1965, AT AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU: THE DECISIVE MOMENT

I HAD NO IDEA when I left home that morning that I was going to quit my job at the ORTF, France’s national broadcasting agency. This impulsive act upset my wife and mother but would turn out to be one of the luckiest moments of my life.

Mr. François, the agency’s assistant director, spent at least an hour trying to convince me not to resign. I held firm. When I went back to the house, Beate and Raïssa reproached me for my decision. At that moment, I regretted it, but France was going through a period of full employment, and I felt sure it wouldn’t take me long to find another, equivalent job that I would find less frustrating. I didn’t even register as unemployed. A few months later, I was appointed an executive assistant in a multinational cereal corporation: Continental Grain.

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THE YEAR BEFORE, our son was born: Arno David Emmanuel came into the world on August 27, 1965. A short time before my son’s birth, I became aware of a feeling of loss that was growing inside me, connected to the death of my father. Since I was about to have my first contact with my child, it seemed only right that I should reestablish contact with my father. So I began methodically retracing the final stage of his life: what had happened to him from the moment he left us until his death. Passing through Romania, where I got the transit visa from the Soviet Union, I arrived in Katowice, which was freezing cold, and from there, I went to Auschwitz II–Birkenau.

In the main camp, Auschwitz I, there were lots of visitors, all of them from Poland or other Soviet satellite countries. At Birkenau, the final destination for the Jewish people, I was alone, completely alone. At that moment, I felt certain that my life should have ended there, that the immense suffering of the slaughtered Jewish people had not been assuaged by the passage of time. It seemed that I could hear my people screaming, a scream as great as the crime that had provoked it, a scream that was impossible to interrupt, that would go on forever. I could not block my ears or my heart: if the child who had survived the genocide by a miracle, and by his father’s sacrifice, remained deaf to that scream—which was also a call for him to assume his responsibilities as a Jew—wouldn’t my life be an act of betrayal? I was a Jew who had survived the Holocaust, and I was a Jew who had seen the creation of an independent Jewish state, a Jew belonging to an exceptional generation assuming exceptional responsibilities. It felt like a revelation.

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IN LATE 1966, my mother, my wife, my sister and her husband, our children, Arno and Maldoror, our two cats, Minette and Nikita, and our cocker spaniel, Petia, moved to a different part of the sixteenth arrondissement, Passy, where the metro emerges from underground.

Almost simultaneously, two events propelled Beate and me from a normal existence into a situation of total mobilization, as if each of us had accumulated an abundance of energy that simply had to be discharged into the world. For me, the catalyst was the Six-Day War in June 1967; for Beate, it was her dismissal from the Franco-German Youth Office, where she had worked since 1964.

The very morning the Six-Day War broke out, on Monday, June 5, I made plans to go to Israel with my friend and colleague Josy Fainas; in the office, we bought our Air France tickets to Tel Aviv. The office management did not discourage our leaving, but they were shocked, even though they, too, were Jewish. For the company directors, the firm was its employees’ ultimate homeland.

We took off that afternoon. The plane was diverted to Athens because of an air battle taking place in the region. The next day, an El Al airplane transported volunteers stuck in Athens to Tel Aviv. Thanks to my ORTF card, which I had kept, I was accepted as a press war correspondent. With the Egyptian air force having been destroyed at the beginning of the conflict, Israel had no further need for volunteer soldiers. So I was able to witness, from the Wailing Wall, the first exhilarating hours of the liberation of Jewish Jerusalem, which had been in foreign hands since its conquest by Pompey in 63 B.C. and its destruction in A.D. 70 by Titus. I accompanied the units sent to conquer the Golan Heights, staying with them until they reached Quneitra in Syria.

On June 11, 1967, I went to Bucharest to see my aunt and tell the Romanian Jews—in absolute secrecy, because the Soviet government was extremely unhappy about it—what had happened in Israel. On Monday morning, I was back in the office, once again devoted to making a profit for my multinational company.