Eyes half-closed, Germaine said, softly. “I was tourment.” Pained and worried. Suffering.
Once again, I was visiting Germaine in her flat. I’d taken the TGV from Agen to Paris, and I was staying in my hotel in the Marais, greeted warmly by Catherine, one of the managers. Valerie met me there. We walked in the rain to Châtelet, rode the RER to Fontaine Michelon, our stop for Massy Palaiseau, and then splashed through puddles up the hill to Germaine’s apartment complex, arriving breathless, our feet soaked. Our hair, too, in spite of umbrellas. “Ooh la, la,” Germaine had said when she saw us.
I had just a few days in Paris before heading back to the States, and I needed to fit these interviews into Valerie’s schedule. Cancelling was out of the question.
Over time, it had become increasingly clear to me that Vichy had not ended with Hitler’s defeat. The complexities of who did what, where, and when spilled out and were still spilling into the present and future.
As I dug deeper into the larger story of post-war France, I discovered that in August, 1944, when forces of the French Liberation Army entered Paris before the Allies, it was because French generals had insisted on being there first. They would liberate their home city. Allied generals gave in. Once both the French and the Allies had gained control, the Allies left to fight their way to Berlin. On May 8, 1945, nine months after the liberation of Paris, Germany surrendered, and the War in Europe was over. Jews came out of hiding. Refugees and prisoners trickled back. Most, however, ended up in DP (Displaced Persons) camps on either French or German soil. Months passed. A year passed before Germaine left Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne and returned to her home city.
Paris was like a giant beast emerging from a cave, stretching its neck, lifting its head and breathing the stink of collaboration, betrayal, deportation, and death. Cobblestones held the imprint of Nazi boots, and prison walls remembered prisoners’ screams. Hardly a Jew was left alive. Correct that. Hardly, a foreign Jew was left alive. French Jews, those who had managed to go into hiding, surfaced to find their businesses and their flats in the hands of others. Their possessions were gone, dishes, pots, pans, furniture, clothes. Jews returning from the south faced the same losses.
Refugee organizations took over hotels, and with help from the Jewish Scouts, Germaine found a room for herself and the children on the rue Le Marois in the Sixteenth Arrondissment. Ever flexible to the needs of their people, the Jewish Scouts ran schools for Jewish orphans and prepared these children to make Aliyah, return to the homeland, which at that time was Palestine. Monsieur and Madame Gordin directed one of these schools, and once again, Madame hired Germaine to teach music. The school was in the Marais, and Germaine pedaled her bicycle across half the city to get there.
Today, as we spoke of those early post-war days, Germaine pushed the sleeves of her blue sweater to her elbows. She wore a long black skirt, a familiar silver pendant on a black cord at her neck. Seated in one of the apricot velvet chairs, she held onto the handle of her cane with both hands. Her gaze turned inward. “My husband came. He wanted to take the children to live with him in the east of France. He was living in a big house with his parents. They were wealthy. This was his condition for a divorce. I must give up the children. This I refused.”
“He gave me nothing,” Germaine said. “His father was a kind man. He sent me something every month.” She earned another pittance teaching music. Ralph was asking for all she had left in this world to love: the children. Daniel was four, Aline, nearly three, and Arlette, the baby, not quite two.
I pictured a morning in spring. Chestnut trees in full bloom. On the sidewalk in front of the refugee hotel, Germaine straddled the low bar of her bicycle. All her possessions came from the generosity of others, clothing from the “Joint,” American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, her bicycle from the Rothschild Foundation. One day in the not-so-distant future, someone would steal her bicycle, and strangely Ralph, who was good with his hands, would find parts and build her another.
Arlette lifted her arms. Germaine hoisted her up and set her down inside a wicker basket fastened to the bicycle’s handlebars. Then, Aline went into a basket on the back fender. Daniel sat on the seat between his mother’s legs. Germaine pushed off. She rode through Paris’s strangely empty streets, no cars, no buses, no taxis — no petrol. She thought of Ralph. He owned and drove a red car. Where did he find petrol?
She touched Daniel’s hair. How he loved his father’s red car, and whenever Ralph came to Paris — and he did come to badger Germaine to have the children stay with him — he took Daniel for a ride. Seeing them drive off, Germaine asked herself the same questions Ralph asked over and over. What kind of life was she giving the children? Would they be better off with their father? He had a house, a yard where they could play. He had money.
As she pedaled her three children through the streets, she noticed the absence of sound, no whoosh of buses, blare of taxi horns, shouts or whistles. The city had not been bombed, but toward the end of the war, the outskirts had — factories feeding the German war machine had burned and blanketed Paris with soot and ash. An acrid scent lingered. Paris’s characteristic white limestone had blackened. Germaine missed the clean façades and clean statues. She missed the city’s pulse. She swerved to avoid a pile of rubble. No one to take it away. She supposed she should be grateful to be here at all.
Before this war, Germaine had thought of herself as French, only French. She’d been engaged to marry a Catholic man and had little sense of a Jewish identity. Now, she thought of herself as both French and Jewish. In la colonie, she celebrated Shabbat and Hanukkah with the girls. “But I didn’t feel comfortable with ritual,” she said. “I always felt there was no God. What is God?”
She linked ritual to God. I did not. I linked ritual to community and continuity, the generations that preceded mine, the generations that would come after. Yet, I often asked the same question: “What is God?”
It wasn’t easy to call yourself a Jew in post-war Paris where Jews reminded Parisians of all they wanted to forget: Occupation and Collaboration. Ashamed, confused and wondering what had gone wrong in their beloved city and their beloved country, Jews, too, wanted to forget. Most of the surviving Jews were French citizens, men and women who had believed in their land of liberté, égalité, fraternité; yet, their officials and gendarmes had compiled lists of names and handed them over to the Germans. Better not to dwell on these things. Germaine did not dwell, nor did she openly declare she was a Jew.
After an immediate, but brief crackdown, informers and collaborators blended into the mix of post-war life. No one spoke of past deeds; yet, all could breathe the suffering and guilt hanging in the air. Germaine did not want her children to feel like prey, and she made a conscious decision: she would not tell them they were Jews. Nor would she say they were Protestant or Catholic. It was as if she thought she could leave a blank space that no one would notice, not the outside world, not the children. Truth pressed at that empty space.
On that spring morning, Daniel leaned and gripped the handlebars of his mother’s bicycle. Aline grabbed a hunk of her mother’s skirt. Arlette, the baby, sat upright in her basket and held on. Germaine was speeding down a steep hill, wind whipping strands of hair across her cheek. She could not stop. The bicycle had no brakes. The street leveled and Germaine coasted to the entrance of the children’s school, another relief agency enterprise. Here the children would eat two hot meals, breakfast and lunch, and for this Germaine was grateful. Daniel hopped down and steadied the bicycle. Germaine lifted Aline, then Arlette. The baby clung to Germaine’s neck.
Now, alone on her bicycle, Germaine pedaled to the Marais.
I was struck by her strength and determination, the way she followed what Mama called that still small voice inside your heart. Mama used to say if I listened, I would hear that voice. Germaine described that voice as her Jiminy Cricket, a bird sitting on her shoulder and singing into her ear.
Post-war, money from Germaine’s mother’s family had dried up. Her father was broke. He couldn’t find work. Finally, a brother gave him what Germaine described as “a small job.” He also received a government pension, but it wasn’t much. He could not help his daughter. “You must give the children to Ralph,” her father said. Her mother agreed.
Germaine leaned and rested her hands on her knees. “I said to my parents, ‘I am fine. I have everything under control.’ Oh, Sandell, I was like a child, and all of life was like a game.”
I was in my late twenties, a mother of three, when life for me too, was like a game. I made the moves I needed to make, and that was how I got through each day, washing, drying and folding the family’s clothes, preparing our meals and driving — to the supermarket, to nursery school, to play dates, then home with the baby strapped into his car seat beside me in the passenger’s seat. At home, the boys and I built skyscrapers and parking garages with wooden blocks. We parked Matchbox cars inside. We played board games. I fed the dog, fed the boys, gave them baths and afterwards, we snuggled down on one of their single beds, all four of us, as I read them stories. It was the late ‘60s. The world was churning and burning. I was a suburban mother and wife, but I dressed as if I were a flower child, wearing stars and stripes jeans and peasant blouses and tying a narrow leather headband around my forehead. I worked part-time for my local newspaper covering the school news, and I attended staid school committee meetings in my hippie get-up. I didn’t wear shoes, not even sandals. I’d already given up two careers, one as a dancer in New York City — the realization of a childhood dream — a second as a high school English teacher. I was searching for the woman I might have become, or perhaps searching for authenticity. That’s what I thought the flower children had found, a way to be themselves.
I came home late after meetings, often not until well past eleven, to a quiet and sleeping house. I walked down the basement stairs to my “office” a table, a chair, a lamp, and a typewriter in a corner where I wrote my copy, then drove to town and slipped my story under the editor’s door.
We were linked, Germaine and I, by our rebellious spirits and by our struggle, when young, to be both women and mothers. Independent and connected. I’d imagined for her an amped-up life with sharpened senses. I’d imagined lovers because that was something that over the years, I’d wanted to do and had not done. I figured wartime gave women permission to fly free. Instead, like me, she became a mother.
Germaine rolled her fists in front of her belly in a gesture of agitation. “I did not know what to do. What if my parents were correct?”
Creeping doubt.
“I was tourment.”
That word, again. Troubled and anxious, but something more, a restlessness invading every cell in her body.
In the school in the Marais, Germaine poured out her troubles to Madame Gordin. Maybe at day’s end, she stood at a window and looked down into a courtyard. She was tired. Soon, she would pedal to the children’s school, then to her single room where every evening she warmed milk on a one-burner hot plate, offered the children bread and cheese, maybe jam if she was lucky. She’d wash them and get them ready for bed. She’d sing to them, kiss them, then settle down into bed beside them, all four snuggling like puppies. The children slept. Germaine lay awake. She could not go on like this.
She sank down into the cushions of a threadbare couch. Madame Gordin offered tea. Germaine held the cup with both hands and looked into Madame’s eyes. She was nearly too tired to speak. Finally, she said, “Should I give up the children? I have nothing to give them, only my love.”
Madame rested a hand on Germaine’s arm and spoke softly. “You must find diversion. Something to take your mind from your troubles. My husband is teaching a course in Jewish philosophy. The school is not far from your hotel. I will tell him you are coming.”
Germaine shifted, anger seeping into her melancholy. What did she want with Jewish philosophy? She was not an intello, an intellectual.
“Go,” Madame said.
At the school, also run by a Jewish refugee organization, she stood in an open doorway and surveyed the classroom. “I didn’t see a single seat. I said to myself, ‘Good, I can go home and tell Madame I tried,’” Germaine said.
Just then, a man beckoned. Germaine entered and sat down beside him. He was short and slight of build. Not her type. Germaine liked tall, athletic men like Ralph. He introduced himself and made small talk.
“I don’t know why, but I found his accent charming. The next day, I asked Madame, ‘Who is this Léon Poliakov?’”
“Ah. Léon Poliakov. Très intéressant. Très compliqué,” Madame had said.
During the War, Léon Poliakov and Monsieur Gordin had worked to save Jewish refugee children, and in order to pass as a Frenchman, he’d spoken perfect unaccented French. Now, he was speaking French like a Russian, again. He was an historian, a brilliant man, but he had troubles. “He is engaged to marry, but his fiancée is very religious, and he is secular,” Madame said. “He did not think this would matter. Now, it mattered. Also, he is seeing a second woman. I did not know he would be taking that class. I don’t know if I would have sent you.”
When Léon telephoned, he was clear, an affair nothing more. Germaine, too, was clear. “You know, I have three children.”
“What does that matter?”
To most men, that would matter.
On their first date, they walked along the Avenue de Versailles, Léon slight of build, Germaine sturdy, broad-shouldered and matching his height. Léon talked about testimonies he had collected during and immediately after the War. He’d translated the archives of the Gestapo and was accompanying the French delegation to Nuremberg. Under Vichy, he’d been a hunted man. Now, the hunted was the hunter. Although he would become known for his work, at this moment his future was not assured.
In spite of his words on the telephone, there was no affair. Léon did not wish to take on a third sexual liaison. Night after night, they walked and Germaine listened as Léon talked because this was what he did, talk and talk. Germaine didn’t mind. She was happy. Although, this was not the diversion Madame Gordin had intended, Germaine’s spirits lifted. Now, sitting opposite me, Germaine said, “From the beginning, we were very, very good together.”
Léon broke with both his fiancée and his lover. He rented a flat in the Thirteenth Arrondissement for Germaine and the children. The Thirteenth was a hilly working-class district with narrow cobbled streets. During the Occupation, members of the Resistance had sheltered here, perhaps Léon himself. Soon, Léon gave up his own flat and moved in with them. As Germaine told me this story, I remained calm, but I wanted to shout: He moved in? In the forties? Amazing. What about your parents? What about Ralph? What about you? So brave.
When the school in the Marais closed, Germaine took on private pupils. She found work as a choir leader. “Moi, je travaille,” Germaine said. Always, she worked. She took classes and studied music. Evenings, she attended concerts. Because Léon researched and wrote at home, he became the at-home parent, present but not engaged. After school, when the children returned to the flat, he did not hear their shouts or their fights, and mostly, they were on their own. Still, he loved them and called them l’equipe, the team. When they cried, he offered his hands palms up. “Give me your tears. I am the king of tears.”
Léon filled the flat with his friends, all trying to make sense of the genocide they’d managed to live through. One of those men was Romain Gary, novelist, filmmaker and World War II aviator.
In Promise at Dawn, Gary’s memoir, he claims that when he was a child and too young to understand evil, he intuited evil, and he named the evil gods — Stupidity, “with his scarlet monkey’s behind, the swollen head of a doctrinaire and a passionate love for abstractions; he has always been the Germans’ pet….” Next, Absolute Truth and Total Righteousness, “the lord of all true believers and bigots; whip in hand…. one half of the human race licks his boots.” Now, the God of Mediocrity, “one of the most powerful of the gods, and the most eagerly listened to; he is to be found in every political camp, from right to left, lurking behind every cause, every ideal, always present, rubbing his hands whenever a dream of human dignity is stamped into the mud.” And finally, “the god of Acceptance and Servility, of survival at all costs… He knows how to worm his way into a tired heart… appears before you when it is so easy to give up and to remain alive takes only a little cowardice.”
Hardly a child’s thoughts, but thoughts I pondered. I would never know what I would have done had I been faced with Germaine’s circumstance or what I would have done at the war’s end, rejected my identity or embraced it? I thought of the years I’d decorated a Christmas tree and hung a wreath on my front door, refusing to announce to the world that I was a Jew. I hid my difference and shrank inside when I saw photographs in the newspaper of swastikas painted on synagogue walls or when I heard references to Jew York City, Jew Town, Jew Street or a friend’s casual remark: “He Jewed me down.”
Others who congregated in Germaine’s and Léon’s flat were Jacques Attali, economist and writer; Maxime Rodinson, Marxist historian and socialist; Stéphane Hessel, Léon’s nephew, diplomat, writer and years and years later, the inspiration for Occupy Wall Street. As time passed, Léon would break with Hessel over Hessel’s comparison of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands to the Nazi Occupation of France. Hessel would be forced to clarify, saying he saw no parallel between the horrors of Nazism and the illegal attitude of the state of Israel, but the damage had been done. Léon was not satisfied.
Léon’s research papers and his books — with their heady discussions of anti-Semitism and National Socialism — filled the flat. Yet, neither Germaine nor Léon spoke of the war or the fate of the Jews with the children. Neither mentioned the camps. These horrors, they believed, were not for a child’s ears. Nor was the fact that Germaine’s and Ralph’s children were Jews. But wherever secrets lie buried, their vapor escapes.
Evenings, when Léon’s friends visited, Germaine would cook a fish stew, heavy on potatoes, light on fish. She would prepare a salad with whatever fresh vegetables she could find at the market. She did not consider her time in the kitchen subservient. Germaine loved to cook, and her kitchen was fragrant with spice — oregano and mint, cinnamon and clove, spices that Yvonne had learned to love when Germaine cooked for the girls in la colonie, spices that harkened back to her mother’s and father’s life in Turkey long ago.
Always, Germaine joined Léon and his friends at the table. Her life was with Léon; yet, she was married to Ralph. She was married and not married. Free and tethered. She was my mother’s contemporary and she dared to live openly with a man who was not her husband. She claimed her place and her space.
Finally, because he wanted to marry, Ralph asked for a divorce. Daniel, seven, chose to live with his father. Why had Germaine and Ralph given this weighty decision to a child? When I asked, Germaine’s eyes clouded over. Probably I’d asked the same question she’d been asking herself for decades. She didn’t know. “He was seven and he went. His father had a red car. Maybe he wanted to ride in a red car. Maybe I didn’t love him enough. I don’t know, Sandell. I don’t know.”
Daniel visited Germaine during school vacations and for most of every summer. Still, her heart was broken.
In 1952, she and Léon married. They had little money. “The wedding rings were not made of gold,” Germaine said. “It was a mixture.” In 1960, when Germaine was nearly forty-two and Léon was almost fifty, Germaine gave birth to a second son, Jean Michael. By then, Germaine and Léon had moved to this flat in Massy Palaiseau where we sat. When Jean Michael was three, he wanted to fly, so he climbed out onto the balcony with its pots of blooming geranium and up onto the railing, glistening now in the rain. I imagined three-year-old Jean Michael, spreading his arms and jumping into the air. “He had nothing,” Germaine said. “Nothing.”
No broken bones, no bruises, no concussion. A branch or a bush must have broken his fall. That night Léon walked to the synagogue, but he did not go inside. “He walked around outside,” Germaine said. I supposed, in this way, he thanked the God he didn’t believe in for his son’s life. Strangely and for no reason, I can imagine myself doing the same thing, honoring mystery.
In the room that used to be Léon’s study, Germaine sifted through a stack of her artwork. In addition to her other pursuits, she dried flowers, painted them, and assembled the painted flowers into collages. If I were to develop a theory on aging, I would say that those who created lived, if not longer lives, then, more fulfilling lives. Germaine wanted to give me a gift to take home to the States. I was leaving the next day. By then, we both knew I’d return. I protested. She insisted. Together, we chose a collage. “Will you frame it?” Germaine said.