Saint-Sauveur-de-Montagut
August 28, 2001
It was a very special day for Valérie. Seated in front of her at an old café that had borne witness to the joys and sorrows of its clients for decades were two of the girls who had survived the Vénissieux camp: Lotte Levy and Rachel Kaminker. The two women studied Valérie with the kind eyes of people who have suffered much and forgiven deeply in order to continue on with their lives. She smiled at them.
“I’ve learned as much about you two as your paperwork and a few photographs can tell. At times it’s been hard to believe that you’re real, as if all the information about the camp were just history, a history I’ve been digging up from the dust of the past. But here you are—flesh and blood.”
“Yes, dearie, and some of us are a little more fleshy than others,” Lotte, the more rotund of the two, said with a giggle.
“Oh, it’s so delightful to meet you!” Valérie gushed.
“The pleasure is ours, truly. We’ve been told that you’re researching everything that happened the last week of August 1942. At that time we should’ve all been jittery about going back to school, smelling our new schoolbooks, complaining about our uncomfortable new shoes and satchels that were wearing thin. But instead we were packed into buses that took us to hell and stole what we loved most dearly in life.” The muscles in Rachel’s face strained with the effort to control her emotions.
“Sometimes things just happen. Existence itself is suffering and pain, as well as love and life. Who would we be now if we hadn’t gone through all that? We’ll never know. Obviously we’d be very different, but there are important lessons to be learned from the ups and downs of life—things that can’t be learned in history books,” Lotte added with her sweet voice.
Rachel tsked and said, “But we haven’t come here to get our new friend all sad. Valérie, you’ll know probably better than we do what happened. We were young, terrified, and so confused that, to be frank, I can hardly remember any of it. It’s probably for the best, though what is forever emblazoned into my mind—the memory that torments me most—is the way my mother looked the last time I saw her. It was a look of complete desperation and fear. She had always overprotected me, and I think the poor woman didn’t think I could survive without her.” Though she had gotten control of her face, her eyes belied the pain behind her words.
The three women chatted for some time, telling one another everything they knew or could remember.
Eventually, Valérie asked, “Did you always know who you really were, your real names?”
Lotte nodded. “I did. I could remember everything from my life before the camp because I was fifteen when they took me to Vénissieux. And it was only me, not my parents. We were eventually reunited. But I think that afterward, if the family I ended up staying with had tried to convince me that I was someone else, they could’ve done so. It’s always been so painful to go back and remember.”
Lotte looked to Rachel, wondering how she would respond. Rachel thought for a few moments before answering. “No, I didn’t know who I was and still don’t know. I don’t know much about my family of origin except that they were all killed in concentration camps. We’re a generation of lost names and lost lives. Our identities disappeared that stormy, scary night. There under the rain and lightning, we became other people.”
Valérie turned off the recorder and took the hands of the two women. “Your lives will not be lost forever to the impetuous winds of history. You and the other children rescued that night are more than the blue documents on which your parents rescinded their rights in order to save you.”
Lotte and Rachel smiled through their broken hearts. They were now mothers and grandmothers. Deep inside they were also still scared, lost children who escaped from hell one August night as the skies let loose their fury against the accursed earth—the earth where parents were capable of turning away from their children to save them from the tyrannical yoke of Nazi slavery.
“It’s strange how bonds of love can form between strangers, but I feel like I’ve known you for years,” Valérie said.
“Love is much more than a feeling or an emotion. It’s fundamentally a choice, and you have decided to love us—at least, the lost girls of Vénissieux that we were.”
Valérie nodded. Rachel was right. She loved her research and loved the names written on dingy old documents. She did not yet know and love the flesh and blood version of those names sitting in front of her.
“Still,” Rachel went on, “we want to thank you for digging up our history. For so, so long we never dared to talk about what happened, not even with our own children. Forgetting seemed better. But that’s not right. If we lose the memories, we’ll be left with nothing—just orphans of the truth.”
Lotte smiled. To lighten the mood, she suggested, “So are you picking up the tab?”
Valérie laughed. “Of course! It’s my pleasure. Had you two stayed in touch?”
Rachel and Lotte looked at each other and smiled.
“Well,” Rachel said, “for a time some of us were able to, but you know how life goes. We went on about the business of living. Fate joins us together with certain people for certain times. Sometimes we think it’ll be forever, but often it’s just a brief moment, and then we’re separated again like strangers. That’s why we treasure in our hearts all the people who’ve shared their lives with us. We might lose them and realize too late that there was so much more we could have shared with them.”
Valérie stored up Rachel’s words. Then she asked for the check. As the three women said goodbye, Valérie was more committed than ever to finding the rest of the formerly lost, scared children of Vénissieux and giving them back their identities so they never had to hide again.