I DISCOVERED LITTLE about Leon’s life in the difficult period before the liberation of Paris by American troops in August 1944. Leon’s teaching career was over, and he worked in some capacity for a Jewish organization. There was nothing about this in the papers my mother kept, but when I asked my aunt Annie (the widow of Leon and Rita’s son Jean-Pierre, born after the war) whether Leon ever mentioned this period, she produced a bundle of documents that Leon gave her before he died. They were in a plastic shopping bag.
The documents were unexpected. The bulk of the papers comprised copies of a roughly printed newsletter, the Bulletin of the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF), the Union of French Jews. The organization was established during the Nazi occupation to provide assistance to Jewish communities, and the Bulletin was published each Friday. Leon had a near-complete collection, from issue 1 (published in January 1942) to issue 119 (May 1944). Never more than four pages long, the Bulletin was printed on cheap paper, with articles on Jewish themes, advertisements (restaurants in the 4th arrondissement, a funeral parlor), and death notices. As the number of deportations rose, the Bulletin provided details of letters that couldn’t be delivered, the addressees having been sent to distant “work camps” in the east.
The Bulletin offered a platform for Nazi regulations, with warnings about the dangers of noncompliance, a snapshot of life in occupied Paris. One early ordinance prohibited Jews from leaving their homes between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. (February 1942). A month later, a new rule banned the employment of Jews. From May 1942, every Jew was required to wear a Star of David on the left side of the chest (to be obtained from the main UGIF office at 19 rue de Téhéran, the elegant nineteenth-century building where Leon worked). In July, Jews were banned from attending theaters or other places of public performance. From October, they were limited to making purchases for an hour each day, prohibited from having a telephone, then required to travel in the last carriage of each train on the metro. The following year, in August 1943, special identity cards were issued.
As the number of deportations increased, the UGIF was subjected to increased restrictions, particularly after its leadership refused to give effect to an order to fire its foreign Jewish employees. In February 1943, the local Gestapo commander Klaus Barbie led a raid on the main office, arresting more than eighty employees and beneficiaries. A month later, on March 17 and 18, former employees of UGIF were arrested (I noticed that issue 61 of the Bulletin, published that week, was missing from Leon’s collection). Later that summer, Alois Brunner ordered the arrest of several UGIF leaders, sent to Drancy, then Auschwitz.
As a Polish Jew, Leon was under particular threat, yet somehow he evaded arrest. My aunt recalled him telling her how, on one occasion in the summer of 1943, Brunner personally descended on the offices at 19 rue de Téhéran to oversee arrests. Leon avoided him by hiding behind a door.
The plastic bag offered other evidence of activity. It held sheets of unused notepaper from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Mouvement National des Prisonniers de Guerre et Déportés, and the Comité d’Unité et de Défense des Juifs de France. Each of these organizations, with which he must have worked, had offices at 19 rue de Téhéran.
Among the papers were two personal statements, each offering a detailed description of the treatment of deportees sent east. One was prepared in Paris in April 1944, recording testimony that at Auschwitz “they hang for no reason, to the sound of music.” The other was prepared shortly after the war ended. “At Birkenau, we worked in filth, at Auschwitz we died in cleanliness and order.” It ended with a statement of evidence: “In short, this young man confirms all that is said on the radio and in the newspapers on the subject of concentration camps.”
Leon kept receipts of the postal packages he sent to camps and ghettos in the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland. In the summer of 1942, he made twenty-four trips to the post office on the boulevard Malesherbes to send packages to Lina Marx, a woman in the Piaski ghetto, near Lublin (the ghetto was liquidated the following summer, and Lina Marx was not among the few to survive).
Two postcards caught my eye, sent from the small town of Sandomierz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, by a Dr. Ernst Walter Ulmann, deported from Vienna in February 1941. In the first, sent in March 1942, Dr. Ulmann explained that he was an elderly, retired Viennese lawyer. “Please help me.” The second card came four months later, in July, personally addressed to Leon at 19 rue de Téhéran. Dr. Ulmann thanked him for a care package of sausage, canned tomatoes, and small quantities of sugar. By the time Leon received the card, courteous Dr. Ulmann was dead: the ghetto from which the card was sent had been emptied that month, its occupants dispatched to the concentration camp at Belzec, farther along the railway line that connected Lemberg to Żółkiew.
At the bottom of the bag, I found a bundle of yellow cloth, small sections cut into squares, with fraying edges. Each had a black Star of David printed onto it, with the word “Juif” at its center. There were forty-three of these stars, each in pristine condition, unused, ready to be distributed and worn.