WHILE I WAS conducting research in 1965 in the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr, now known as the Mémorial de la Shoah, I came across a Gestapo list that featured our names: “Klarsfeld, Raïssa and her children.” It concerned a request for repatriation to Romania that my mother had made in late 1943 following receipt of a letter from the Romanian embassy informing us that the Germans had agreed to this measure; the repatriation was supposed to take place in February 1944, from Lyon. Later, through another document, I learned that it was Klaus Barbie who had been in charge of this railroad repatriation of seventy-eight people. I never discovered whether the Romanian Jews on that list did indeed go back to their homeland; what I do know is that my mother had given the Germans our names but, prudently, not our address, and that she had later given up on this plan, which she considered too dangerous. On yet another Gestapo document, our address is listed as unbekannt (unknown).
In February 1944, the authorities decided to evacuate women and children from Nice; certain départements were chosen to welcome them. But the rumor among the Jews in Nice was that the Haute-Loire was the least dangerous destination because the German major headquartered at Puy-en-Velay was not interested in the Jews. This information turned out to be accurate: there was no Gestapo branch in the Haute-Loire and Major Julius Schmäling—a schoolteacher in civilian life—did not order a single raid in the département during the twenty months of German occupation. He was a member of the Nazi Party; but men who were officially Nazis could prove themselves humane and indifferent to anti-Semitic ideology, while others who did not belong to the party perpetrated the most heinous crimes.
Our mother decided we should go to Puy. During this period, the fate of the Jews was also a question of luck, and this time, luck was on our side. In Puy, we were advised to move to Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, a village where the Germans hardly ever went.
On March 24, 1944, newly arrived in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, we found lodgings on the second floor of a house belonging to Mrs. Adhémard, who ran a bar on the ground floor, where she also sold the few newspapers that were published back then. Our apartment was quite large. Raïssa had her own room, and my sister and I shared another. The main room, overlooking the courtyard, combined kitchen and dining room. There was no running water or heat in the bedrooms, and the toilets were at the far end of the courtyard. To fetch water, we had to carry jugs to the pump, about a hundred yards farther up the village’s only street.
We were officially refugees, like the other ten or so Jews who lived in this village. At the mayor’s office, they did not ask us for our religion. We simply had to declare to the prefecture that we were not Jews. No one asked us to prove it. We were supposed to be members of the Orthodox Church. Soon after our arrival, our mother enrolled us in the local schools—a girls’ school for Georgette and a boys’ school for me, both of them Catholic.
Saint-Julien is a hilltop village set in a bucolic landscape studded with rocky outcrops. From the church square, we could look down over the village rooftops at a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. How I loved that church, where, at eight years old, I briefly believed in God and prayed ardently for my father’s return.
I dreamed of being an altar boy and wearing the same ceremonial robes as my school friends. I loved the history contained in the Bible. At catechism, I was the only one who listened carefully and remembered everything. One day, the bishop came to inspect the school and question the students. I was the first to respond to all his questions:
“Tell me, who is that gifted child?”
“A little refugee boy, Monseigneur.”
“Is he a choirboy?”
“No, Monseigneur, we’re not allowed to take him because he’s not Catholic!”
“What? Then you must baptize him!”
The next day, three monks from my school turned up at our house amid great pomp. “Monseigneur singled out your son for praise. He would like him to be baptized so that he can serve Mass. And who knows, perhaps he could enter the seminary one day and become a priest, and then a bishop, even a cardinal.” They tried to persuade my mother to convert me. Raïssa was disturbed by this because she desperately wanted us to remain Jewish and regarded conversion as an act of cowardice. “My brothers,” she told them, “we are Orthodox Christians. I have nothing against Serge becoming Catholic, but it is a very important decision and I cannot make it alone, while my husband is a prisoner of the Germans. So we will wait until he returns and then decide.”
They seemed persuaded by this argument.
We were happy in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil. People told us about the local peasants who could sell us food or exchange it for clothes or, best of all, wine, which was rationed but very popular in the village, where almost every other house was a bar. Sometimes we would accompany my mother to the farms, where we would find milk, butter, lard, cured ham, and eggs. From time to time, they would even kill a chicken for us. This was like a wonderland in comparison with the restrictions in Nice, where fresh food was a rarity and incredibly expensive on the black market. It was in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil that I saw the harvests, the yoked cattle, the glories of nature, and the kindness of people, a way of life that has now disappeared, even from that lost corner of France, and that has left me with a powerful feeling of nostalgia.
While we lived there, I was impressed by my mother’s evenhandedness toward the Germans. She was horrified to hear about the destruction of German cities where she had lived or visited. But she drew a clear distinction between the guilty Germans and the others. Everyone in the village spoke badly of the Germans—of all Germans—except for my mother. This very personal viewpoint, so different from that of those around us, certainly had a profound influence on me at an age when, consciously or subconsciously, clear principles about how to live were being made.
* * *
AFTER THE WAR, my sister often went back to Saint-Julien, and I went three times, one of them memorable, as a profound change in Beate’s and my life took place during that stay in “my” village. We had gone there to meet up with our family, and we were staying once again with Mrs. Adhémard, in the same house I had lived in twenty-four years earlier. Beate and I were working together on her third article for Combat about Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, an article that was published on July 21, 1967, and which, by August 30, had led to Beate’s dismissal from her job at the Franco-German Youth Office. The most notable line in the article stated: “Mr. Kiesinger’s first steps were modest and quiet, because this man, who was able to forge an equally good reputation among Brownshirts and among Christian Democrats, was well aware of what was at stake during the first weeks of his rise.”
* * *
ON AUGUST 18, 1944, the Haute-Loire was liberated by the Resistance, and the celebrations began in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil. We left the village on September 24, in order to be in Paris for the start of classes on October 1. The journey seemed to last forever, and when we reached Porte de Saint-Cloud, we found our apartment occupied; it had been looted in 1941 and assigned to other tenants. This marked the beginning of another nomadic period for our family, which lasted about eighteen months, the time it took for the legal system to restore our rights as tenants. When we finally got our apartment back, it had been stripped bare. Even the wallpaper had been ripped off the walls, so that we would not be able to profit from the previous tenants’ investment.
In the meantime, we stayed at a variety of addresses. I remember in particular spending the coldest months of winter in an unheated room in a run-down hotel named Chez Ernest. Georgette would spend hours every night studying in spite of the cold, a blanket covering her back and mittens on her hands. We had no money, as my mother had not yet found work, and her family, who had survived in Bucharest, did not know how to help her: Europe was broken up by military, political, and financial barriers, impossible for a civilian to cross without connections in high places.
I went to several schools without any real idea of what I wanted to do with my life—I was waiting for my father to come home, and life got even worse when I realized he never would. Then my mother started working for the OSE in a free clinic that treated survivors. Sometimes I would go with her. I listened to people’s stories, and I realized what kind of hell had swallowed up my father; it was then that I truly understood that we owed our lives to his courage and his sacrifice. I managed to stay close to him by imagining what must have gone through his mind in those final, weakened moments. There was nothing morbid about this; it was simply that I felt a need to continue a dialogue with him and to remain faithful to him. An orphan, who lost both his parents when he was too young to remember them, once wrote to me that the only means he had found to create a kind of contact with his mother and father was to hold his breath for as long as he could, almost to the point of asphyxia, in order to imagine he was with them while they were being gassed.
In the fall of 1945, my mother enrolled me as a boarder at the Maimonides School in Boulogne. Having been almost Christian in the spring of 1944, I was now a model little Jew. In truth, I had not believed in God since He had refused to give me back my father, but there was nothing on the surface to distinguish me from the other children in berets and kippas who surrounded the school’s headmaster, the renowned Marcus Cohn. In the photograph I have of that year, I am closer to him than any other student. This was because I excelled in Jewish history. I was bored stiff in synagogue, though, and found it difficult to learn Hebrew.
I do not remember much of 1946, until the moment, that fall, when my mother succeeded in obtaining the necessary visas for us to return to Romania. Prudently, she did not give up our apartment, as Romania’s fate still hung in the balance, and there was a chance that it might fall into the hands of the Communists. We took the first Orient Express train from Paris to Bucharest on November 9, 1946, and, after three days of travel, arrived in the promised land. Here, we once again lived a life of ease and plenty. In Romania, there was no restriction on what you could buy if you had the money, and the pastries were delicious. My grandparents owned a large apartment in the very center of Bucharest, with windows overlooking the city’s equivalent of the Champs-Élysées, and my paternal uncles and aunts all lived in mansions. Georgette and I were enrolled in the French high school, and finally my mother was able to relax a bit after so many years of hardship.
It turned out to be a brief respite: the legislative elections were due to take place in January 1947, and the Communist Party was expected to win. Its campaigners went door to door, intimidating people into voting for them. My mother was outraged: “After the Gestapo, I’m not going to put up with the GPU [State Political Directorate]. If the Communists win, we’ll go back to Paris.” My grandparents tried to dissuade her. Besides, how would she leave Romania? My mother and I both had Romanian nationality, and we would need an exit visa, which only the Soviet military could provide.
When the Communist Party won the elections, my mother immediately went to see General Borissov, a Russian military leader in Bucharest, who received us without ceremony. He was an elderly man, dressed in simple clothes. My mother, who was Russian, explained our situation to him: that her daughter was French and that she wished both her children to go to school in France. The general signed our exit visa, to my mother’s immense gratitude.
Thanks to my mother’s bravery and that visa, we were the first people to leave that country after the election, before it sank into tyranny. Some of my relatives went to prison, while others suffered endless bureaucratic hassles and were banished from society; all had their belongings confiscated. My grandparents died in 1950, but my uncles, aunts, and cousins did eventually manage to escape Romania after the payment of a ransom. Only Lida, my mother’s beloved sister, remained in Bucharest. Ten years later, I was given the happy task of getting back in touch with her. That was one of my favorite roles, in fact: being able to bring a family back together despite the Cold War.