SEPTEMBER 30, 1943. I am eight years old. We live in Nice, in southern France, in a 1920s house at number 15 Rue d’Italie. At the end of the street is the basilica, which looks out on the city’s main road, Avenue de la Victoire. At the other end of that road, perpendicular to Rue d’Italie, is Avenue Durante, which leads to the train station. On the left-hand sidewalk, fewer than a hundred yards from the junction, is the Hôtel Excelsior. For the last three weeks, this hotel has been the headquarters of the Gestapo, the secret state police. The Germans, who have just occupied Nice after taking over from the Italians, are raiding the houses of Jews and sending them to Drancy. We quickly learned to avoid going anywhere near Avenue Durante.
It is midnight and I am sleeping peacefully in our sparsely furnished three-room apartment. As are my sister, my mother, and my father. Suddenly, searchlights illuminate the windows, and we hear orders shouted in German. We jump out of bed, and my sister and I run over to the hiding place that my father made for us. It is set in a deep cupboard, about five feet wide. A thin partition conceals us from view. It opens from the inside with a simple latch at the bottom.
* * *
ON SEPTEMBER 8, 1943, less than a month before this, the Germans entered Nice. They now occupied all eight départements in southeastern France, which had been under the control of their Italian allies since November 11, 1942, when the Third Reich invaded what had previously been the French-administered zone libre, or “free zone.”
That ten-month respite, between November 1942 and September 1943, was a happy period for many Jewish families who would later suffer so badly under the Nazis. Our family, like most of those around us, was still intact: Papa, Mama, and the children. Newspaper articles often illustrate my childhood with a photograph showing the four of us—Arno, Georgette, Serge, and Raïssa—walking along the Promenade des Anglais, together for the last time. Our safety seemed assured by the carabinieri and the bersaglieri, and thousands of Jews were fleeing the German-occupied zone and taking refuge in the Italian zone.
I have retained from this period a profound gratitude toward the Italians, and ever since my childhood I have regarded Italy as a second home. As a teenager, I hitchhiked all over the country, and I have constantly gone back there as an adult. I have also passed on this passion to our children: our son, Arno, lived with Carla; and our daughter, Lida, married Carlo.
The Italian occupation was a blessing for Jewish families like ours. No more murderous raids by the Vichy police; no more identity papers stamped with “Jew”; no more arrests of Jews simply for being Jews. The Italians protected not only Italian Jews but French Jews and foreign Jews, too.
For us, the German takeover was a catastrophe. Italian soldiers tried to smuggle Jews to safety, but the occupation was so sudden that most of those attempts were doomed to failure.
Terror spread like wildfire among the twenty-five thousand Jews in Nice. Barricades were erected in the streets, at various intersections, and on the roads leading out of town, while any traveler taking a bus or train had to go through rigorous identity checks. Security was so tight that it was even riskier to try to escape than it was to stay.
Recognizing the danger we were in, my father decided to create the hiding place. He attached a rod in front of it and hung clothes from the rod to hide the entrance. Our situation was still precarious, though. All it would have taken was a hand pressing on the partition or a rifle butt banged against the thin wooden wall, and the subterfuge would have been exposed—and us along with it.
* * *
MY SISTER IS ELEVEN, three years older than me. We argue all the time. When the moment comes for us to enter the cupboard, however, we are perfectly quiet and obedient. We squeeze in there along with our mother, all three of us dressed in the clothes we wore the previous day, which we grabbed when we leaped out of bed. Seized by a sudden fear, Raïssa goes back out to make the beds. She must eliminate any trace of our presence in the apartment. Seconds later, she returns to the hiding place and shuts the door.
We know the scenario by heart. If the Gestapo raids our apartment, my father will give himself up, telling the Germans that the apartment is being disinfected, so he sent his family to the countryside. If he were to hide, too, the risk is that the soldiers would sound every wall and every cupboard with their rifle butts, and the game would be up for all of us.
Our father has made clear to us the danger we are in. We are perfectly aware that this refuge constitutes our only hope. A few days before, he explained to us that, if the Germans do arrest him, he would be more likely to survive than we would: “I’m strong. I would survive. The same is not true for you.”
* * *
IN NICE, ALOIS BRUNNER, the new Nazi head of the Drancy camp near Paris, ordered one of the most brutal raids on Jews ever seen in Western Europe. Papers were checked in the street, attics and cellars were searched, and men were forced to undress to see if they had been circumcised. Hundreds of people were arrested in the course of a few days.
* * *
ON THE NIGHT of September 30, 1943, the Gestapo raids our building. They proceed methodically, moving up floor by floor, knocking on every door but only entering apartments occupied by Jews. Presumably those Jewish families, like ours, who did not report their arrival in Nice to the authorities, have been denounced. The blame for this does not lie with the local authorities, however: the prefect Jean Chaigneau destroyed the file listing all the city’s Jews in order to prevent the Nazis from having that information. Arrested and deported in 1944, Chaigneau survived.
The hiding place shares a wall with the neighboring apartment, home to the Goetz family, who claim to be Alsatian but are in fact Polish Jews. We hear the Germans enter, and Yvonne, their daughter, cries out in pain after being hit in the face with a rifle butt for daring to ask to see their papers. Little Marguerite, my sister’s friend, weeps as the soldiers twist her arm in order to make her give them the address of her older brother, Lucien. She screams, “I don’t know! I don’t know!” They threaten and hurt each member of the family, one after another, and finally succeed in making them talk. Lucien is arrested a few hours later.
We hear their father yell, “Help! French police, help us! We’re French! Save us! Save us!”
* * *
UNLIKE THAT OF so many of my friends, of so many children of deported Jews, our home was not raided by the French police but by members of the Gestapo. As a child, I knew nothing about the arrests made by the French police on the orders of the collaboration government, and I would not learn the truth for a long time afterward. Unlike other Jewish children in France, I never feared the French police. In Nice, in particular, they did not take part in the German-led operations. True, we were in Nice on August 26, 1942, when the big raid on “stateless” Jews (former Germans, Austrians, Poles, Russians, and Czechs who had entered France after 1935) took place, but Romanians were not targeted in that raid.
If we had stayed in Paris instead of fleeing when the Germans invaded, we would have been arrested in 1942, along with more than fifteen hundred other Romanian Jews, when the Gestapo was informed that the Romanian government had abandoned its sovereignty over its emigrant Jews living abroad. They were arrested by French police at dawn on September 24, and at 8:55 a.m. on September 25, they were deported. On the morning of September 27, three-quarters of the deportees from that convoy were gassed in Birkenau. Less than seventy-two hours had passed between their rude awakening in Paris by those “guardians of the peace” and their murder by the SS at the other end of Europe.
Yes, I was lucky not to have suffered as so many other Jews did from what the current French president, François Hollande, finally acknowledged as “this crime … committed in France, by France.”
The night of that raid has stayed with me all of my life—as it has for all the Jewish children who experienced that terror and lost loved ones—as an experience that forged my identity as a Jew. I did not inherit that identity through religion or culture: my Jewish identity is defined by the Holocaust and an unswerving attachment to the Jewish state of Israel. It is my past as a Jew, and it is the future of the Jewish people.
* * *
SUDDENLY, THEY ARE banging on our door. My father opens it. A voice with a strong German accent demands in French, “Where are your wife and children?” My father tells them his prepared story.
My sister has bronchitis. To stop herself from coughing, she stuffs a handkerchief in her mouth like a gag.
The Germans enter and start searching the apartment. One of them opens the cupboard door. Seventy years later, I can still hear the sound of the clothes sliding along the rod. They do not inspect the partition that conceals us. Instead, they close the cupboard door. The voice orders: “Get dressed and follow us!”
Our father is about to leave when, at the last moment, he changes his mind. How can he pretend we are absent if he leaves without taking his keys? He is not supposed to know that he will never return. If he leaves without locking the door, the Germans might realize that we are in the apartment. My father walks to the cupboard, leans inside, and whispers, “My keys.” My mother, on all fours, opens the door a crack and hands the keys to my father. He kisses her hand one last time before taking the keys and leaving.
Eventually, the building falls silent. We remain in the cupboard for hours, paralyzed with fear. We don’t know if a German has stayed behind on the landing. In the early hours of the morning, my mother goes out onto the landing when she hears a neighbor walking downstairs. She asks him to check that the Germans have left. After that, we come out of our hiding place, get dressed, and leave the building.
* * *
FOR THE NEXT few weeks, we move around Nice and its suburbs, evading the clutches of death. We stay in furnished apartments and guesthouses because hotels full of Jews are the Gestapo’s favorite hunting grounds. Out on the street, my mother walks along one sidewalk while my sister and I take the other. In the trolleybus, she stands at the back while we stand at the front. We know what to do if she is arrested: which friends we should stay with, whom to write to; we have money, just in case. We often go to the basilica. There is a feeling of peace and safety there. We pray for our father, Arno.
* * *
THE GESTAPO TOOK our father to the Hôtel Excelsior, which had become an annex of the Drancy camp. As soon as there were more than fifty Jews in the hotel, Brunner would send them away. On October 2, our mother bravely went to the train station to see her husband off. With a glance, he told her to move away, because the Germans would arrest anyone who watched the train too intently. They had honeymooned in Nice in February 1929; now, in Nice, fourteen years and eight months later, they were separated for the last time.
It was in Nice that I lost my father; in Nice, too, I lost my mother. It was April 20, 1981. She wanted to visit our old apartment building again. She was suffering with heart problems. My sister went with her and took a photograph of her outside the door of 15 Rue d’Italie. Then they went back to the Negresco Hotel. Soon after, my mother died of a heart attack. That was how she had wanted to die: while living her life, not lying in a hospital bed.
* * *
AFTER THOSE EXHAUSTING weeks spent traveling around Nice, my mother decided we should return to our apartment. She’d had enough of being hunted in other people’s homes. Instead, she showed us what we should do if there was another raid: we, the children, would go into the hiding place, and she would open the door to the Germans. Every night, we put our clothes in the hiding place with the documents we needed for our escape, and then the three of us went to bed together—our mother between me and my sister—where she would stay up, on the alert, reading detective novels almost all night long. I would read them with her until I fell asleep, and that was how I acquired my love for detective stories, which still have the ability to calm me if I am feeling anxious.
We went back to the local girls’ school, where I managed to take classes, until the Gestapo arrested a Jewish girl there, and our mother decided we shouldn’t return. When we walked back to our apartment in the evening, we never knew if we would find our mother waiting for us. The sky could fall in on a Jew at any moment. It was not until February 1944 that we were able to leave Nice.
* * *
WHEN CONVOY 61 arrived in Auschwitz on October 28, 1943, my father, Arno Klarsfeld, punched a Kapo who had hit him. That instant of defiance cost him his life. For punishment, he was sent to work in a coal mine in Fürstengrube. The average survival time there was less than six weeks. My father survived for nine months before dying at the age of thirty-nine. Why, for once in his life, couldn’t he have deferred to authority? I will never know, but I do feel certain that, if he hadn’t retaliated that day when the Kapo struck him, he might well have gotten out alive.