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.