Germaine Poliakov stood in the doorway of her flat, vibrant in her periwinkle blue, V-necked jersey dress. She was extraordinary, mighty, smashing — what the French called formidable. Leaning lightly on her cane, she offered her cheek. Now, the other.
In her living room, sunlight streamed through two nearly floor-to-ceiling windows and flooded the room. A narrow balcony held window boxes with pink geranium and trailing ivy. More geranium bloomed in pots. It was mid-October, but in this sun-filled room, the air was summer warm. Germaine’s furniture was well-worn, but still elegant: two matching French provincial chairs covered with apricot velvet, and a couch upholstered in muted silk stripes of gray, white, and tangerine. I wondered if, like Germaine, the chairs had survived the war. Could they have been remnants of an earlier life, a life she’d been meant to live?
Potted plants sat on bookcases, window sills, and side tables — peace lilies, ivy, a purple orchid. I, too, grew peace lilies, ivy, and orchids. I presented my gift, a green box tied with a lavender ribbon, macarons from Ladurée, a well-known Parisian pastry shop and tea room. Germaine nodded approvingly. French macarons were not macaroons, those heavy, dense, stringy coconut confections I’d grown up with, served particularly at Passover. Macarons had names like orange blossom, cherry blossom, strawberry, poppy, and they were ambrosia — especially when they came from Ladurée.
Valerie and I took our seats at a round dining table spread with photographs and albums. Germaine hooked her cane over the edge of the table before walking stiffly to the kitchen, a tiny room with an open doorway. I watched as she pulled the lavender ribbon and untied the bow. Now, this ninety-two year-old woman carried a tray with a white porcelain teapot and a white bowl filled with an assortment of macarons and placed it on the table. She returned to the kitchen for an apple tart.“She baked this,” Valerie said.
Germaine’s flat was a fifth-floor walk-up, and she climbed the stairs twice each day, going out for a walk or to pick up a few things at a grocery. Mostly, the market delivered. “I manage a few small packages,” Germaine said.
I pondered my own age. As I grew older, I looked for elder women as beacons. My friend Marie, skiing Vail’s back bowls in her late seventies and reading voraciously; my neighbor Jean, in her eighties and wielding a garden spade, also a reader; and now Germaine Poliakov, a French woman who climbed stairs, taught music, and read, too. She held a strainer over a porcelain cup and poured. Valerie and I made room among the photographs for our saucers and cups.
“So, do you have a publisher?” Germaine asked.
The dreaded question, and so early. I shot Valerie a plaintive look. She spoke to Germaine in rapid French, after which Germaine nodded and narrowed her eyes. I read her thoughts, or thought I had. Who is this woman, this American who has come to take up my time? She is nothing like the journalists who came to interview Léon.
“And you want my story?” she said. “Not Léon’s?”
“Yes, your story. Perhaps you can start with your family.”
Germaine had six sisters and one brother. During the war, one sister lived in London with her husband. Four sisters, all younger, stayed in Paris with their mother and their father. Her sister, Josette, like Germaine, was in the south of France. Her brother was in the French Air Force. Nissim Rousso, Germaine’s father, a man who spoke ten languages, had held a high government position in Turkey before emigrating to Paris when Germaine was a toddler. “He was a minister in the Turkish government,” Valerie explained.
I supposed a minister was akin to being a cabinet official in the States.
“My mother was a Cattaui. Do you know the Cattauis?” Germaine said.
I did not. Valerie filled me in. The Cattaui family were prominent and prosperous Jewish bankers who had lived in both Austria and Egypt. In Egypt, they became government administrators, scholars, scientists, inventors, and dealers in sugar. The family amassed a vast fortune and Irma, Germaine’s mother, a daughter of Fortunée Cattaui, grew up in a seventeen-room palace. The family kept a small house on the property for a rabbi. Germaine nodded as Valerie spoke. Although she did not speak English, I felt as if she both understood and approved Valerie’s translation. I eased my way into questions about Germaine’s wartime work, asking first if she remembered the moment France declared war on Germany. She would have been twenty-one. “I was with my parents at Le Touquet. We were on the beach when word came over the loudspeaker. My father said to us, ‘Nothing will stop the Germans.’”
Immediately, the family aborted their holiday and returned to Paris. Nissim Rousso rented a flat in Brive, a town in the southwest and sent his family to safety. By June 12, 1940, when the German army crossed the Seine, all of Germaine’s family had fled Paris. Nissim, too, had escaped, leaving before the mass exodus with abandoned cars, people fleeing on foot, pulling carts, men and women carrying babies, dragging toddlers, all sharing the clogged roads with France’s defeated, demoralized and retreating army. Food and water were scarce. Cars ran out of petrol. Husbands fought with wives, wives with husbands. Babies cried. Children trudged onward. Inns filled beyond capacity. People slept in haylofts and in ditches. They’d waited too long. Not Nissim Rousso.
None of Germaine’s family witnessed the first massive flags with swastikas flying from public buildings. None watched as street signs came down, then went up with German names in large text and French names in small text below. None leaned out of windows as German tanks surged on streets or German planes flew overhead. But the expected bombs did not fall. Instead of destroying Paris, Hitler chose to make the city a jewel in his crown. When the Fuhrer’s intentions became clear, Germaine’s parents and four of her sisters returned to their plush flat near the Arc de Triomphe. Germaine and her sister, Josette, remained in the south, although not together.
Speaking of the flat near the Arc de Triomphe, Valerie said, “This was a very good address.”
In Paris, the Tricolore was banned and clocks were turned to Berlin time. A curfew was in effect. The Germans collected all guns. Nissim Rousso did not anticipate what was coming, a Jewish census, a yellow cloth six-pointed Star of David pinned to every Jew’s outer garment, even those of children. On the day he was scheduled to register for the Jewish census, Nissim Rousso had a premonition.
Germaine stood. She held a strainer and refilled our tea cups. “My father said to himself, ‘This is not such a good idea.’ He turned around. Next to him was a Spanish Church. He went inside and talked to a priest. When he came out, he had false Baptism certificates for all of us. This, I refused,” Germaine said.
I wasn’t sure how word traveled between Paris and Brive, but this was early in the war and German control had not yet tightened. Perhaps by telephone, letter, or telegraph.
“I registered as a Jew,” Germaine said.
“Did you wear the yellow star?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No one in the south wore the Star. It was not enforced.”
“Your identity card?”
“It said, Juif. Not Juive. I was upset.” The masculine form, not the feminine.
One day, while walking in Brive, Germaine met Madame Rachel Gordin, her old Scout leader, on the sidewalk. Madame Gordin lived in Beaulieu sur Dordogne, a village twenty-five miles south, where she directed la colonie, a house that protected Jewish refugee children. Jewish children were pouring out of Germany, Austria, and Poland, if they could. La colonie belonged to the Jewish Scouts, the same organization with which Sigismond and Berthe Hirsch were working, all saving Jewish refugee children.
Germaine had not seen her old Scout leader for years. “Come,” Madame Gordin said. “Please, I need you to help me manage these girls.”
At the table, Germaine popped a bright pink raspberry macaron into her mouth and chewed, mouth open. She swallowed. “I had nothing better to do, so I went.”
She turned the page of an album, ran her palm along the open binding, and showed me photos of girls with braids, girls with wild curly hair, all smiling into the camera’s lens. These were photos taken at la colonie. I used to wear my hair like so many of these girls, parted in the middle and fastened with barrettes. I wore the same dark skirts and white blouses with Peter Pan collars. I belonged to that time, but not to that place. In our living room, war news spilled from the radio. Mama would touch my hair and call me her shayna maidel, pretty girl. I understood my blonde hair and blue-green eyes made me special, although I wasn’t sure why. Mama said I was safe in America, but I didn’t always feel safe. At night I would lie awake in my narrow bed and watch shapes move across the surface of my wall. If I closed my eyes, those shapes glided toward me. In theaters, war movies dragged their images across the screen. I was too young to see those films, but I saw posters. In the yard across the street, I watched older boys play war, shooting and falling down dead.
Germaine took a nom de guerre — literally, a name for the war. All the girls knew her as Maki. Only Madame Gordin knew her real name. Her title was chieftain, and she worked with three other chieftains, sharing a room with Sultan, her best friend, also a nom de guerre. Each earned a small salary plus room and board.
“We saved them all,” Germaine said, speaking of the girls in la colonie, except one. She was homesick and went to her parents in Paris.” A long pause. “Déportée.”
Deportation meant imprisonment in a French internment camp, probably Drancy on the outskirts of Paris, then a journey east in a cattle car and almost certain death. As Germaine lowered her gaze, I placed my tea cup noiselessly into the ring of my saucer offering a few seconds of silence for that dead child.
Germaine spoke of combing lice from the girls’ hair twice each day and mending their clothes. I had expected to hear tales of harrowing escapes, of near captures, of slick moves, of life so heightened the hairs on the back of her neck bristled, not a tale of combing lice. Germaine cooked. She gave lessons. She was a musician, voice her instrument. Before the war, she was studying at the Music Academy of Paris and singing in a trio with two of her sisters, Germaine the bass. They won a contest, their prize a spot to sing on the radio, but they could not collect. By then, the Nazis had taken over. No Jews on the radio. In Beaulieu sur Dordogne, Germaine formed a choir and taught the girls Hebrew melodies she’d learned years before when she was a Scout and Madame Gordin was her leader. Abruptly, Germaine lifted her chin, “There is nothing more to tell you. My life was ordinary. Nothing special.”
Was she ending our interview? I lifted my hand and touched the border of a photograph. “You?”
“Oui.”
In the photo, Germaine is a tall, full figured woman with broad shoulders and dark wavy hair that frames her face. She stands in front of a car with the three other chieftains. They link arms. Germaine is not beautiful, but she has a certain allure. She gazes sideways at the camera.
Now, seeing herself young, Germaine’s own gaze lingered. I pointed to a photo of two women and three men sitting on a bench inside a walled courtyard. The men wore berets and tallit, prayer shawls, and held prayer books. “They are studying Torah with Leo Cohn,” Germaine said.
I looked up. “That was unusual, men and women studying Torah side by side.”
“Not for him,” Germaine said.
“Did you study?”
“I am secular.”
Germaine spoke of Leo Cohn — Zionist, Jewish scholar, educator, and accomplished musician. He played piano and flute, and when he visited la colonie, he and Germaine sang duets. Cohn traveled throughout France, visiting the Scouts’ network of safe houses and teaching Torah. He was worried about France’s Jews. So many were secular, and like Germaine, they had little or no knowledge of Torah. Although Germaine did not share Cohn’s Zionist or religious views, she adored him.
In his travels, Leo Cohn distributed false identity papers and escorted small groups of Jewish children across Swiss and Spanish borders. Fearless, he boarded trains in cities and towns where the Gestapo hunted him, and under his guidance five hundred Jewish children reached safety. On May 17, 1944, in the Toulouse railroad station, his luck ran out. The Gestapo arrested him. Germaine’s gaze lingered on his face. Slowly and softy she uttered that single word. “Déporté.”
Leo Cohn, a man with a prominent nose, a receding hairline, and wearing glasses, bore an uncanny resemblance to my father.
As Germaine flipped pages and pointed to young men, she spoke that single word again and again: “Déporté.”
I wondered about la colonie. I pictured a stone farmhouse with a red-tiled roof like the farmhouse at the crest of the hill I passed on my daily walks in Auvillar. Perhaps, though, la colonie sat at the end of a long dirt drive, only its roof visible. Inside, Germaine taught the girls math, history, and geography. She led the girls in song. I understood that in those moments of lessons and song, war seemed far away. Perhaps that was what Germaine meant when she said life was ordinary.
What of life outside? In the album there are photos of girls at the river in Beaulieu sur Dordogne. Did they walk to the river, stop in a boulangerie to buy baguettes? Did they pass German soldiers? In times of war, rumors spread like seeds on the wind. Fear floated. Germaine’s family was far away, their fate unknown. Only Josette was nearby. And what of these girls, these young refugee girls living in la colonie, some orphaned, some with parents in prison or in hiding, none knowing, all hoping their parents, their sisters, their brothers, their cousins, their aunts, their uncles, and their friends were safe, but suspecting they weren’t, all relying on Madame Gordin, Germaine, and the other chieftains to keep them out of harm’s way?
Could the house have been a meeting place of the resistance where young fighters, men and women, stood at the door? In my musings, it was night, someone knocked, and Germaine opened the door a crack to peer out. Three, four, five resistance fighters entered the house, bringing with them the scent of danger, the exhilaration of escape. I saw bottles of wine and beer on a kitchen table. Someone laughed, and someone else whispered, “Shhh, you’ll wake the girls.”
In Germaine’s flat, I looked out a window and beyond the narrow balcony with its blooming pots of pink geranium. Leaves on trees shimmered yellow in the light. I had so many questions. What did she know of battles and bombings? Of mass arrests throughout Europe? Had she seen planes overhead? And who was she to the villagers, a Jew in hiding? A refugee? I said, “So la colonie was run by the Jewish Scouts, and the Scouts were part of the resistance, so I suppose that would make you part of the resistance, too. Did you think of yourself that way?”
Germaine straightened her spine. She spoke to Valerie in rapid French, and as she spoke, she did not take her eyes from my face. “Pourquoi est-elle si intéressée par ce sujet?”
I understood every word. Why was I so interested in this subject? I’d touched an old tender wound. What was it? Perhaps if I shared my own thoughts she would share hers. “I was very young during the war, but I have memories,” I said. “At night a man used to walk past our house and call, ‘Lights out, lights out.’ He worked for the Civil Defense. We were afraid of enemy planes.” I spoke of visiting Grandma Rose and Grandpa Harry, my father’s mother and step-father, at the Jersey Shore. Dad would stand on the Boardwalk in Asbury Park and point to the horizon, a forlorn look on his face. “They spotted a U-boat out there.” We were Jews, and we knew, if not specifically, then inherently, what that meant to our distant and unknown cousins across the sea.
Germaine’s body softened. “I did not know you thought about the war in America.”
How could she not have known? Then I thought of all I did not know about her. I pointed to a portrait on a wall. In the painting, a man sits in one of the apricot velvet chairs, holding his hands as if in prayer and pressing his long index fingers to his lips. He is a thin man with a long face, a narrow nose, and contemplative eyes. “Léon?” I said.
“Léon,” she answered.
“Did you meet him in Beaulieu sur Dordogne?”
Germaine turned to Valerie. “She does not want to speak about this,” Valerie said. “She wants to know if you have heard of Rabbi Zalman Chneerson?” Valerie wrote the name on a slip of paper, Chneerson spelled with a C, not an S. I was familiar with Schneerson, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Brooklyn, but this was not the same person.
“Léon worked with Chneerson,” Germaine said.
A diversion, but what could I do?
“This was unusual,” Valerie said, “a secular Jew and an Orthodox rabbi working together.”
Germaine launched into her story. Léon and the rabbi arrived in Nice with a group of Jewish children, when suddenly the Nazis were everywhere. Nice. Not Beaulieu sur Dordogne. They could not stay. Somehow, Léon procured a truck, but the truck had an open back. Léon collected cardboard boxes and hid the children under the cardboard. He and Chneerson drove the children from Nice to safe houses in the countryside, dropping them off one by one. This was a wireless network of communication working by word of mouth, courier, instinct, courage, and luck. Poliakov and Chneerson returned to Nice and hid out in a vacant flat.
“They had nothing to eat,” Germaine said, “so Léon went out to buy food. The rebbe said, ‘Not this food. It is not kosher.’ Also, it was Yom Kippur, and Chneerson wanted to blow the shofar.”
The shofar is an instrument made from a ram’s horn, and when you blow, the sound blasts louder than a trumpet.
“Léon said to Chneerson, ‘There is no way you can blow the shofar.’
‘Chneerson said, ‘On Yom Kippur I blow the shofar.’
‘Léon said, ‘Wait. Promise you’ll wait until I return.’
“Léon went to the railroad station and he checked the…”
Translating, Valerie gestured. “How do you say in English horaire?”
I shook my head.
Valerie pursed her lips and continued to translate Germaine’s words. “Léon went back to the flat. He showed the rebbe this paper.”
Suddenly, I understood. “Timetable.”
“Timetable?”
“Schedule for the trains.”
“Ah,” Valerie said. “Léon said to the rebbe, ‘You can blow the shofar here and here.’ So, when the train went past, Chneerson blew.”
A story of Léon’s cleverness, his triumph. This was what Germaine wanted to show me; yet, this story was so much more, touching as it did on an essential question: What did it mean to be a Jew? For some the shofar must sound. For others, like Léon, silence worked. For me, the question was an ongoing search.
I still didn’t know how or when Germaine met Léon.
In his essay “The Meaning of Homeland,” Amos Oz, an Israeli writer who was not religious — no revelation, no faith — wrote, “I am a Jew and a Zionist.” According to Oz, a Jew is a person who calls herself or himself a Jew, or one who others force to be a Jew. He wrote: “A Jew, in my unhalachic opinion, is someone who chooses to share the fate of other Jews, or who is condemned to do so.”
Unhalachic, not according to the law.
One night in 1998, leaving a movie theater with Dick, I was furious. We had just seen Roberto Benigni’s award-winning film Life is Beautiful. At the end of the war, when the Americans are near, the death camp pictured in the film breaks into chaos. Guido, the main character, played by Benigni, hides Giosue, his son, in a sweatbox, explaining that this is the final move in a game the two have been playing for years. Guido disappears. When finally, the Americans liberate the camp, Giosue climbs out of the sweat box. There he is, a small boy, facing a gigantic American tank, the prize his father has promised. Giosue has won the game.
Sitting in the car after the movie, I yanked my seatbelt across my lap. “How could he do that, make a comedy about the Holocaust? Nobody won that game. Not the dead, not the survivors.”
For years we couldn’t talk about what had happened. For years those murders had no name. The Holocaust wasn’t a game.
Dick backed out of our parking space, his face calm. This was what my anger did to him — sent him into a silence that looked like ease. He shifted the car into drive. “Maybe there’s another way to look at the film,” he said.
“There isn’t. There can’t be. There is no way Guido would have gotten away with all he did. There’s no way that child would have survived. And what of the other children, the ones who arrived with Giosue? Where is Benigni on them?”
“It’s not real,” Dick said.
“That’s the point.”
“You’re right. That is the point.”
I sulked all the way home, refusing to suspend belief, my feelings raw and visceral.
Germaine lowered her gaze. “I met a young man, Ralph Weyl. He was a resistance fighter, very handsome. He lived seventeen kilometers from Beaulieu. We married. He wasn’t — how do you say — very nice. He found others. I had three children.”
She recited their names, Daniel, Aline, and Arlette. These children were my contemporaries.
Germaine whispered. “He left me.”
I wanted to touch her arm and ease her painful memory, but we were not yet friends and I didn’t know the customs here. Above all, I didn’t want to offend. I mulled her words — married to a resistance fighter who was not Léon, a man who returned from missions smelling of danger and other women, a man who impregnated her three times and, after the war, left for good.
In the summer of 1942 and into the fall of 1943, Hitler intensified his war against the Jews. He gave the French quotas for deportations and, because of the Jewish census taken early in the war, officials had the names and addresses of all Jews. Germaine spoke of sewing money and letters into the hems of the girls’ skirts. If found or rescued, each could be identified. Beaulieu sur Dordogne had either been a strategic or a lucky choice for a safe house, probably a little of each. Notices of impending roundups went to the gendarmerie in advance. French officers needed time to procure vehicles and have the necessary personnel available. In Beaulieu, one gendarme, Amédée Duhaut, warned Madame Gordin of scheduled roundups. She emptied the house. She, the chieftains, and the girls marched and followed paths in the woods. Being scouts with wilderness skills, they pitched tents. Mornings, they broke camp and moved on, and so it went until danger had passed. Germaine called these “flying camps.”
An iconic saga, a safe house no longer safe, money sewn into hems, girls hiding in a forest, and now that story was here in this Parisian living room. I had never known war, and in spite of movies and my father’s ominous warnings as he pointed out to sea, I could not truly imagine war, the fear, the hunger, the disruption, the loss, lives changing instantaneously.
Germaine said, “I do not believe the children suffered or were sad. When they went to sleep at night, they asked me to kiss. So, I kissed.”
I asked about a single day Germaine remembered vividly. Germaine folded her hands loosely in her lap and spoke of a day in 1944 when German soldiers were marching though Beaulieu sur Dordogne and heading to Normandy. They were nervous, edgy, and shooting wildly. “I was…” Germaine rounded her hands and drew a dome in front of her belly… “expecting my third child, carrying my baby in one arm, dragging Daniel by his hand and running across a field to the woods. I heard a shot. I knew what it was. I wasn’t frightened. I felt calm. I don’t know why.”
Naturally she was frightened. But fear propelled her and gave her strength, a pregnant woman carrying her baby, dragging her toddler, her heart pounding, her belly cramping, adrenaline pumping her legs.
I looked into my cup of golden tea. How did she find her way through all that, then integrate into the person she had become?
A few days before, Germaine’s granddaughter, a woman who became very religious and lived in Israel, had come to visit with her children, boys who wore peyes, side curls. “I wanted to make them lunch,” Germaine said. “They came from so far. I offered a cup of tea. My granddaughter refused. She would not let the boys eat, not even a cookie.” This woman was the daughter of the baby in Germaine’s belly that day she raced for the woods. “I knew they were Orthodox. Still, I was insulted. I don’t like Orthodox.”
She meant Orthodoxy. I agreed. Had I been visiting that day, I would have told that granddaughter to forget her rules of kashrut that allowed her to eat only kosher foods from kosher plates and to drink only from kosher cups. I would have told her to take a cup of tea with her grandmother, to let Germaine give cookies to the boys. Their great-grandmother had been to the edge and survived. To break bread, to share a meal with family and friends, this was naches, a Yiddish word that, like most Yiddish words, squiggled out from under definition. Naches was pleasure, but more than pleasure. Naches was the pure joy a child brought to a parent or grandparent.
Speaking English, Germaine said, “The more and more I get old, the more I can express what I feel. Only now, I realize my life was not ordinary.”
So, we agreed.
At the door, Germaine said, “People tell me I was courageous to do what I did. I did not know.”
Perhaps courage is acting, not out of bravery, but out of the essence of who you are.
Germaine offered her cheek, and we kiss-kissed. She was tired. She must nap. We’d talked a long time. “You are going back to the States?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. I’d been away a month. I had decided, with fairness to Dick, a month was the limit for my absences. For years, he provided the financial and emotional support for me to become more than I ever thought I could be, and I was grateful.
Germaine and I exchanged email addresses. She took my hand and held on. “You must tell me when will you return.” Not if I would return. When. I thought about journalists coming to interview Léon, but never Germaine as she sat in one of the apricot velvet chairs, looking on, her own story rumbling in her belly. Yes, I would return to listen to Germaine and continue my search for answers to questions I hardly knew. The best way to find what I was looking for was: let it reveal itself.