Back in Paris for a week after my residency, I descended the winding staircase to the breakfast room in the basement of the Hotel Saint Paul le Marais, my pied-a-terre in Paris. At the entrance an iron gate sat open on its hinges. I entered beneath a stone arch. The walls were also stone, and I felt as if I were inside a wine cellar or a cave, perhaps a dungeon. The room was not unpleasant with its wooden tables, blue-and-yellow placemats, long table displaying an array of breakfast breads, cheeses, cereals, jams, and meats — but it was closed-in.
In an egg cooker, an electric appliance with a water bath, a timer, and indentations, I boiled my egg. At my table, I whacked off the top with the back edge of my knife just as Papa had taught me. Whack off the top and scoop egg up and out of the shell. I buttered a slice of dark bread and spread it with jam. In Mama’s kitchen, I’d teethed on hard crusts of rye bread and pumpernickel.
Mama and Papa’s roots were in Poland and Russia. Mama was thirteen, escorting her two younger brothers when their ship sailed into New York harbor. Both her parents had gone on ahead, and she was left to close up the family farm, so the story went. Teachers placed her in a classroom with six-year-olds. How was a girl who’d closed up a farm and crossed an ocean supposed to learn with six-year-olds? She left school and never learned to read or write in English, and all of her life her speech, whether English, Russian, Polish or Yiddish, sang with a Yiddish lilt. I didn’t speak Yiddish, Mama Loshen, the mother tongue, but I understood the music of Mama’s words, their intonation, their cadence, and I learned to make my voice sing that way. But not out loud. Not in front of my father.
German Jews did not speak Yiddish, and for my father this was a point of pride. He was not like those “other” Eastern European Jews. “No Yiddish. We speak English,” he admonished Mama. On Shabbos, when my Uncle Irving tore a hunk of challah and passed it to my father, my father would pass the bread along without tasting. German Jews did not tear bread; German Jews sliced.
Germaine’s family had roots in Spain, Italy, Greece, Austria, Egypt, and France. Probably my father’s family had as many claims to countries as hers before settling in the Alsace-Lorraine, but they were unknown to me. Still, I understood that European culture had shaped me, giving me the fragrant smells of Mama’s kitchen, the Yiddish lilt of her speech, and a closely bonded family. Sitting alone at my table in this windowless breakfast room, I felt something shifting inside me as if the proportions of my life were changing. In France, I’d found threads that linked me to my particular past and to the pasts of my people, Jews expelled from host country after host country, all searching and settling, never completely, because a diaspora population lived on the fringes. We carried our foods and our beliefs in invisible sacks on our backs, and those of us who thought we belonged often found ourselves talked about behind our backs. People whispered that we looked or didn’t look Jewish. We were tight with a dollar or we were spendthrifts. Such were the extremes of stereotyping. No matter where we settled, we walked a narrow bridge. Commonality needed to learn to contain not only our difference, but all difference.
Over sparkling water and sweets — small apricot jellied tarts and frosted chocolate cookies — Yvonne, Valerie and I spoke of Yvonne’s post-war life. At war’s end Yvonne lived in a house run by the OSE, Oeuvre des Secours Enfants, the Children’s Aid Society, in Limoges. Like the wartime Jewish Scouts, the OSE ran safe houses and saved Jewish children. Post-war, they housed and fed the survivors.
Yvonne was fifteen. Her parents had no money, no will, and no place to go. They traveled to Beaulieu sur Dordogne, the village of their survival and of their children’s survival, where they rented a tiny basement flat and sustained themselves on government assistance. They neither could nor wanted to return to Germany. Ernst was not well; he needed an operation at a clinic in Tulle, about twenty-five miles north.
The name of the town must have haunted him. During the war, Tulle was a stronghold of Communist resistance. The day after D-day, the Resistance attacked the German garrison and killed, maimed, or imprisoned the German soldiers stationed there. A division of the SS on their way to Normandy changed course to Tulle but, by the time they arrived, all of the resistance fighters had melted into the woods. Only the town’s citizens remained. The Germans hanged 99 men and deported another hundred to death camps from which they never returned. Germaine spoke of this as one of her worst memories. Surely, Yvonne and her family knew of this, too.
In Tulle, Yvonne saw her father through his operation and cared for him for seven weeks. On her return, still living in the house run by the OSE, she went to classes and learned to paint on porcelain, her tuition paid by the “Joint.” Perfect, she thought. She loved to draw. She loved to paint. Bored, she found herself painting the same design over and over. Her fingers ached. She wanted to quit, but she needed a skill. What else could she do to earn money for herself and her parents?
On her sixteenth birthday, her Aunt Marthe surprised her with a visit. Aunt Marthe wanted to reopen her shirt factory and, now that Maurice had died, she needed Yvonne. She offered room, board, and a small salary. Sitting at a table in her flat, Yvonne looked down at her manicured nails. She had lovely hands, lovely fingers, not a bulge of arthritis at the knuckles. “It wasn’t much,” Yvonne said, “but it was more than what I had.”
Gone were her dreams of attending university and becoming a kindergarten teacher or a psychologist. Gone was the soil on which both sides of her family had lived for generations, their bones sunk deep into troubled earth. She’d lost her country and her language. Her family had scattered, her parents living in a dark flat in Beaulieu sur Dordogne, Marion living in Switzerland and refusing Yvonne’s pleas to come to France and help with their parents. Years later, when Marion returned, she relied on Yvonne to find her a job and a flat. “I still prepare her taxes,” Yvonne said.
In the shirt factory, Yvonne counted out piece work. She checked each garment for quality and she calculated payment. She had an affinity for numbers, so Aunt Marthe asked her to keep the books. She was becoming adept at business. “What about weekends?” I asked. “What did you do for fun?” Then, I wondered, was fun possible for a sixteen-year-old who had grown up inside this war?
“I liked classical music on the radio,” Yvonne said. Sundays, she listened to — Tchaikovsky, Dvorak and Brahms. She drew in her sketchbook. She formed a Jewish scouting group for adolescent girls and took them on hikes in the countryside. She enjoyed her time with the young scouts, hiking and organizing dances. She lifted a frosted cookie from a plate and said to me, “I was a second Maki.”
Germaine.
I probed, gently. “You went to dances?”
“No, I did not dance.”
“But you went on dates, maybe for a walk or to a café?”
Yvonne brought her fingers to the large amber pendant at her neck. “If a young man asked me to accompany him to a café, I did not go. I thought he was inviting me because of my aunt’s money.”
Distrust, doubt, and fear, the residue of war invisible on her skin. How would she find her way back into life — not the life she’d imagined before leaving Ludwigshafen, that was gone, but into joy, laughter, and the frivolity of youth? Perhaps frivolity was gone for good, but not joy. Not laughter.
Yvonne set two photographs before me. In one she is about seven or eight, a child standing in the courtyard in Ludwigshafen where she used to play with Ursula, her German friend. The courtyard where, in her dream, she smashed her porcelain doll. In the photo she wears a short-sleeved smocked cotton dress with puffed sleeves and a Peter Pan collar, a straw hat with a ribbon tied under her chin. She poses near bushes and a small tree; and, in the manner of Shirley Temple, she tilts her head and looks coyly from under her hat. I remembered the marquee advertising a Shirley Temple movie that she’d passed with her mother, Yvonne asking. “Why, Mutter, why can’t I go inside?”
In the photo, Yvonne bends the long stem of a trumpet flower and rests the bloom on her arm. This was life before expulsion, life before war had taught her to tamp down every pulsing part of herself.
In the second photograph she is a young woman living in Sarreguemines. Her hair is short and tightly curled and, although she smiles sweetly, her body carries an air of skepticism. At the table, Yvonne rested her fingers at the border of the portrait. Again I noticed her lovely fingers, her manicured nails. “In Sarreguemines I did not like the provincial boys. I was waiting for something serious. I wanted to feel something.”
Robert Lieser, the man Yvonne married, had spent the war years hiding in an empty flat in Occupied Paris. He’d moved in after a Jewish family had been arrested. The sympathetic landlord was hiding two Jewish women in another “empty” flat. What was one more Jew? Ironically, this flat was a few buildings down the street from where we sat, Valerie, Yvonne, and I looking out on the tops of chestnut trees in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont across the road.
Robert’s mother, the daughter of a French aristocrat, not Jewish, died young. His father, a German Jew, was hiding in the countryside. Mostly, Robert had grown up in Germany and he spoke perfect, unaccented German. Every morning for the five years of Occupation, he dressed in his green Austrian jacket and his Austrian hat. He pulled the sealing tape from his door, reaffixed the tape, and left the building. Shoulders squared, he walked two blocks to the Rothschild Hospital of Ophthalmology on a corner, the same hospital Valerie and I had passed as we walked from the Metro stop. The Germans, of course, had taken over. In the cafeteria Robert helped himself to a tray, chose his breakfast, and took a seat at a table among German doctors and German military officers. This was the one meal he ate, daily. A classic story of survival — unless or until something went wrong. Nothing went wrong. With a spark in her eye, Yvonne said, “This was the man I married.”
In the immediate aftermath of the war, Robert Lieser became a salesman, selling shoes on the road and, as he traveled, he searched for missing relatives. That was how he learned of a cousin, Maurice, in Sarreguemines. He did not know that Maurice had been murdered in Auschwitz. In Sarreguemines he discovered Marthe and Yvonne. Again Yvonne’s fingers moved to the pendant at her neck. “I found the feeling I was looking for when I met my husband.”
Robert was family, cousin to the man who, along with Aunt Marthe, had taken Yvonne into their home all those years ago. Robert was also the handsome stranger come to town, but he wasn’t a stranger, and so their meeting must have felt like destiny. He’d grown up in Yvonne’s lost country. He spoke her lost language. He lived in Paris, the city of her dreams. Consciously or unconsciously, she must have remembered that day long ago when she’d begged Aunt Toni, “Why, why can’t I go to Paris. Why only Marion?”
Because his two brothers had married women who were not Jews, Robert had taken a silent vow: he would marry a Jewish woman. He was in his mid-thirties and it was time. Yvonne was days away from her twenty-sixth birthday. She’d always thought she’d marry at twenty-five. The fates and the stars had aligned.
Yvonne brought a third photograph to the table. In this one she and Robert stand on a porch outside the house in Sarreguemines. Yvonne wears a sleeveless silk dress with a deep soft collar. A vase of tulips sits on a table behind her shoulder. Robert wears a suit, a white shirt, and a tie. He stands stiffly, his eyes and his smile holding back. Yvonne leans into his shoulder with her whole body. Her face is pure joy. Fingers curled into a fist, she holds his lapel as if to say, I will never let you go.
Robert died in 2011. Although this was a long marriage, Valerie had hinted on numerous occasions that they were not happy.
This portrait was their wedding picture, taken in 1952 after they’d married in a civil ceremony in Sarreguemines. Later they would marry in a religious service in Saarbrücken, Germany, the city of Robert’s birth and his bar mitzvah. The synagogue was burned down on Kristallnacht and later rebuilt. Neither Yvonne nor Robert wanted to live in Germany, but they returned to their home country and to Robert’s synagogue as if to sanctify ancestral memory. They settled in Paris, moving to this flat where we sat drinking tea and eating small cakes.
Later that day, I wandered the Marais — in Yiddish the pletzl, referred to as the Jewish Quarter. I thought of the folks who had lived here before the infamous roundups of the summer of 1942. At that time, the Marais was home to a thriving community of Eastern European Jews, who had fled Poland, Russia, Bulgaria, Lithuania and later Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Most were observant, either Conservative or Orthodox, but their Orthodoxy was not the ultra-Orthodoxy of today — Jews easily identifiable by their dress, who isolate themselves from the stream of modern life, who send their children to Jewish schools and govern their separate Jewish communities according to repressive rules.
Ironically, in the 1930s as Hitler came to power, Jews living in western Europe and Jews living in the shtetls of Eastern Europe were on a path toward modernization and assimilation. Orthodoxy was disappearing. After the war, the trauma of the Shoah changed this course and ultra-Orthodox communities grew in size and power, both in France and in the United States. Today, the Marais was once again home to Jews, most of them ultra-Orthodox, but they were not from Eastern Europe; they were Sephardic, who had emigrated mostly from Tunisia and Morocco.
In the 1800s when Baron Haussmann created his wide sweeping boulevards across Paris, the Marais escaped his demolition and renovation plans and retained its narrow cobblestoned streets and tiny lanes, teeming now with pedestrians — smartly dressed women walking in pairs or alone, some pushing strollers, others carrying briefcases, men wearing suits, teens in jeans and T-shirts, their leather jackets unzipped.
Rue de rossier was mostly a pedestrian walkway with an occasional motor scooter. Bicyclists wove among the crowd. I walked slowly, absorbing sights and sounds, storefronts painted bright yellow, emerald green or Persian blue. I listened to bicycle bells and the rapid-fire sounds of French. I breathed the sweet scents of butter and yeast wafting from Sasha Finkelstajn, a bakery displaying what Mama used to call aeyer kikhl, air cookies because they were crispy, crunchy, and light as air. I waited in a long line, then pointed. A woman behind a counter plucked three, then four. “C’est bon,” I said.
Outside the bakery and across the way, restaurant tables tilted on worn cobblestones. People talked, ate, and sipped from glasses of beer or wine. No matter the time of day in Paris, people ate. Waiters set down platters with smoked salmon and fragrant cheeses, baskets filled with slices of baguette, plates with pommes frites. I stood in front of Panzer, a delicatessen with a Star of David, its date written according to the Hebrew calendar: Since 5755, ie. 1994. Inside the shop, tubes of salami and bologna hung from hooks. Cases displayed hunks of brisket and whole tongues. These were the foods of my childhood: slices of salami, brisket, and tongue. Mama would boil a whole tongue in a pot on the stove, and I would watch the peppercorns and pickling spices swirl.
Again, I imagined life here before July 1942: women leaning out of third-story windows and shouting to the children below who were kicking balls in the street and jumping rope, men walking to prayer — a bustle of urban Jewish life. All would have been wearing a yellow cloth Star of David when the Germans, along with French police, emptied the Marais, herding men, women and children, even infants, into waiting buses, their destination the Vel d’hiv. Inside that airless building — with windows sealed shut, a glass roof painted black where daytime temperatures soared and nighttime temperatures plummeted — French police guarded more than thirteen thousand Jews, four thousand of them children. They had no food, no water, no toilets. Women gave birth. People grew sick. After five days, French police transported these wretched people to the intermediate detainment camp, Drancy, prior to sending them to Auschwitz.
I remembered the day I visited the memorial to the Vel d’hiv on Boulevard de Grenelle. As I stood off to one side, a woman wearing faded jeans and a bold red and black striped shirt approached. She was flanked by two girls who looked about twelve or thirteen. The girls, too, wore jeans, along with sleeveless shirts and sneakers, one pair white, the other pink. All three held tea candles. The woman lit a match, and they placed their burning candles on a cement curb just inside the iron fence. Assuming they spoke English, I approached. “That was so thoughtful. To bring candles,” I said.
She motioned to the girls. “They read the book, Sarah… She searched for the title. “Ah Sarah’s Key,” I said.
In the popular novel, Tatiana de Rosnay fictionalizes the Paris roundups and the imprisonment of Jewish families in the Vel d’hiv. I didn’t read the book, but I saw the movie because I was looking for images for my research, but I found it unrealistic and sensationalist. Yet, Sarah’s Key brought these girls to this history and to this place, and for that I am grateful. Deeply moved, the girls stood back and watched their candles glow.
I made my way to rue des Hospitalières Saint Gervais and stopped outside a stone courtyard. A gray iron fence protected both courtyard and building. Even from this distance I was able to read the carved stone plaque:
260 enfants Juifs de cette école
deportes en Allemagne durant
la seconde guerre mondiale
furent extermines
dans les camps Nazis
N’oubliez pas
Loosely translated the plaque read: The Germans deported 260 Jewish children from this school during the Second World War for extermination in the Nazi camps. Do not forget.
Another day, walking along the Seine in the Fifteenth Arrondissement, I spotted a flight of stairs with a sculpture at the top. I found myself in an elevated park with grass, a walkway, and a sign that read Quai de Grenelle. An iron railing ran along the edge of the park and guarded a drop down to the river. Bolted to cement blocks, iron lamp-posts marched single file to the base of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. The park was quiet, an oasis above the street noise.
I stared at human shapes cast in bronze, a family, their bodies curving with sadness and compassion for each other, their gazes distant, as if each were trying to understand this terrible turn their lives had taken. They leaned toward one another, a mother cradling a small boy, a husband touching his wife’s shoulder and, at their feet, their daughter holding a sleeping baby in her lap, one hand resting on the baby’s cheek, the other on the baby’s leg. The girl looked inward with knowledge beyond her years. The child in his mother’s arms seemed to have exhausted himself with crying. A couple clung to one another, he holding her, she holding her pregnant belly. A single woman lay on her side, one arm bent and holding her head, the other arm resting on a valise. I translated the inscription at the sculpture’s base. “In tribute to the victims of racist persecutions and crimes against humanity. Never forget.”
This was a second memorial to the victims of the Vel d’hiv, their humanity cast in bronze. It was here in 1995 during a ceremony held two months after he had taken office that President Jacques Chirac publicly recognized France’s responsibility for sending thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps, thus ending years of government equivocation.