~

history

the dream comes back. The night after drinks at the Ritz with Laura and Marie-Claire. Again she’s awake but not awake, eyes open but not able to move. Glass breaking, boots coming up the stairs, people shouting, pounding on the door, shouting orders. Outside the room the sound of motors and trucks, the awful barking of dogs. Why is she remembering something that didn’t happen to her? The thing pressing on her chest. Somehow she knows Michael is breathing beside her. The dream won’t stop. Finally she must have called out, because he rolls over beside her, wraps his arm around her, almost asleep, muttering, you okay? No. But his arm around her moves her out from the nightmare. Michael, she says, and he stirs, pulls her towards him. Michael, she doesn’t say, save me from the dream.

~

The next morning, the dream a hum at the back of her mind, she’s heading down to the public library in the Centre Pompidou at Place Beaubourg, ten minutes’ walk from their apartment, to study history. Histoire. The history, the story, of Paris. What is the story of Paris? It may be that for her, Paris is a puzzle, or a test. La rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv. The Holocaust history course taught Sarah so much but it didn’t teach her this story and now she needs to know.

In the story of Paris, the Centre Pompidou, like the Eiffel Tower and Sacré Coeur, like the Eastern European Jews who took refuge here, is another unwelcome recent arrival, a newfangled building opened five years ago to general public displeasure. Covered in gaudy tubes, with a weird exoskeleton of mechanical parts like a squid or octopus with its guts on the outside, the building certainly makes Sarah grumpy. The stepped plastic tube that holds the escalator looks like something that belongs on a hamster cage. Such a show-off of a building, a building that looks forwards, never back, that has no regrets. Maybe it belongs to a brave new world, a world in which la rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv never happened. Or happened and can be ignored.

Sarah’s been meaning to come to the public library here ever since Charles gave her the list of gardens; she wants to look things up, learn about the history of the parks he’s suggested she visit, see some scale drawings, some old engravings that show the various stages of development. She’s more and more interested in public spaces, what can happen in them. What can happen in public spaces – what was it that happened in the Vélodrome d’Hiver? That’s why she’s here, this is the story she needs to learn about today, not the Palais-Royal, not the Bois de Boulogne or the Tuileries.

It’s clear what can’t happen in the public space of this enormous square in front of the Centre Pompidou – it isn’t made for sitting. No benches, nowhere at all to be comfortable, though people Sarah’s age or young families are picnicking on the cobblestones, or perching on the concrete stumps of columns that help control traffic. Laura says the slang word for the stumps is bîtes, which is also slang for penis, something like putz or schmuck. Is the square meant only as a space to move through? It must be perfect for big demonstrations or for shepherding giant tour groups, but what if you’re tired, what if you need to rest?

What does get to happen here? There are the usual little kids feeding the usual pigeons, and the usual pamphleteers, some of them touting shops, some political causes. No doubt the usual pickpockets. Sarah pulls her purse closer, Laura’s slightly tipsy words of wisdom still in her head. Despite the few lonely-looking lindens, that amenable tree – littleleaf, by the look of them – at the western edge of the square, this is not a park, certainly not a garden. The space feels harsh, controlled, despite the fun the picnickers are clearly having, especially on a day like today, all sunshine.

There are buskers here as well, musicians playing jazz, a guy dressed up as a mime, wearing a beret and striped sailor t-shirt, tight trousers. He’s got a mask over the top half of his face, an exaggerated clown face of some sort, that’s vaguely frightening in its distortion. And he’s very clever, walking up to people who are self-absorbed, mimicking them for the brief moment before they notice him, and startle, or shriek, and then mostly laugh, others laughing at their bemusement or fear. There’s something about him Sarah doesn’t like, the way he pushes into other people’s spaces. So clever. She doesn’t want him to come up to her, so she hustles into the building. The inside is the inverse of the square outside, a lidded, rather than a lidless, giant box. It feels slightly less unfriendly than the square, but there’s still no place to sit: you must never be tired at the Centre Pompidou. She lets herself be taken up the short escalator ride to the library and she’s soon absorbed in the quiet, the public privacy of its reading rooms.

It takes a while, but eventually she finds a few references. The librarian helps her find more articles, points out other possibilities. Sarah starts reading painstakingly through the French sources. It’s hard to find much, just as Laura predicted, though Sarah does learn that the round-up at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, which happened on July 16 and 17, 1942, was part of one of the largest operations against Jews by the Vichy government, and it was mostly hushed up. Marie-Claire was wrong: the Gestapo weren’t directly involved. The operation was led by the French police and by officials who were working with the Parti Populaire Français, a French fascist organization, to round up thousands of Jewish civilians, mostly women and children, many of them living in the neighbourhood around the Pletzl. The neighbourhood she now wants to visit, to be able to imagine how this story unwound. Because something real happened there. People, civilians were taken away, held in the Vélodrome and then deported to Auschwitz. The sources note the Vichy government’s ‘enthusiasm.’

To ensure compliance, the government officials recommended that only foreign nationals be included in the round-up. So Marie-Claire was right about that. But Laura was also right: many of the ‘foreign nationals’ had in fact lived in France for decades, but hadn’t been able to become citizens. The decision was made to round up children as well, to avoid ‘unpleasant scenes’ when they were separated from their parents. There were Parisians who applauded as their neighbours were herded into busses. There were concierges who looted empty Jewish apartments. Collaboration. It’s the same in French and English. A word the French don’t like. Would Marie-Claire have been one of the ones applauding as those people were taken away? There were Parisians who did help: church leaders, journalists, even some of the police officers involved in the round-up. Prof. Koenig would want Sarah to determine the numbers, objective evidence, and she finds them: 4,115 children, 2,916 women, 1,129 men. They were held for up to seven days, they were given next to no food, no water, next to no access to the restrooms. She finds no record of an apology, no claim of responsibility by the French government after the war. Rien de rien.

What she does find is a photograph of a family: the father in his dark suit and tie, his face under the fedora obscured in shadow, a yellow star stitched to his jacket pocket; two little girls who remind Sarah of photos of her mother when she was a girl, one in a neat plaid skirt cut fashionably on the bias, her hairband tidy. It’s hard to see in the print, but it looks like the mother is bent over beside the bleacher, probably reaching for some food she packed. Yes, it’s the mother, there’s a patch of light caught on the back of her hair, one hand. The dark cloth of her coat. One strand of light. Their little brother is in his suit jacket with his yellow star stitched to the left breast pocket, bedrolls on the bench beside them, one, two, three, four, five, one each. A wooden horse on the bench as well, just within reach. He looks to be about five or six. It’s probably his favourite toy, the one he decided to take with him.

Who took the picture? And how did it get into the book? There’s nothing in the caption that gives the names of the family. She wishes she knew their names. That would help. It wouldn’t help them but it would help her.

She closes her books, puts them on a trolley to be shelved.

When she comes out of the Centre Pompidou she notices for the first time the graceful, welcoming slope of the plaza. This space built so many years after those thousands of people, women, children, men, were taken away to the Vél’ d’Hiv so they could be forgotten. Such a big space, where only certain things can happen, where no one can rest. Another Paris.