At home, I read as much about Vichy France as I could find. Germaine and I exchanged emails. Valerie and I exchanged emails. I tested my notes and my memory against Valerie’s memory. She suggested books and I read them: The Imaginary Jew, by Alain Finkielkraut; an old guidebook; Paris Judaica, by Emmanuel Haymann De Noel. In return, I read documents related to her work with Thierry that she had translated into English, and corrected her grammar and word choice. All of our friendships deepened, mine and Valerie’s, mine and Germaine’s, and by spring of the following year, I was planning my return. In 2013, I returned both spring and fall, leaving behind my expanded household — husband, son, granddaughter, and dogs. I have always loved the chase and the hunt, that determination of pursuit even when what I’m chasing is not in sight. I rarely give up. In that sense, I am my father’s daughter. “Quitters never win, and winners never quit,” he would say.
That May, Germaine asked if I’d like to meet one of the girls she’d cared for in la colonie. Meet a child who had lived in la colonie? I hadn’t dreamed of the possibility.
Valerie accompanied me to translate. She had met Yvonne years before, and as we traveled on the Metro, she filled me in on Yvonne’s story. Now eighty-four, Yvonne lived in the Nineteenth Arrondissement, a district with a large and mostly observant Jewish population. She, too, was observant, keeping kosher, conservative, but she bent certain rules. Although Yvonne blessed the candles, observed shabbat, and celebrated all Jewish holidays, she also cared for and walked her neighbor’s dog on the sabbath. One time, Valerie said, a religious Jew stopped her on the sidewalk and scolded her. “What,” she said to the man, “you don’t pee on shabbat?”
I liked her already.
Yvonne lived in a pre-war building with a small cage-like elevator barely large enough for the two of us. We rode in near darkness up through the interior of the building, machinery groaning. Yvonne waited in an open doorway. She was a diminutive woman with a dowager’s hump, and she moved as Germaine moved, quickly and with purpose, walking now to her kitchen, then back, carrying first a pot with tea, then a plate with nonettes, jam-filled cakes named for the nuns who used to make them. She set the plate on the table and poured tea. The only window in this room looked out on the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont across the road. I was eye level with leafy crowns of century-old chestnut trees. Far below, traffic passed noiselessly on a busy street. This flat was nothing like Germaine’s bright space. No orchids. No geranium. No sun.
I was surprised to learn that Yvonne was German, surprised, too, that neither Germaine nor Valerie had told me this. I’d assumed she was a French child sent to the south for safety. Turned out Yvonne was born in Mannheim, a city across the Rhine River from Ludwigshafen, the city where she lived until she was nine. Her given name was Inga Sigrid Borhmann, and her family — both sides — had lived in Ludwigshafen for ten generations, firmly rooted in German soil. Yvonne’s grandfather and father, Ernst Bohrmann, traded in carriage horses. She’d expected that she, too, would grow up in Ludwigshafen, but the Nazis had had other ideas.
Yvonne fingered a honey-brown gemstone at her neck and spoke to me of Kristallnacht and the burning synagogue, her father rushing out of their flat and racing to rescue tallit, prayer shawls, and sidur, prayer books. I’d never been this close to someone who’d experienced that night, the acrid smell of burning buildings, the sounds of storefront windows shattering, the shouts of gangs in the street beating Jews, the cries of terror. Still, her father had run out into the tumult to rescue Torahs and tallit. Yvonne said, “My father returned. He carried tallit. Police came and took him away. Thugs came. They tore pictures from the walls and threw them into the street.”
She spoke in short, simple sentences, reducing memory to simple facts devoid of emotion, perhaps because the child who had once lived inside of her was beyond her recognition or held so tightly that she remained hidden. I wasn’t sure which came first, the thugs or the arrest. Had Yvonne, her sister Marion, and Else, their mother, stayed in the flat and watched? Or had they sought refuge with a neighbor? How long did the rioting last? How long did the thugs stay in the flat? Yvonne shook her head. She did not know. She laced her fingers on the table, unlaced, and laced again. “They took all of the Jewish men that night. Later, I heard them singing, ‘Did you see the little kohn with big ears like a donkey’s?’”
Kohn. Jew.
She remembered the lyrics of a song that stigmatized, punished, and shamed. She did not remember details of the horror. She stared at a small-screened television, rabbit ears perched on top. “The day after, I saw the shops. The broken windows. The burned synagogue.”
Here in this flat, my belly hollowed out. I could not fathom seeing police take my father away or thugs filling my living room. What had this done to this child?
Yvonne remembered a dream. “I had a doll. You could turn the arms and legs. I took the doll and I threw it away in the cement yard. The doll broke, then came on fire. I was very angry.”
I saw the doll landing, body, head, arms, and legs smashing, then rising in flames. All through the war, Yvonne dreamed that dream. Now, leaning an elbow on the table, Yvonne said, “I wonder what that doll symbolized.”
Life as she and her family had known it for generations began its end in 1933 when Hitler came to power. On Kristallnacht, it was finished.
Nearly seven weeks after his arrest, Ernst Borhmann returned from Dachau and knocked on the door of his own flat. For reasons no one knew, the Germans had released him. The next morning, Else dressed her daughters in layers of clothing — underwear, skirts, blouses, sweaters, socks. Gloves and a hat. Baggy leggings. Perhaps matching coats of good wool, coarse to the touch and softened with velvet collars, the style in 1938, wool and velvet. Yvonne was nine, Marion twelve, and at that moment Yvonne was still known as Inga.
Yvonne remembered events and feelings. She did not remember details, so I conjured them, baggy leggings, coats with velvet collars. Yvonne did remember a brown leather satchel, small and shaped like an envelope, hanging low below her hip bone. In it she’d packed paper, pencils for drawing, a little money, and a trinket or two. She also carried a small valise, as did Marion. Yvonne was still Inga. I saw her standing outside the building where she lived, adjusting the strap of her brown leather satchel and looking longingly up at a window framing her mother’s face.
I imagined a sky hanging low, snow drifting down, Inga lifting her chin and darting her tongue to taste. She was a curious child but, at this moment, subdued. All her life she had known only Hitler and anti-Semitism — Jewish doctors forbidden to practice, Jewish teachers dismissed from their jobs, Jewish shops boycotted and then closed, Jewish graves desecrated. Silently she’d watched her world shrink, absorbing as a child absorbed, seeing, hearing, touching. Forbidden to attend her German school, she was sent to a Jewish school where fifty children learned with one teacher. She didn’t like the press of so many bodies. Often, she could not hear the teacher’s voice. Always, there were new laws against Jews. One day, walking with her mother, she saw a marquee announcing a Shirley Temple film. She loved Shirley Temple. “Why, Mutter, why can’t I go inside?”
Ernst had wanted all of the family to emigrate to the States, but he had not been able to find a way. On that snowy December day, he was sending Inga and Marion to live with his sister, Toni, in Strasbourg, France. He rode with them on a train as far as Kehl, walked with them to a bridge that crossed the Rhine. Inga looked up at her father. “When will you come?”
“Later.”
“And Mutter?”
“Later, too.”
In Strasbourg, the girls stayed with Aunt Toni for a night, but she was a widow and could not afford to keep them. Did Ernst know that when he watched his daughters walk across the bridge his sister had had other plans for his girls? The next morning, Inga stood on a platform beside Aunt Toni and watched as Marion boarded a train bound for Paris, where she would stay with Lisolotte, a cousin, recently married. Inga wanted to go to Paris, too. She’d never seen Paris. Why couldn’t she go? Why couldn’t she stay with Lisolotte? Why only Marion? How easily I inserted my own longing here — I, the child who tugged at her father’s trouser leg and whined, “Why, Daddy, why? Why can’t I go?”
Aunt Toni and Inga boarded a different train, one bound for Sarreguemines, a city sixty-two miles north, on the Saar River. There, Inga would stay with Aunt Marthe, sister to both Aunt Toni and Ernst. Like Aunt Toni, Aunt Marthe had married a French citizen, Maurice Samuels, and this, the family believed, would keep Inga safe. Proprietors of a shirt factory, the family was wealthy. They had no children. On the train, Aunt Toni whispered, “You will live in a big house. Your Aunt Marthe will buy you pretty frocks.”
Inga hardly knew Aunt Marthe and Uncle Maurice. She did not want pretty frocks. She wanted to go to Paris. She wanted Marion. She wanted her parents.
I imagined Inga on that train, a brown-haired child with brown eyes, one larger than the other, hunkering down and turning her whole body to the window. Winter moved toward her, the frozen ground, the metal gray sky. She felt as if she were entering a tunnel. Where was the end? She clutched her brown leather satchel and stroked the leather as if it were a dog’s furry coat.
In Sarreguemines, children attended either a Protestant or a Catholic school. This pleased Inga. She’d had a friend in Ludwigshafen, a girl who belonged to the Hitler Youth. Let’s call her Ursula. After coming home and changing out of her uniform, Ursula knocked on Inga’s door, and even though she could have gotten into big trouble, she played with Inga. Inga hoped that, in the Protestant school Aunt Marthe had chosen, she would find a friend like Ursula. On her first day, Inga sat at her desk, words swarming like bees. She didn’t understand, not a word. She bowed her dizzy head. Her teacher spoke French, only French. Inga spoke only German. Her teacher gave her a new name. She was no longer Inga; she was Yvonne. She felt like an orphan.
Sarreguemines was in the Alsace, and when Hitler took over the Alsace-Lorraine region, he expelled the Jews and confiscated their property. Germans took the Samuels’ home and their shirt factory. Yvonne fled south with her aunt and her uncle. At the same time, Lisolotte and Marion were leaving Paris and also traveling south to Beaulieu sur Dordogne, where Lisolotte would briefly direct la colonie before following her husband to the States. Madame Gordin would become the second director of la colonie. After months of travel without a destination, Aunt Marthe and Uncle Maurice left Yvonne at la colonie and went into hiding nearby.
At the table, Yvonne reached for her porcelain tea cup. “I liked very much living with the other girls, but at night I cried. I spoke German. I did not like speaking French. Maki scolded. (Maki, Germaine.) She said I must speak French, only French. And without my German accent. If I did not listen, I would get us all arrested. Maki was tough. Nice, but tough.” She set her cup down into the ring in her saucer without drinking. “I wanted very much to sing in Maki’s choir. She did not want me to sing. I had a very deep voice. Not soprano.”
I remembered a photograph in The History of Beaulieu Sur Dordogne, the book Germaine had shown me — girls standing in a plaza in front of la colonie, arms outstretched to form a six-pointed Star of David. This was early in the war, before the pervasive presence of German soldiers and increased Vichy propaganda had turned most of the populace in the south against Jews. In the photograph, Maki stood off to one side, arms raised and ready to give the downbeat. The girls sang Ma Tovu, a Hebrew prayer, Maki announcing that Ma Tovu was an “oriental” melody. Yvonne knew Ma Tovu, every note and every word. She used to sing it in Ludwigshafen on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year. To this day, Yvonne remembered Maki’s words, so deep was her hurt and her desire. “She said to me, ‘You will spoil the sound.’”
Growing up under Hitler, Yvonne was marked. Now, at la colonie, she was flawed in a different way. How isolated she must have felt. Still, Yvonne loved Maki, and continues to love her.
At home in the States, I’d read of Hitler’s order to evacuate all Jews from the German states of Baden, the Palatinate, and Württemberg. Cattle cars waited at train stations. Ludwigshafen was in the Palatinate, and Ernst and Else Bohrmann were among those arrested and deported. France had a network of internment camps, some created during the First World War and others built for Spanish refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War. One of them, Gurs, sat in the foothills of the Pyrenees close to the Spanish border, and that was where the train carrying Ernst and Else Bohrmann discharged its human cargo.
Gurs was an internment camp, not a concentration camp; still, conditions were harsh. Frigid air penetrated the women’s and the men’s barracks. Blankets were thin, rations sparse. Prisoners starved. They needed medicine and potable water. A guard would heave a single loaf of bread into a barracks of thirty women, who would attack the loaf like the animals they had become. Outside, the mud was so deep that one night, on the way to the latrine, a woman drowned. Others died of typhoid fever or dysentery. Ever since his imprisonment in Dachau, Ernst’s lungs were bad. In Gurs, they worsened.
Not many prisoners left Gurs with their freedom. Most were shipped to Drancy. But Lisolotte, working with the Red Cross before leaving France, had obtained their release: Ernst and Else Bohrmann made their way to la colonie.
In her flat all these years later, Yvonne lowered the plate of nonettes to the table. With an index finger she slowly traced a flower on the plastic tablecloth. “What was difficult when my parents came to Beaulieu from Gurs,” she said. “I felt like they were not my parents. I looked at them. I did not know them. They were…” She searched for a word. “Sedated.”
Quiet, blunted, and broken in ways a child could not name.
“They had lost weight. They were old. I was living in a community of girls. That was my life. I called Maki ma mère.”
Then and now, Yvonne was not ashamed of her behavior. She was a child and she was angry. I understood. I would have felt and acted the same way.
Her mother, her father, Aunt Toni, Aunt Marthe, Uncle Maurice, and another uncle, all sheltered in basement rooms near the river in Beaulieu sur Dordogne. Her parents wanted Yvonne to live with them, but she refused. The Borhmanns and Madame Gordin reached a compromise: Yvonne would spend her days learning her lessons, doing her chores, and eating her meals with Maki and the girls. Nights, she’d sleep in her family’s dark basement rooms.
One day, Uncle Maurice walked to the gendarmerie and asked to see Monsieur Duhaut, the friendly gendarme. Maurice wanted to travel to Brive. Was that possible? Duhaut pulled a paper from a pile. “Look at this list. Tomorrow morning, soldiers and police are coming with buses to arrest all the names here.”
He saw his name, his wife’s name, his brother-in-law’s name, his sister-in-law’s name, and Yvonne’s parents’ names, along with the names of certain girls in la colonie. The family scattered. Madame Gordin emptied the house. Rucksacks on their backs, the girls, including Yvonne, left the village and marched into the countryside to set up camp. Day after day, they moved on until danger passed. The girls whose names were not on the list returned to la colonie. The others traveled to safe houses or to convents, escorted by members of the Resistance.
In the fall of 1942, following the British and American landings in Morocco and Algeria, the Wehrmacht entered the southern zone. Before that there had been a strong German presence, along with a pretense of French governance. Now, that pretense was gone. The Germans stepped up raids and deportations. Beaulieu sur Dordogne was no longer safe. Still, the Scouts did not close the doors of la colonie until December 1943. One by one, resistance workers escorted each of the girls to safety. Claude Samuels, a resistance worker and Yvonne’s cousin, took her to a convent in Tulle, a village twenty miles north. Marion, three years older, was dropped at the Swiss border and told to make her way. The rest of the family quit their basement flat and scattered.
“When Claude left me with the nuns in Tulle, he did not say I was Jewish,” Yvonne said.
I pictured her, fourteen, standing in an entryway, a large wooden door closing behind her. Her parents were gone. Marion was gone. Maki was gone, and Claude, too, was gone, sucked up into the night. She fingered the strap of her brown leather satchel.
Yvonne said, “Suddenly, I was a Catholic orphan. I did not want to put my fingers in the Holy water. On the day of Confession, I said I was sick. On Yom Kippur, I had a headache; I must stay in bed. A girl brought me food. I placed the food in a cupboard and waited for night.”
Yom Kippur was a fast day. Perhaps Yvonne clung to ritual as if to transcend time, remembering holidays in Ludwigshafen when the family would gather — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, her mother, her father, her sister. I thought of the yellow stucco house and Jewish holiday dinners with Mama and Papa and all of the family. No one argued, not even my father. Peace hovered over the table like mist. Perhaps, too, Yvonne thought of Marion, walking paths in a Swiss forest with no one to guide her. Did Marion know which day was Yom Kippur? Did she need to know?
One morning, without notice or explanation, the nuns sent Yvonne to a new school. “I was sitting next to a girl I knew in Beaulieu, the daughter of a grocer. She knew I was Jewish. I was worried. I sent word to Claude.”
Soon, Yvonne was traveling again, this time to a convent in Saint Etienne, a city near Lyon, about a hundred and ninety miles east. “Here the nuns knew I was Jewish. They tried to convert me,” Yvonne said.
I could envision a small room with stone walls, a chair where Yvonne sat. Another chair where a nun sat. The nun was not unkind, but she was austere, her face narrowed by her wimple. She was afraid for Yvonne. If Yvonne did not believe in the Savior, she would burn in hell. Perhaps at that moment Yvonne remembered Kristallnacht, and the dream of her porcelain doll shattering, then rising in flames. No, Yvonne would not burn in hell. She did not believe in hell.
Yvonne said, “In a house near this convent, a priest was hiding three Jewish boys and teaching them Torah. He was preparing them to make their bar mitzvahs after the War.”
This was the complexity of that time, a nun who wanted to convert a Jewish child, a priest who taught three Jewish boys Torah.
Yvonne spoke of the spring of 1944 when everyone who could get near a clandestine radio listened to the BBC. The Royal Air Force and American B-17’s were bombing Berlin. The family, Yvonne, her mother, her father, her aunts — all except Marion, who was in Switzerland, and Uncle Maurice, who would die or had already died in Auschwitz — came together in Vabre, a village in Tarn in the southeast. Who, Maurice had wondered, would arrest a sixty-two year-old man? This despite the fact that he’d seen his name on a list, earlier. Perhaps he was tired of running.
In Vabre, the men joined the Protestant Maquis, a resistance fighting group, and the family, nine in all, hid in a house next to a Protestant church. Yvonne said, “When the Germans came, one of the men placed a ladder across the open space between the two roofs. I crawled across.”
“You crawled across?” I said, trying to imagine myself on my hands and knees, my arm reaching for the next rung, a deep emptiness below.
Yvonne smiled. “I did not look down.”
In the dark cavernous church, hiding was easy.
From somewhere in this building, a dog barked. Her neighbor’s dog, the dog she cared for. Searching under the table with her toes, Yvonne slipped her stocking feet into a pair of brown leather flats. “I must take him out.” Valerie and I stood. We took our leave. Outside on the sidewalk, we stood in silence for a moment, each of us pondering Yvonne’s story. Blossoms from the flowering chestnut trees drifted like snow, and I conjured an image of two girls from long ago, sisters walking to the train station with their father on a cold, snowy December day.
In a courtyard of the Mémorial de la Shoah, I walked slowly around a large brass cylinder that evoked a chimney. Raised letters on the circumference spelled out Belzec, Buchenwald, Chelmno, Dachau, Majdanek, Maluthausin, Sobibor, Struthof, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Warsaw Ghetto. Words both familiar and strange, places few people remembered directly, Yvonne and Germaine two of the last living links to that time. During the war years when she cared for children in la colonie, Germaine claimed she had no knowledge of the camps. “Only Madame Gordin, who had been to Germany, knew,” she said. The phrase intrigued me — been to Germany. Perhaps Madame Gordin had witnessed the early racial laws, as Yvonne had. Perhaps she’d understood hatred in a way that others had not. Yvonne was too young to have known of the camps. Yet, this larger story of deportation and murder that played out without their knowledge gave their lives context. Without both the larger story and the individual story, the I disappeared. I thought of Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder’s history of mass killings, the larger story, and of those folded notes thrown from cattle cars, the individual story.
All of us, Jews and non-Jews, belonged to that larger story. Yet, as Jews, we needed to be careful. How tempting to some to take their identity from the camps as if to reduce our grand culture of religious scholarship, literature, philosophy, mathematics, ritual, and spirituality — to genocide. Folks who did that saw an anti-Semite around every corner. In order to discover who we are, we need to dig under those years of horror and under our fear. Our stories, collective or individual, do not begin with that time any more than my story begins with my paternal great-grandparents who washed up on American shores. A writing residency drew me to Auvillar. Curiosity drew me to Lev and questions about Auvillar’s Vichy history. Events followed, my discovery of Jean Hirsch and our matching last names, Lev’s introduction to Valerie, Valerie’s introduction to Germaine, Germaine’s to Yvonne, and I spiraled down into all of their stories, connecting myself to the larger story of my heritage.
The courtyard of the Mémorial de la Shoah was large, flanked by two stone walls with benches flush to each of them. I sat on a bench and breathed deeply. I let out air in a slow release, as if to empty the sadness inside. On the stone wall across the courtyard I noticed sculptures in relief. I rose and walked toward them. I read a plaque. These were bas reliefs sculpted by Arbit Blatas, a Lithuanian-born artist whose career bridged Venice, New York and Paris. He had escaped the Nazis in 1941 and fled to the States. The reliefs are scenes of persecutions. In one, three soldiers aim their rifles at a woman standing against a wall. Off to one side, a soldier holds the next victim. These reliefs are an assembly line of terror and death, and although the images are of stone, they have the characteristics of sketches, giving the impression that they are both solid and ephemeral — like memory.
In another courtyard of the Mémorial de la Shoah, I walked through aisles of stone markers that rose like walls, their surfaces smooth except for the more than seventy thousand names incised there. These were France’s 75,000 deported Jews. I paused at H and found Hirsch. In 1942, eighty-four Hirsches were deported; in 1943, forty-eight. Berthe and Sigismond were here, Berthe born in 1907, Sigismond in 1906. Their names were rough beneath my touch. Here was something concrete, stone and incision, the mark of a stonecutter’s knife as if to say, I am here and you are here.
Inside, I climbed stairs to the third floor, and at the top of the landing I came upon a film playing on a loop. I watched half, then watched it from the beginning. Les Enfants Avant (The Children Before). The film is a series of images without dialogue, scenes of children, boys and girls riding a carousel, a girl sitting with legs crossed on the grass, her fingers holding an imaginary cigarette as she gleefully pretends to smoke. Children visit a zoo and pose with baby lambs; children sit and sing inside a hay wagon. They eat supper with their families. All of this was archival footage from Ukraine and Germany. At the end of the film, a stylized flame erases the children. I thought of Yvonne’s recurrent dream — her doll’s shattered pieces burning and rising. Always, there is a moment before and a moment after. In between lies what might have been.