My first conversation with Flora Hogman took place at her apartment in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. As I stepped out of the elevator onto her floor, I could see a tiny figure standing at the far end of a very long hallway, but even at that distance I could see that she was smiling broadly. This surprised me, for although she had agreed to talk to me about her hidden childhood in wartime France, I had already learned from months of interviewing Sophie how sensitive this ground could be.
Throughout my career, I have been reluctant to delve into other people’s suffering. As a young reporter, I shrank from invading the privacy of strangers with tragic stories to tell. Yet here I was, unpacking my laptop and tape recorder at Flora’s dining room table while she went to the kitchen to get me a glass of seltzer and a plate of her rich homemade chocolate truffles. Flora, a petite and stylishly dressed woman with a charming French accent, had lost everything, even her self, to the Nazis.
Unlike Sophie, who seemed armored against the past despite admitting to me that our interview sessions had left her depressed, Flora from the beginning was agitated about talking to me. I tried to assure her that her story might actually help bring a relatively neglected aspect of the Holocaust to the attention of a larger public, but her tension remained palpable. And her smile failed to mask her wariness.
She seemed especially concerned that I wouldn’t get her story right. Not that I blamed her. The whole enterprise of trying to capture another person’s life, regardless of the circumstances, is full of pitfalls, to say nothing of the chasm between any writer’s ambition and the subject’s felt experience and spotty recall. My endless questions frustrated her. Flora lamented the loss of her memory as if it were another person whose disappearance she mourned. Her story sometimes seemed to come out of her in a chronological jumble, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle emptied onto a table. After a couple of long interviews, I sent her a first draft of what I had written, and heard nothing for a few weeks. Then this:
Hi Richard,
I have started to read the manuscript over and over again. I hesitated to answer as I am in many regards somewhat dismayed by the writing. There are parts of it which are fine, but others are quite troubling and make it difficult for me to feel that you really concentrated on understanding the person you are talking about and about what happened to her and within her rather than in details which are often wrong.
It ended:
Sorry, but I must be honest. It is very important to make come across the power of forgetting and silence, it is not so easy. I hope you feel up to it.
All the best, Flora
The next time we met, I reminded Flora that we were in this together, that without her help I would never get it right, and I asked for patience. Fortunately, since we’d last met, it seemed to me that Flora’s memory had stirred and stretched; her recall was sharper, the story more coherent than before. I had experienced this with Sophie too.
But getting one’s hands on a vanished reality is no easy matter, especially when there’s just one living witness. At times our sessions felt a little like hand-to-hand combat—with memory itself.
The fates of millions of Eastern European Jews were decided by a hand. The one holding the gun aimed at the base of the skull. The one gripping the flashlight that panned the hiding place, looking for the sets of terrified eyes in the dark. The hand that had the power, with the stroke of a fountain pen, to condemn or reprieve. The one that separated death camp arrivals to the left or to the right.
Flora Hillel’s fate was decided by her own six-year-old hand, and what she didn’t do with it. Seventy years later, she would still not understand what play of unrecognized forces in her young mind had prompted her to keep her hands on her desk.
An only child, she was born in 1935 to opera-loving, Czechoslovakian Jewish parents, the granddaughter of the famous Rabbi Dr. Friedrich Hillel, who served in Leipnik, Czechoslovakia, and was himself descended from the great Jewish sage and scholar Hillel the Elder, who led the Jewish people around the time of Jesus Christ. Flora spent her first two years in San Remo, Italy, where her father, a maker of false teeth, had decided to go because of his tuberculosis. After he died from a recurrence of TB in November 1937, her mother, Stefanie—a pianist and writer—kept Flora in San Remo with her until she decided to join friends who lived across the border in Nice, then part of the Unoccupied Zone administered by the Vichy government.
In June 1942, Stefanie moved the two of them thirty miles west to Nice to a small apartment on Avenue Monplaisir, a mile inland from the Mediterranean, where they started their new life together. Flora did not have to share her mother’s love with anyone and grew so accustomed to maternal adoration that she would never forget the few times she provoked disapproval instead. On one such occasion, Flora’s mother chastised her for making fun of an amputee on the street, and she reprimanded Flora when she caught her and some friends singing popular ditties mocking Hitler and Mussolini.
Desperate to make ends meet, Stefanie Hillel took in sewing. She expertly embroidered Flora’s name on the clothes she wore to her new school, which was a short distance away. Each morning her mother tied a ribbon into a bow near the part in Flora’s hair and sent her off to school with her friend Rachel, who lived nearby. There wasn’t much food—not in the markets near them, anyway, or at least not much that her mother could afford, and Flora worried about her mother’s weight, since she gave most of what she had to Flora.
The taunts of the children who made fun of her for being fatherless brought her to tears. She was helpless to defend herself, since she was not exactly sure how he had died, or why, or even, at times, whether he had died at all. Her mother would often tell her that he was “traveling,” which fueled her fantasies that he would return.
When the French police began arresting Jews by the thousands in August 1942, mother and daughter boarded a bus to Vence, a walled medieval village west of Nice known for its natural spring water and—more recently—for a children’s home and boarding school run by a Protestant relief organization, Maison d’Accueil Chrétienne pour Enfants, that was taking Jewish children.
The bus lumbered up Avenue Colonel Meyere toward Vence’s crested cluster of terra-cotta-roofed buildings and stopped in front of a stucco building with shutters. Holding her mother’s hand, Flora watched an assortment of girls around her age wandering around a dirt yard, one of them clutching a soiled doll.
Her mother assured her she wouldn’t be there long.
Flora turned to her mother in panic. It hadn’t really occurred to her that her mother meant to leave her in Vence. She had never been away from her before.
Her mother straightened her hair ribbon and crushed her in a hug, whispered that it would only be for a while, and was gone.
The days without her mother dragged on among strange children, all of them little refugees from some threat beyond their comprehension. Flora was too numb to concentrate on the games or the songs or the prayers. She wet her bed constantly.
My dear little Flory! her mother wrote just before Christmas, I hope to kiss you soon. Take care of yourself and don’t forget to wear your pants! Lots of kisses. . . .
Chère Maman, she wrote back in January 1943, I hug you very hard. I’m sending you this little letter to make you happy. . . . When the letter comes to you I want you to come. . . . I’m eating well and I hope you’re eating well also. . . . I’m ending this little letter. Your little girl, Florine Hillel.
At least there was food—milk, days-old baguettes, a little cheese, a spoonful of preserves.
And then, miraculously, there was her mother. She reappeared toward spring, thinner than ever, to take her home. Flora ran to her, happier than she had ever been in her life. Back in Nice, Flora returned to school and to her best friend Rachel. All was well, or so it seemed to Flora, for many months. Then came September 1943. On the way home from the food market one day, Flora and Stefanie found themselves in the midst of an excited, expanding crowd, and were soon trapped on the sidewalk, pressed against a store window. Frightened, Flora clutched her mother’s hand and tried to see what the fuss was about, but at first she could only hear the sound of a clacking drumbeat getting louder and louder. She peered between the bodies in front of her to catch a glimpse of the German army’s grand entrance into the city. Flora had never seen anything like it. Helmeted soldiers filed past in perfect formation, the rows bristling with rifles. The clacking sound turned out to be the staccato gun-burst sound of thousands of jackboots striking the pavement in unison. The soldiers were followed by rumbling tanks and armored vehicles—metal monsters out of a nightmare—then more dense rows of goose-stepping soldiers. Then open touring cars filled with unsmiling men, followed by more soldiers.
Flora was terrified, clutching her mother’s hand in that forest of silent adults. But what was worse was that she could feel that her mother was terrified too. The parade seemed to go on for hours before the people on the sidewalk began to disperse and they could make their way home.
By the following day, Nice sprouted Nazi flags everywhere, and soldiers on every corner, even near her school.
The victims of history are the last to know what hit them. Only as an adult would Flora learn what had brought the massive Wehrmacht to Nice. Following the Allied invasion of North Africa and then Italy, the Italian army had capitulated and the Germans had arrived. Had her mother known by then what had happened in Paris the past July? That the French police themselves, under German orders, had rounded up thousands of Jews and sent them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver near the Eiffel Tower, then on to the transit camp at Drancy, and on their way to Auschwitz?
Flora walked to school with Rachel that day, as usual, and they took their adjacent seats in the classroom and waited for their teacher to begin. This time, however, she departed from her usual routine.
“Qui est juif?” she asked, quite suddenly. “Levez vos mains.”
Would the Jewish children raise their hands? Flora’s stomach fluttered. Next to her, Rachel raised her arm, but Flora hesitated. Had her mother told her not to mention to anyone that she was Jewish? Flora didn’t really think about being Jewish, anyway. They were not practicing Jews. Even though her father’s father had been a famous rabbi back in Czechoslovakia, Flora and her mother never went to synagogue or kept the Sabbath or said prayers or lit candles. What Flora felt was not Jewish, but scared and numb, yet when the teacher asked for hands, Flora thought that she ought to ask her mother first before doing anything, so she kept her hands folded on the desk.
“Good,” her mother said when later that day Flora reported what happened. But despite her relief her mother was agitated. Word reached them that Rachel and her family were probably now going to be something called “deported.”
Not only did Flora not return to school after that day, but her mother explained that she was going to send Flora to a new school, a Catholic one where she would be safe. She said that it wouldn’t be like the other place. It was just up the hill, right there in Nice.
Flora knew that it would be just like the other place because her mother wouldn’t be there.
She would believe for a long time that it was her mother who drove her to the convent that sat on a terraced hillside overlooking the Mediterranean, on a road that climbed between oleander bushes on either side. Below the convent’s high walls, olive, cypress, and palms trees ran down toward the sea. Then, with a promise to come visit her as soon as possible, she disappeared.
A towering woman in a long robe spoke to Flora from behind an iron grille, welcoming her to “the house of God.” That God had a house was confusing to Flora; that Flora had ended up in it made her want to giggle, except that the woman, obscured by the grille, was frightening her. God must have extremely long legs, she decided, to live both in the convent and in heaven as well. She wondered when she might meet him. She had the idea that she might become his favorite of all the girls there.
And who was this Mother Superior? What was so superior about her?
Afterward she was led up the hill, above the main building, to join the dozen other children congregating in front of a house ringed by rose hedges. It would be Flora’s home now, except that Flora would no longer be Flora. She had been given a new name to go with her strange new home. She must now forget she had even been Flora Hillel. That much had been made quite clear. She was now Marie Hamon, born in Corsica. She wondered if she would be the same girl as Marie Hamon. Marie Hamon, Marie Hamon, Marie Hamon.
The sisters had taken a vow of silence—and, it appeared to Flora, a vow of not bathing as well. But bathe Flora they did, holding her over an old sink to baptize her. It was yet another new terrifying experience. She barely knew what a Jew was, let alone a Catholic whose salvation required being doused with cold water in what looked like a thousand-year-old sink. What were they doing, pouring water over her head, and telling her she was a child of God?
Among the sisters’ jobs was embroidering religious garments and making holy wafers, but mainly, Flora observed, they prayed. They seemed to spend most of their time gliding silently through the halls in their mountainous robes and winglike white cornettes on their heads, or pacing the flat roof of the convent in postures of prayer, hands pressed against their breasts, eyes glued to the sky. Tiny Flora stood in the garden and watched as they paraded back and forth like huge birds of prey. In her loneliness, Flora prayed only that they would look at her, even just once, and not at the sky. Look at me, she wished. Look at me. Look at me.
The one game the children had was: racing to see who would be the first to finish their Ave Marias and Our Fathers and Mothers Who Art in Heaven on their rosaries. To see which of them could produce the fastest stream of prayer provided their greatest amusement.
NotrePèrequiestauxcieuxquevotreNomsoitSanctifiéquevotrerègneviennequevotrevolontésoitfaitesurlaterrecommeauciel. . . . JevoussalueMariepleinedegrâceLeSeigneurestavecvousvousêtesbénieentretouteslesfemmesetJésuslefruitdevosentraillesestbéni.
Worse than the discipline was the time when she was told the Jews had killed Jesus Christ. Who were these women who claimed to be married to God, yet never had a kind word for their charges, and called them killers? First they had taught her to identify with the baby Jesus, who had so many problems like her, then they said the Jews killed him? She and her mother had already been blamed, and had to be separated, because they were Jewish, and now this? At seven, Flora was not too young to feel the terrible injustice, but not old enough to understand it or defend herself against it.
There were no classes, as in her previous school. Much of the time was spent learning all the prayers, and the sign of the cross. At the large house just across the street, Nazis soldiers came and went, yet the nuns, who were known to supplement the rationing with extra food for Christian children in the area, seemed on good terms with them. To quiet the Jewish children’s anxiety, the nuns reassured them that God was listening. They told Flora that her mother, who had not even written her a letter, would come back, that God granted wishes in mysterious ways. Flora couldn’t understand his mysteriousness; after all, this was his house, yet she never saw him. There was no one to explain anything to her. Still, she prayed to see her mother, who was so nearby and yet seemed to have forgotten her completely, even if one of the sisters had helped her write her a letter.
Amid the general misery and loneliness of Flora’s months there, no event was more vivid than what happened one night in early 1944, when the tranquility of the monastery was broken by the sudden scurrying around of the sisters. They burst into the cottage where the children were sleeping and began packing up their bags by candlelight.
“Levez-vous! Levez-vous!” they whispered urgently. “Les gens viennent vous chercher! Ramassez vos affaires! Levez-vous!”
During the ensuing scramble, one of the sisters began folding Flora’s clothes to put them into her suitcase. “Mon Dieu!” she cried, seeing that Flora’s mother had embroidered her Jewish name on every piece, while for months she’d been answering to Marie Hamon. Wasting no time, the nun took a small pair of sewing scissors and ripped out every dangerous stitch. The nun was destroying, thread by thread, the visual confirmation of Stefanie’s presence in Flora’s life, the only proof that she ever had a mother.
As Flora screamed for her to stop, the nun clapped her hand over Flora’s mouth. “Tais-toi, Marie!” the nun said. “C’est dangereux!”
The nun kept severing the threads that spelled out FLORA and HILLEL and yanking them out of the inside of her collars and the waistbands of her skirts. When she was through, she gathered up the nest of black threads in her lap and it all disappeared inside her habit.
Sobbing, Flora was sure now that her mother would never be able to find her.
In a hushed storm of activity, under cover of darkness, and barely saying farewell to the nuns who had hidden them for months and at great risk, the children and their bags were quietly loaded onto a truck that sat with its motor humming in the monastery’s driveway. Most of the children held hands, shaking, as the truck, its driver unseen beyond the canvas top, rolled out onto L’Avenue Sainte Colette and into the night. None of them had any idea that they had just escaped right under the eyes of the increasingly suspicious Gestapo stationed right across the street.
The children were dropped off at different locations one by one, the driver walking around to the back of the truck to call out a name and offering a hand to help the child down and into his or her new home. For Flora, the destination was the rural home in Châteauneuf of two middle-age ladies, an Englishwoman and a Russian dancer who liked to prance and twirl about the living room, showing off her long legs. Not only were they much nicer than the nuns, although equally eccentric in their own way, but Flora, who loved to dance, would join the Russian in her improvised pirouettes and arabesques. It had been a long time since she had felt free to express herself. To dance was to feel free momentarily from her confusion and grief and thoughts of her absent mother. After the nuns, the women’s warmth, and their delight in the scrawny Flora’s lack of inhibition, made it easy for Flora to fall in love with them and bury, for the moment, her memories of the convent and the life that had come before.
She could leave the house only to be in the garden, where she fed the women’s chickens. One day, a boy appeared in the garden, thirteen or fourteen years old, almost as thin as she was, dressed in dirty shorts and sandals. For a brief time they became friends. She taught him how to feed the chickens, tossing handfuls of corn and cut-up apples. He taught her how to knit, no doubt a skill he had picked up in hiding. Where he came from she never knew.
The friendship distracted her from her worries, but like everything else it was taken from her. After only a few weeks, the two women told Flora they could no longer afford to keep her. She felt betrayed. A man appeared that night and drove her west to the next village, Magagnosc, where a wife and her husband welcomed her with the stilted congeniality she was getting used to. There her life became quite difficult again. Although she had her own room, the wife paid little attention to her while the irritable husband, an engineer, punished the high-spirited Flora for the slightest infraction of their house rules or her failure to complete her chores. Flora looked on sadly when he offered his wife bread before her. They had no children, and therefore no toys. Maybe that’s why he decided to teach her the names of all 206 bones of the human skeleton. She didn’t get very far before they both gave up in frustration.
He told her repeatedly that he was an atheist and that those who believed in God were fools, weaklings, or worse.
It was cruel, since Flora needed all the help she could get.
“You do know what happens to you after you die, don’t you?” he told her.
“I’m going to heaven,” said Flora, thinking of the nuns.
“This is what I’m talking about! There is no heaven. No God, no heaven, no angels. If there was a God, you wouldn’t have to stay with us because the Germans wouldn’t be taking all the Jews away and you’d be with your mother. I will tell you what happens after you die,” the husband said. “They put your body in the ground, but that’s not the worst of it.” He waited in vain for her Flora to ask him what the worst of it was. “You’ll be eaten by worms,” he said finally. “That’s what happens.”
She had been left by her mother, abandoned by the sisters, betrayed by the two ladies, and now taunted by the engineer. She spent most of her time talking to the couple’s goats and hugging them. What she felt was a faraway, distant sorrow.
Fortunately before long the atheist announced that he and his wife wouldn’t be able to take care of her any longer. Unlike the other separations in her life, this one barely touched her. Her life with her mother on Avenue Monplaisir had receded so far behind a scrim of rosary games, nearsighted nuns, and free-form dancing around a dining room table that when the man packed up her things and put Flora and her suitcase on the back of his bicycle one morning, it seemed almost—almost—like the normal course of things.
He pedaled her several kilometers to the town of Grasse, known as the Perfume Capital of the World. From a distance, Grasse reminded her of Vence. It was a jumble of medieval stucco buildings with painted shutters, built on a hill. He walked Flora, still on his bicycle, into the heart of the old village, past charcuteries and patisseries with little food in their windows. At La Place de la Poissonerie, a square surrounded by tall, five- and six-story buildings painted yellow ocher and rust, they stopped. There the atheist introduced himself and Flora to a group of people who had gathered to find her a new home.
She sat on a bench, feeling spikes of desperation pushing up through her numbness. The atheist sat around a café table with the strangers, who periodically glanced over at her. She could hear one couple, easily the oldest of them, debating in an unfamiliar language. The tall man with a long face and receding hairline was gesturing with a chopping motion of his right hand at a woman, somewhat younger, who wore a strand of wooden beads and a sort of long, flowing turquoise dress that wrapped around her. Finally, it was this couple, old enough to be her grandparents, who told her that she was coming with them.
“I’m Andrée Karpeles,” the woman in the long dress said in French, “and this is my husband, Adalrik Hogman.” The long-faced man stood a bit behind her, saying nothing. “Our house is out in the country and we’ll have to walk there, but I’ll carry your suitcase for you.”
The man was holding out his hand to her. In it was a single white sugar cube.
“My husband is Swedish and I’m afraid he doesn’t speak French that well,” the woman said.
Flora took the cube and licked it a few times, finally resting it on her tongue and letting it dissolve in slow, quiet ecstasy.
After a brief word with the engineer, the three of them set off on foot through the narrow streets of Grasse and into the surrounding countryside. With Andrée carrying her suitcase and Adalrik marching silently next to them, they traipsed through woods and past springtime fields of sweet-smelling white jasmine flowers. It was the perfect setting for a girl named Flora, but she didn’t notice or care. Flora was thinking, Who are these old people? and wondering what was to become of her now.
After what seemed like several hours on foot, they came to the end of a dirt road in the hills and Flora saw a huge, three-story stone house with a terra-cotta tile roof hidden behind a row of Italian cypress trees. The property was dotted with cacti, some growing out of enormous urns. Low hedge-bordered paths led to a rectangular pond into which a fountain shot a high-arcing jet of water. While Andrée showed Flora around the property, a white mutt with brown markings, the couple’s pet, pranced behind them.
She was given her own room upstairs. It seemed like paradise, but the very next morning, as Flora was exploring the downstairs rooms, there were several loud raps on the front door. Andrée told Flora to run upstairs and hide in her room, but instead she stopped and sat at the top of the stairs, from which she could just see the bottom of the front door, which Andrée opened to a pair of glossy black boots.
“Je m’excuse de vous déranger, Madame Hogman,” a man’s voice said, “mais j’ai été informé que vous hébergez une jeune fille. Une jeune fille juive.”
Flora froze at the sound of a gendarme who already seemed to know of her presence there. Hours of walking over hill and dale to what seemed like the end of the world, and her existence had been discovered the first day?
Flora listened as Andrée explained that, of course, there was no Jewish girl living with them, she would never allow such a thing. After a brief pause, Flora heard the policeman say, “Quand même, je vous conseille d’être prudente, si vous me permettez.” All the same, be careful, he said.
Only a few days later, a Kübelwagen pulled up to the house and a German soldier jumped out and knocked on the side door. This time Mr. Hogman accompanied his wife to answer the door.
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” the soldier asked.
“Français,” Andrée replied.
In broken French, the soldier insisted on coming inside to search for metal objects for the Third Reich to turn into much needed ammunition in a war they were now losing.
On hearing this, Adalrik stepped outside and escorted him to the front door to point at a document taped to it. By this point, Flora had run to the kitchen in the back of the house and hidden herself in the pantry, closing the door behind her.
“Comme vous voyez clairement, monsieur,” she faintly heard Andrée explain to the solider.
After the German had driven off, Andrée and Adalrik showed Flora the official stamped document taped to the inside of the front door’s window.
“This says that our house is protected by the Swedish Consulate,” she explained to Flora, “and no one can come in unless we want them to. As long as you stay in the house, you’re safe.”
The next and most stable phase of Flora’s life began a few months later, when the war ended and the Hogmans eventually adopted her, after which she became Flora Hogman and grew to adulthood. Andrée was over sixty and an accomplished painter by the time Flora arrived, and was unlike any adult she had ever met before. As a close friend and devotee of Rabindranath Tagore, the prolific Indian Buddhist poet, musician, and the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Andrée had become a yoga aficionada who occasionally dressed in saris. She knew a lot of people, such as the sister of the Nobel Prize–winning French writer and mystic Romain Rolland, and she had met the famous French writer Colette. After a year and a half of austere nuns and capricious hosts, Flora felt in some ways an immediate affinity for this woman, who treated her like a child to be loved, and took time to tutor Flora, who had already lost two years of schooling, in arithmetic, reading, and, of course, drawing.
Andrée had a fine sense of life’s ironies—with which Flora was already too well acquainted—and the two of them laughed a lot together like schoolgirls. Flora found in Andrée a soul mate who encouraged her love of dancing.
“Let’s see you dance some more,” Andrée would say.
“Again?”
“Rabindranath, you know, was a big proponent of Manipuri dance. He almost single-handedly revived it back in the 1920s.” Flora was fascinated, though she had no idea what her foster mother was talking about.
Adalrik, who had retired from the liquor business, was a different story. He didn’t speak French and Flora didn’t speak English, but he seemed remote in a way not entirely explained by their lack of a common language. When she brought him his tea, he would simply say “tack” or “tack så mycket.”
“You must be grateful to him,” Andrée told her. “He took you in because I wanted to.”
That was pure Andrée, the streak of childish insensitivity. She was a woman with her own ideas about things, some of which, to say the least, rubbed Flora the wrong way. With a logic that would forever escape Flora, Andrée, a Jew-turned-Buddhist, made her convert to Protestantism, even though all her classmates were Catholics. In Catholic France, being a Protestant was only somewhat better than being a Jew. Flora endured months of Sunday school, learning the Protestant catechism. It made so little sense to her, this latest visit to the smorgasbord of the world’s religions, that at the moment of her confirmation Flora decided to become an atheist.
While Flora could secretly resist Andrée’s religious control, she was helpless to defend herself against Andrée’s fashion dictates. She cut Flora’s hair like an Indian girl she had known in Tagore’s family and sometimes made her wear saris at home. Andrée disdained modern culture and denied Flora access to popular music and books, though there were plenty of Bach and Brahms recordings, and Flora had the run of Andrée’s library of leather-bound volumes by Tolstoy, Hugo, Balzac, Rousseau, Baudelaire, and editions of Tagore’s poetry, short stories, and novels, some of which Andrée herself had illustrated.
After the war, for a while there was no word of Flora’s real mother; rather, the French children’s welfare agency L’Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, which itself had saved thousands of Jewish children during the German occupation, put Flora in contact with two living relatives she didn’t know. There was an eccentric aunt on her father’s side who lived in Geneva and who, Andrée would tell Flora later, had been intent on kidnapping her. The other relative was her mother’s half-brother, who lived in Haifa, Israel, to whom Andrée wrote in 1945:
In the beginning she had to hide and that made her nervous and full of fear, but since the liberation she is a very gay, well-balanced little girl, always in good temper though deep enough to understand what a loss it is to have had her mother snatched away from her.
I can’t help being very interested in her . . . as if I had known her. I have been looking after her little girl as if she was my own with the hope of a happy meeting one day between mother and child. That hope must be given up.
Flora’s half-uncle was not equipped to deal with Flora. Having spent the war years in an English internment camp in Mauritius, having lost most of his family, and now starting a new life in Palestine, he gave the Hogmans permission to officially adopt Flora as their daughter.
Andrée enrolled Flora in the nearest school, which was a three-mile bicycle ride each way, a long climb in the morning and downhill in the afternoon. She had plenty of time, and was now old enough to begin reckoning with the reality of her life. Her mother’s survival during the war remained a possibility in the absence of any news of her, but with the war over, it seemed that nothing but death could explain her failure to reappear. Yet Flora was still shocked to learn the truth shortly after the end of the war, when a handsome Czech military officer named Ali showed up at the house, saying he was an old friend of Flora’s mother.
He embraced Flora, who had no recollection of him, and sat in a chair in the living room, twisting his military cap while Flora squeezed in between Adalrik and Andrée on the settee.
“Stefanie—your mother,” he began, and the rest of it Flora heard only in snatches as she stared at him, trying to take in what he was saying as she felt Andrée’s arm tighten around her shoulder. “I know that she was deported to Drancy . . . ,” he said. “I’m sorry to say . . . transported to Auschwitz on October 28, 1943 . . . it can only be assumed . . . no word . . . Flora, I am so sorry . . . but I know she would’ve wanted me to give the two of you”—he was looking at her foster parents now—“her blessings to officially adopt Flora. . . .”
She couldn’t help fantasizing that the military man had at one time been more than her mother’s friend, and that, had she survived, perhaps she would have married him. For days a vision of the three of them walking hand in hand down Nice’s Promenade des Anglais kept playing in her head. Her never-to-be stepfather wrote a few letters to Flora after his visit, but they stopped and she never heard from him again.
Andrée kept telling Flora how brave her mother was and suggested they all go to Nice and see the apartment where Flora had last lived with her mother. Although others no doubt lived in the two rooms on Avenue Monplaisir, Andrée thought that perhaps Flora could reconnect there with her mother’s spirit, resurrect more memories of her, find some acceptance of her death.
So the Hogmans set off with her in the car one morning. To their surprise, they found the apartment door in Nice unlocked and the living room bare of furniture. Only a few useless objects were scattered about the desolate apartment. Flora, wandering the dimly remembered rooms in a daze, found her mother’s beautiful box of spools of thread. And there was a shoe box lying on the floor, which, when Flora removed the lid, revealed a jumble of black-and-white photographs, many of her, her mother, and her father. The ones with her father had been taken in San Remo or before, in Czechoslovakia; the ones with only her and her mother were from their time in Nice. There were other people in the photos she didn’t recognize, men and women posing with her parents.
“How come you’re not crying?” Andrée asked her, looking on.
When Flora got up and went to the kitchen, it had been stripped of everything but the sink. The stove and the squat little refrigerator were gone. When Flora looked in the sink, she stopped short, her heart pounding.
In it were two of her mother’s dirty dishes that, after three years, were still waiting to be washed.
After the war, Flora tried her best to approximate a normal adolescence. Adalrik’s reserve and Andrée’s flamboyance made for an odd combination of influences, but they were devoted to each other. At times, their mutual adoration made Flora feel even more like an outsider. The bloom on Flora’s relationship with Andrée began to fade; what had been exotic to a nine-year-old—the saris, the Indian hairstyles, her interminable yoga—was annoying to the teenage Flora. In an attempt to get closer to her adoptive father, Flora asked him to teach her Swedish.
Over time, the Hogmans grew elderly and developed health and financial problems, which necessitated a move to a smaller house. At least Adalrik had been an effective enough teacher of Swedish that he could arrange for her to work for a travel agency in Sweden. It was her first taste of real independence, as opposed to abandonment, but in 1956, when Flora had been living with them for almost a dozen years, Andrée suddenly died of a heart attack. Flora had lost her second mother. After she returned to Grasse from Sweden, numb and guilt-ridden, she soon got rid of Andrée’s yoga and Buddhism books. But the rest of the library, including several of Tagore’s books, inscribed by him to Andrée, she kept forever.
She had to turn her attention to Adalrik, who was in decline. She hired someone to look after him during the day while she took a job as a file clerk for the Swedish airline SAS in its Nice office, to which she commuted fifteen miles every day by motorbike. In the mornings and evenings, though, Flora spent increasing amounts of time caring for her adoptive father, giving him his medicines and injections and conversing in Swedish.
In 1959, Adalrik died. Flora was now twenty-three, a beautiful petite young woman with a warm smile and her dark hair grown out and parted in the middle. In a photo from that year, she leans against a rock in the sun, surrounded by cypresses and cacti, wearing white espadrilles and a pretty sundress. She could be any attractive young French woman from a good home with her life ahead of her. But she was now without family, and with the war years a distant—indeed, mostly repressed—memory, she had no idea what to do. She had been Flora Hillel, granddaughter of a famous Czech rabbi, then Marie Hamon, then Flora Hamon, and finally Flora Hogman. Her faith, what there had ever been of it, had been fractured beyond any denominational recognition. She had been a Czech Jew born in Italy, a Roman Catholic living in a Riviera convent, a reluctant Buddhist, a French Protestant, and finally an atheist—and all by the age of fifteen. She had put together a life out of spare parts and the kindness of fearless strangers, and had emerged from her fragmented childhood with a fighting spirit. She just had no idea what to fight for. She was as trapped in her confusion as she had once been in a convent. Where her life was supposed to be, there was only numbness.
Incredibly, just as she had been rescued so many times before, someone appeared and, with the help of a coincidence too pat even for pulp fiction, pointed the way to the future. Flora had an aunt she didn’t know, the sister of her aunt in Geneva, who had managed to escape from Austria to New York City in 1940. The aunt’s son, her first cousin, now in his twenties, decided he wanted to see Vienna. Before he left on his trip, his mother gave him one last instruction: “Go find Flora Hogman in southern France.” That was the sum of anyone’s knowledge of her whereabouts; not even her sister in Geneva knew any more than that.
On his way to Austria, he stopped in Paris, where he happened to walk by a store for tourists called Maison de Nice. He knew that Flora had once lived in the Côte d’Azur, so, for the fun of it, he stopped in to ask the young salesgirl there—what did he have to lose?—if she happened to know a Flora Hogman in southern France. But what were the odds that, just because the store had “Nice” in its name, someone there would ever have heard of his cousin?
The salesgirl, whose name was Thérèse, smiled at him. “Bien sûr, elle est une de mes meilleures amies.”
One of her best friends? “C’est incroyable!” the young man said, exhausting in one phrase a good portion of the French he had mastered, then using up a good portion of the rest by saying, “C’est possible?”
Therese knew Flora from the tourist industry on the Riviera, where she had previously worked, and they had stayed in touch. She gave him her address in Nice.
And that was how Flora Hogman received a visit out of the blue from some cousin speaking a mélange of bad French and unfamiliar English. Between one thing and another, one of the lucky survivors of history’s most efficient genocide was soon walking down Fifth Avenue in a city that, thanks to that genocide, was now home to more than 50 percent as many Jews as remained in all of Europe.
By 1959, New York City was home to more than its fair share of young adults who had survived the Holocaust in hiding as children, including a woman whose path Flora was destined to cross more than three decades later at the most important event in the lives of hidden child survivors everywhere.