little skirt. I earned a few cents. I went to the market and bought a pair of secondhand shoes, old shoes—I had still been wearing the clogs.
Later, I had another piece of cloth left over and made myself a jacket. I had a suit, a skirt, a jacket, shoes. I was a real lady . . .
Every day, I went to the committee to see if I might not find someone. One day, I saw a girl I had worked with in the camp, carrying a little sack on her back. She was crying her eyes out:
"Here I am, I don't know where to go, I don't have anything, I've been sleeping outside."
"That's silly. Come with me."
Once while I was working at the machine next to the window, I heard somebody calling me. I looked out and saw that neighbor with a piece of paper in her hand:
"You've got a letter from your husband!"
I don't know how I got down. Through the window, through the stairs! I don't remember anymore. There was no address, just a number.
"Go to the railroad station, they'll know."
I went to the railroad station. I showed them the letter and they gave me a ticket.
It was night when I arrived. There were a lot of Poles traveling, dealing on the black market. I sat on the ground with them, waiting for dawn. A Russian came by: "Come with me!" I looked at him. I didn't want to. He took me by the hand and pulled me. There was a Polish agent across from me: "Don't go. They're looking for women." When I heard that, I ran. I'm still running.
Day dawned, but where should I go? I saw a soldier, a colonel maybe:
"Do you know a hospital where there are wounded soldiers?"
He showed me the way. I got there. There was a wall around. I walked around. I saw a wounded man. He was wearing a bathrobe:
"Do you know this name?"
"I can't tell. There are a lot of them I don't know. Go to the office, you'll find out."
I went to the office. "What name?" She looked but didn't find anything. I asked her to try again. She was a Russian woman who spoke a little Polish. I looked too, and I saw the name way
down at the bottom. "Go with him." I accompanied the soldier to the room and waited outside. He returned with a nurse. "He is wounded so bad that he can't come out. Go see him." I went in. There were three rows of beds. I looked, but I didn't see him. I looked again. He was way at the end, his head bandaged. He had been wounded eleven miles from Berlin. When I came in, he saw me. He didn't ask me anything. He knew everything. He didn't have to ask. I didn't tell him anything, he understood everything.
And what of the fates of our other characters? After the arrest of Golda R.'s husband, she fled to a sister-in-law, in Viry-Chatillon, where she remained hidden until the end of the war. At the Liberation, as soon as she returned to Paris, she met a returnee who, with brutal frankness, confirmed the death of her husband.
At the Liberation, the Resistance liberated Viry. All the Jews who had been in hiding rejoiced and danced. But I wept. "You're rejoicing. You have your children, your husbands. I'm still in the dark."
[ . . .] Walking in the street, in Paris, I met one of our friends. He came up to me. His daughter had boarded in my house. He had returned. He said to me: "Golda, I can tell you that Avrom won't come back. He swelled up after two weeks in Auschwitz and died. I buried him myself. If you need a witness for your pension, you can quote me."
She also learned what happened to Chil, her former suitor. Chil, Golda's and Rosette's indecisive lover, Chil, who had finally married Rosette, also died in Auschwitz. He committed suicide by throwing himself against the barbed wire.
Returns
Are these evanescent traces in the memories of the survivors all that is left of the original world? To exist in memory is a form of existence after all, one that is nourished by nostalgia. Not a simple regret over the past or a romantic sense of the ephemeral, it is the stubborn quest for a destroyed world. This nostalgia permeates memories in various
tones, from violent aspiration to modest melancholy. It is manifest throughout the narratives, sometimes in pathetic effusions, sometimes in a discreet remark or in a sigh or in silence.
Georges F.:
That was my life. Now, why do I want to go back there? It would certainly give me pleasure to see things again, to see how they turned out, how it is now. Yes, even without contact with people. I wouldn't have contact with people I don't know. I wouldn't even tell them I was born there. But I have an enormous desire to see the place where I spent my youth. Even if it doesn't exist anymore, I would recognize the place all the same. It could not have moved. Even if there's a house where there was once a courtyard, I would recognize precisely that place where my courtyard was. We lived there.
With this throbbing subject of return, the memories we have collected converge with the written memoirs that have multiplied in France over the last ten years: autobiographies, chronicles, testimonies. We will present a few examples of this abundant literature, as a comparison and to close our tour.
Return can be an obsession. For Ginette Hirtz, it is, first of all, the return to her hometown, in this case, Amiens, to be there to greet those who disappeared in case they came back: you really need an address, a familiar place where you can be found.[25] But fate can be ironic: she could not return home, for the door had been sealed shut by the English authorities. She had now to prove her identity after dissimulating it for months. When the door was finally opened, what horror she experienced at the spectacle of death and decay:
One image has survived in my memory—of a soup tureen filled with spaghetti swarming with worms, on a shelf in the kitchen. Broken cabinets, clothes strewn over the filthy, stained floor. I went forward as onto a stage set, without recognizing anything except minute absurd traces in some nook, staggering.[26] [The narrator undertook to clean the house, to tidy it up, and
[25] Ginette Hirtz, Les Hortillonnages sous la grêle: Histoire d'une famille juive en France sous l'Occupation [Gardens under Hail: The History of a Jewish Family in France Under the Occupation] (Paris: Mercure de France, 1982), p. 128.
[26] Ibid., p. 128.
even to reconstruct the decor she had known. For the idea is to re-create a "pretense of a home," while waiting for her parents, in the very place of the lost Paradise. ] Hope riveted us to that encounter with those who disappeared: the address of 14 Rue Alberic-de-Calonne in Amiens.[27]
There is another original world, even older than the one where one was born: the Holy Land. After living under several false identities and even thinking of converting to Catholicism, Saul Friedländer decided to go to Palestine to find his true identity. For him that provided the sense of a definitive break with his past and his entry into a new era. On the ship, shortly before landing, he lost the only souvenir he had of his father, a watch, and he interpreted this loss as a symbolic rupture:
There was no way of recovering it. Thus the most beloved memento of my childhood disappeared at the moment that I was approaching Israel, at the dawn of a new life. Symbolically, what measured time past was no more: symbolically, everything was beginning all over again.[28]
However, in the extremely skillful composition of his book, Saul Friedländer constantly interweaves times. In a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, he can move in a few pages from the account of his arrival in Israel (in 1947) to the analysis of his feelings at the moment he writes (June 5, 1977) to the memory of the Six Day War—then, finally, to return far, very far back, to that time with which he has not entirely broken (despite the symbol of the lost watch), that of his native land. Through the art of writing, he also attempts to realize the ambition of the famous Rabbi Loew, creator and then destroyer of the Golem: to abolish time, to achieve the fusion of past and present.[29]Indeed, what did he find in Israel, in his life barely begun again? Precisely "the way of life of the Jews of Prague," at the time of his childhood.
[27] Ibid., p. 140.
[28] Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes (New York: Farrae, Straus & Giroux), p. 186.
[29] Ibid., pp. 18–20.
It was in the evening, after long workdays in the sun, that the world of "yesterday" came to occupy its true place once again. Over their bridge game, surrounded by the few pieces of furniture and books that still belonged to "back home," our peasants took on their real nature once more and dropped their masks, so to speak. Heller, Fleishman, Prager, or Glaser seemed to forget the mosquito bites, the drone of the sprinklers, or the smell of orange blossom, and they must all have had the impression that they were back once again in those large, rather dark apartments that I had known for such a short time, but whose scent, that discreet charm made up of old things, wax-polished wood, and well-worn leather, I could still describe today. . . . The way of life of the Jews of Prague of my childhood was perhaps futile and "rootless," seen from a historical viewpoint. Yet this way of life was ours, the one we treasured.[30]
Some have attempted to rediscover the original world by going to look for it where it really was, returning to the very places where their ancestors had lived, by a pilgrimage, by returning to the shtetl. Maurice Rajsfus had made a first trip to Poland in 1935, at the age of seven, to Bledow, the village where his mother was born. He was accompanying his parents, who had themselves been away for ten years, on a visit to his maternal grandmother. His parents had already adapted to another way of life and he remembers with bitter irony that, during that first trip, in spite of their admonitions, he was an unbearably fresh kid. Forty-five years later, he refuses to think of himself as a Jew but he does feel the strange, almost "morbid" need to make the pilgrimage: "I've been haunted by this project for more than twenty years."[31]
So, in 1980, he made the second trip. Arriving in Warsaw, he didn't recognize any of the streets he had once known. But when someone told him that he was crossing the border of the former ghetto, he says: "I can't help trembling and, calmly, I explain: not that I'm of Jewish origin, as I often say when anyone questions me about that, but that I am a Jew. Quite simply."[32]
[30] Ibid., pp. 8–9.
[31] Rajsfus, Quand j'étais juif [When I Was a Jew], p. 209.
[32] Ibid., p. 219.
Overwhelmed by emotion, Maurice Rajsfus becomes a Jew again in another place too: at the end of his quest, returning at last to the original place, Bledow, the former shtetl. At first, the village seems completely unfamiliar to him; on entering, he discovers a church which he had "thrown out of his memory," while the synagogue had remained "so present" to him. This unexpected landscape plunges him into a profound confusion until, led along by some reminiscence, he finds both his grandmother's house and the child he was:
Everything was clear in my memory. I remembered perfectly the baker's house and the bakery, the smell of good bread that drifted into the street. All of a sudden, I remembered the pond where the Polish children had pushed me after throwing stones at me. I remembered the carts and the horses, the peasant women with scarves on their heads and you could have sworn they were the same ones who were strolling in the church square where Tadeusz had parked his car. I felt lost near that church, a complete intruder into that landscape. . . . I was helpless, already thinking I had made that trip for nothing. To have come so far and to find an unexpected landscape, what an atrocious deception. . . . Despite my friends who explain to me that they are going to inquire since they felt my confusion, I walk away, practically escape from them and here I am, in the street. That can only be the sidewalk on the right. Where is the house? I don't have time to reflect. Almost a half century disappears in a fraction of a second. I stagger and lean against the wall. Suddenly I burst into sobs. I'm crying like a baby, more nervously perhaps, but almost without tears. It hurts so much to rediscover the traces of a happy past. All those old stones that knew my mother. . . . I no longer control myself and I cry.[33]
To return to the shtetl: it isn't necessary to pick up physically and go look for it in space; it is enough to journey in time and rediscover it in imagination. Such is the return, or pilgrimage, of Regine Robin, into the past: "I remember a Kaluszyn that I never knew."[34] She starts by retracing family legends, reproducing tales she heard from her father,
[33] Ibid., pp. 225–226.
[34] Regine Robin, Le Cheval blanc de Lenine, ou l'histoire autre [Lenin's White Horse or Different History] (Brussels: Complexe, 1979), p. 19.
enriching them with scenes she reinvents. History goes back to the ancestor Moshe who, during the massacres of 1648, had an epic dialogue with Bogdan Chmielnicki; his son Junkle, a disciple of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, was sold to Berber pirates in Constantinople; Shlomo, Junkle's great-grandson, one of the three hundred disciples of the Baal Shem Tov, was a sage who lived for a hundred and twenty years; Schmil, the great-grandfather of Regine Robin's grandfather, was the musician of the family, who once played the violin for Napoleon. As for the author's father, he had met Lenin in 1920, leading the Bolshevik army "on a beautiful white horse," and had conducted his own epic dialogue with him on the meaning of the Revolution. Then, in the course of her journey through the centuries, Regine Robin stops at a certain moment. More precisely, she stops time in the year 1931, to re-create a day in Kaluszyn. "Yes, a day in Kaluszyn, in my mother's house."[35]She is truly present in another world, in a period when she wasn't yet born:
More precisely, a summer night. It is very heavy. A storm is threatening. The whole day has been nothing but a slow incandescence. We're stifling. . . . My mother's grandfather, Avram Zuker, born in 1857 (so he was seventy-four years old in 1931) barely works anymore. . . . Tonight he hurries. . . . Farther away on the Warshawa Gass, my grandfather Raime Mortre closes his candy shop. Business hasn't been good. He thinks more and more seriously of going to Warsaw where two of his sons have already moved. . . . Yes, of leaving Kaluszyn. Tonight, he almost makes the decision. . . . My father is far from having finished with his shaving brushes. What heat. The day has been rough. The police broke into the cell meeting. True, once again, they could pretend that the comrades were waiting for a haircut. . . . My mother rocks my brother. He's only a year old. She sings an old Yiddish lullaby to him. "Happy is he who has a mother and a little cradle." Ten years later, I too will hear this refrain. She opens the window. No wind . . .[36]
And there is more. At the end of her pilgrimage, Regine Robin reinvents history, or at least her own history, and forges a new fate for
[35] Ibid., p. 67.
[36] Ibid., pp. 67–71.
herself: she too is born in Kaluszyn (some twenty years before her real date of birth) and, from then on, lives the life of a shtetl girl. This then is the opposite of the survival of those who lived through the genocide since the issue here is a previous life, a pre-life, whose end is none other than Treblinka, where "everything is finished."[ 37]
There remains one last form of return: the narrator abolishes time not by going backward, from the present to the past, but by keeping that past so alive inside himself that it truly lives in the present. After the disappearance of her parents, Ginette Hirtz feels herself to be "their free and voluntary extension, moved by them."[38] When she returned to Amiens right after the Liberation, it was her father who made decisions for her: "It was still him, dead, who dictated that behavior to me."[39]And Ginette Hirtz, born in France to an assimilated family, herself a professor of literature whose whole mode of thought is rationalist, uses the metaphor of the dybbuk: it is as if she is inhabited, possessed by the spirit of her father. Again at the Liberation, when she returns to the little woods he had bought before the war and notes that the oaks have been cut down, she is gripped by rage and despair: "My father howled in me like a dybbuk, and he breathed scornful attitudes into me, fierce words for which the appraisor had no use."[40]At the end of her narrative, meditating on her life and her profession, she realizes that it is the spirit of her parents she has attempted to instill into her role as a mother and her work as a professor: "Into all the young people that I have loved, educated, accompanied for a long or short period of time: my brother, my children, some of my students, the dybbuk of my parents has passed without my even knowing it rationally."[41]And Ginette Hirtz ends her memoirs as she had begun, by going quite naturally, without any transitions, from the dybbuk of her parents to the Winterreise, adding a few small details: she lies on the ground and listens to one of her son's favorite pieces of music. Thus the chain of the generations is reconstructed to the sound of Schubert's lieder. "I listen to that singing blended with the piano and I curl up in my father's arms, protected from the danger that threatens, over there ."[42]
[37] Ibid., pp. 133–134.
[38] Hirtz, Les Hortillonnages, p. 104.
[39] Ibid., p. 124.
[40] Ibid., p. 146.
[41] Ibid., p. 173.
[42] Ibid.