VOICES THAT CAN STILL BE HEARD

MY COMMITMENT TO the victims involves elucidating and explaining their fate by reconstructing the circumstances of their arrest and deportation, restoring their faces by finding photographs of them, and making their voices heard.

How is this achieved? By unearthing a deeply poignant letter written before or after they were arrested, revealing a personality or the power of a destiny. A facial expression in a photograph that cannot be forgotten. The name of a child in a list of deported adults; a child that was sent away, alone, without parents, whose memory you must keep in your mind because you cannot let that child be abandoned again. A drawing that expresses the hopes and betrays the fears of the person who drew it.

From my book French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, a powerful subterranean chorus rises from those thousands of too-brief lives, begging us not to let the horror be repeated, begging us not to forget them.

I think of Louise Jacobson, who died at seventeen. I think of the twenty-six letters she wrote from the prison in Fresnes and the six she wrote from the camp in Drancy. Reading the words of this adolescent girl who was so courageous and sensitive, happy and thoughtful, intelligent and curious, who—even in a prison cell—woke each morning determined not to give up, we are faced with all the charm and grace and generosity of youth. By murdering Louise, they murdered youth.

Louise Jacobson is France’s Anne Frank. Her letters were adapted for a play that has been translated and performed in many countries, Germany most of all. In Italy, three hundred thousand copies of her letters were published. I remember poring over those cards that, because she had no paper, Louise covered with tiny handwriting in order to write as many things as possible. I read her words and was captivated by her effervescence. With the publication of those letters, Louise emerged from her forty-five-year sleep. While her contemporaries grow old, she remains forever young, a representative of all those children who were murdered.

I think of Georgy, Georg Halpern, that cheerful boy, the same age as me, whom I might have seen in 1941 at the OSE in La Creuse, at the Château du Masgelier; who was arrested by Barbie in 1944, while I had escaped arrest by Brunner in 1943; and whose story, drawings, and photographs I published.

I think of Youri Riskine, that fifteen-year-old genius, in whose memory I published a book of reminiscences written by one of his classmates at Lycée Louis-le-Grand. His friend Bertrand Poirot-Delpech has continued a dialogue with him throughout his life.

I think of Noël (Nissim) Calef, the author of Drancy 1941, a gripping book that, better than any other, explains what the first Drancy camp was like: the psychology of the detainees, the inhumanity of their gendarme guards, the creation of the camp’s structures. In 1991, fifty years to the day after the roundup of August 20, 1941, I placed a copy of the just-published book at the foot of the Drancy monument.

I think of Benjamin Schatzmann, whose journal—written in the Compiègne camp—I published as part of the foundation’s testimonies collection. Written on scraps of paper, it is an extraordinary text by a man of great intellect and moral stature, a man with a scientific background and a broad cultural knowledge, who described in painstaking detail the various stages of his descent into hell, tossed between hope and despair, while forcing his mind to think intensely, to analyze the reasons for the persecutions that he and his fellow prisoners were suffering: anti-Semitism, the pathology of Europe.

The unique life that created the personality of Benjamin Schatzmann—born in Romania, raised in Turkish Palestine, a student in France, an agronomist in New Zealand, a dentist in a chic part of Paris—ensures that this journal is his and only his. Through the depth of his self-knowledge amid this ordeal, his writing helps us to understand and defend human dignity.

On March 2, 1943, a convoy of 1,000 Jews left the camp in Drancy for Auschwitz. When it reached the extermination camp, 100 men and 19 women were chosen for forced labor; the other 881 deportees were immediately gassed. In 1945, only six survivors remained: four men and two women. One of those survivors was David Olère. He was assigned to the Sonderkommando, the Jewish special commando, in crematorium III, a building that combined a gas chamber and crematory ovens. Olère could have been killed soon afterward, as the vast majority of the Sonderkommando were. Another survivor, Dow Paisikovic, related after the war, “A Jew from Paris, named Olère, was in the Sonderkommando for a long time. He was an artist and, for the whole time I was there, his only task was to paint pictures for the SS.”

David Olère is the only painter in the world to have entered the Birkenau crematoria and come out alive. He was born in 1902 in Warsaw. After stints in Danzig and Berlin, where he painted backdrops for Ernst Lubitsch’s spectacular movie The Loves of Pharaoh, he moved to Paris in 1923. In Auschwitz, Olère was saved because he was an artist who spoke several languages: Polish, Russian, Yiddish, French, English, and German. It was his knowledge of this latter tongue and his gift as an illustrator that made him interesting to the SS. For them, he wrote beautifully handwritten letters, decorated with flowers, to their families. Sometimes, though, he had to “clean out” the gas chambers. Sometimes, too, he had to witness the paroxysms of horror that took place in the crematorium: the undressing in the changing rooms, the gassing, the collection of hair and fillings by barbers and dentists, the incineration of the bodies. And before the crematorium, the sexual services forced on young Jewish girls by the SS, the so-called medical experiments, the victims’ terror, the Nazis’ cruelty. When he told his wife what he had seen, she thought he was going insane. And so he drew Memento: more than fifty pictures that were key to his future work.

He died on August 21, 1985. His widow and his son asked me to dispose of his paintings and drawings in such a way that his work would, as he had wished, contribute to maintaining the memory of what happened to the Jews in Auschwitz. This was no easy task, because Olère’s work is hard to look at. We also brought together all his works in a catalog, The Eyes of a Witness, published in 1989.

The documentary value of Olère’s pictures is extremely high. No photographs were taken of what went on inside the crematoria. Only his eyes and his hand were able to reconstruct the terrible truth. He is often present in his own pictures, a ghostly figure, a horrified witness, observing those inhuman scenes that he could not remove from his virtually photographic memory.

I think of Young Perez, the boxer who fought with a Star of David on his shorts (even on November 11, 1938, in Berlin, the night before Kristallnacht) and who reached his peak of glory when he was crowned flyweight champion of the world in 1931, at the age of twenty. Thirteen years later, he found himself in the anus mundi of Auschwitz. He was forced to fight people for the amusement of the SS and had survived 140 bouts in fifteen months before collapsing on the death march that left the camp in January 1945. He was brought back to life in the excellent movie Victor Young Perez, released in 2013, played by a French Muslim boxer (and Olympic champion), Brahim Asloum.

I think of Chana Morgenstern. I edited the letters that her fiancé Isaac Schönberg exchanged with her while he was held at the Pithiviers camp. He was a painter who was deported and never returned. She was a laborer. Out of love for him, she married his best friend so that she would be able to remember Isaac every day; she became a painter, too, and found some fame. She donated the money she earned from her art to the Hadassah Hospital in Israel.

All these voices, these thousands of voices whispering in my memory … I continue to work so that they will be heard, long into the future, after I am gone.