Chapter 3
EXODUS
Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?
—WALT WHITMAN, “PASSAGE TO INDIA”
IT’S MARCH NOW, and damp and cold outside as I board the train. I find my seat at the window and look out into the steel-gray light of the platform. My brand-new husband, Charles—it still feels a little funny calling him that, but so nice—waves good-bye, one more time, and the doors all close. Then, finally, I feel that first pull of gravity against my back as the train leaves the station.
The journey from Paris to the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon will take many hours and include three full legs. First, I’ll catch the SNCF train to Lyon, then switch to a commuter TER to Saint-Étienne. After that, it’s bus number 37—Saint-Étienne–Montfaucon–Saint-Agrève—which should leave me off in the center of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. I’ll be traveling roughly six hundred kilometers, from city to countryside, lowland to highland, center to periphery, cacophony to—perhaps?—consonance.
I close my eyes with the first even lull of the train.
Up until now, Russia has been my whole career, the sole focus of my work for more than fifteen years. As a doctoral student of anthropology at the University of Montreal, I went to Russia to learn something about how communities far from the center of power grapple with their past—particularly when the state is making big, obvious, and sometimes violent efforts to shape how people think. The Soviet Union had already collapsed; in the chaos that followed, mine was a pretty good question. For my research, I spent around a year and a half living in a tiny Russian village—in a little wooden house that smelled of sour milk and hay—learning about every manner of life: the production of sustenance with the help of scythes and rakes and no running water; the makeshift, almost moneyless economy; the ways of maintaining social cohesion in times of trouble; the orientations toward all manner of powerful figures in the past and present, from Stalin to Yeltsin to the guy who runs the collective farm, and even toward the invisible creatures of the home or barn or forest. I, the girl from Salisbury Street, learned how to live under one roof with a middle-aged couple, along with their cows and sheep and chickens. To be warm when they were warm, and cold when they were cold.
I wrote a doctoral dissertation about “social memory” in that village, concluding that rural people did a pretty impressive job of resisting (or ignoring) the will of the state when it came to things that really mattered to them—and then turned that dissertation into a book, and then started a new fieldwork project in one of the Muslim regions of Russia’s North Caucasus Mountains: Kabardino-Balkaria.
It was a strange and beautiful place, with immense mountains in the distance, appearing and disappearing with the moods of the sky. But with brutal wars spanning into two decades, especially in the nearby Republic of Chechnya, it was also ever more dangerous and sad. There were arrests, public denunciations, murders. There were showdowns in the streets between police and religious or ethnic or mafioso clans. Friends began having trouble; the trouble inched closer and closer to me.
It was time to go.
So here I am: on a train on the way to the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, with no more Russia for me, and with no storehouse of knowledge that took years to accumulate. Instead of feeling bereft, though, I feel somehow free.
And—as foolish as this new journey might seem to my academic friends, who have learned to be exceedingly cautious when new questions come around the bend—I am not going empty-handed. So what do I have?
First of all, I have the idea, from my own up-close research, that even powerless-seeming people can find ways to resist the will of a violent state. There is such a thing as collective power, even for the least of us.
Then, I have the three months I spent at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, as a research fellow, where the archivists and librarians and researchers treated me like a fellow traveler and not some reckless adventurer. In those three months, I plunged into Holocaust history to absorb its basic contours. I learned how to talk about the culpability of perpetrators (those who create the architecture of mass murder, or write up the orders, or pull the trigger, or open the valves in the gas chambers), collaborators (those who, as states or groups or individuals, make deals with perpetrators, to their own benefit), and bystanders (those who stand and watch and do nothing). I learned about specific modes of resistance during the Holocaust—violent kinds and nonviolent kinds. And I learned what political scientists say about the structural factors that encourage resistance. One arresting example: being a highlander.
I read everything I could get my hands on about the Plateau and its own (highland) brands of wartime resistance, and—more generally—about the social psychology of heroic altruism. Then, I spent weeks watching interviews of Jewish survivors who had passed through the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. Sitting there with my headphones on, day after day, I would blink; I would cry. I read and read; and watched and watched; and walked through the museum again and again to sear those images of fire and light into my mind’s eye.
So I have that now.
What else do I have? French. I speak French—the vowel-bending Quebec version—which I learned in Montreal. For years, in fact, I lived my whole life in that language: I studied in it, I dreamed in it, I argued in it. I had a graduate school husband and then a divorce in it. The French—like the Russian that came after it—was hard-earned. When you learn a new language, especially in our parochial Western world, you have to be stupid for years before you start getting to be a little bit smart again. People treat you like a child—which, in a way, you are. And if you grew up thinking that, of all the things you might be in life, you are smart, mostly, then . . . you have lots to give up along the way, lots to lose. Some never manage it. In my case, the years of stupidity paid off. My French, like my Russian, is the kind that puts people at ease. I love the music of both. And so, on this train, I carry a twangy, provincial French. And the ability to be a person in it.
And—I open my eyes and check my notebook at the bottom of my bag—I also carry one, two, three phone numbers: one for my hotel; one for a local historian, Monsieur Bollon, whose work I’ve gobbled up; and one for a lovely woman from the tourist office, Muriel, who has been helping me with logistics. In recent weeks, Muriel has been sending me messages with liberal use of the exclamation point: We will be delighted to give you a good welcome!! Bring a warm coat, it will be cold!
And so I carry a warm coat.
But most of all, I carry with me this: the sense that what might have looked, in my own life, like an alarming break away from a known path, is instead a new moment where, who knows, I might be able to learn something about what most matters to me. And whatever this moment will reveal, right now it feels fresh and green and bright. Or, perhaps, like the kind of snow that barrels through the sky at night, like ever-shooting stars.
Two eyes, two ears, three phone numbers, a coat, a fluent tongue. Some knowledge and some questions, barreling through the sky.
That’s not nothing. And anyway, the readiness is all.
THE TRAIN PUSHES FORWARD to the rusty edges of Paris—mottled with their graffiti conversations—and then out past the gray, rowdy banlieues.
What was it like, out my window of the train, when the story I am seeking began?
After the devastation of the First World War—fought over the airy nothing of nascent nationalisms—there was no clear pathway forward to the time of war-no-more, no clear way to bind the collective wounds of the continent. There were shattered families, destroyed economies, political ravings in chilling new forms. In the decades that followed Versailles, more and more people abandoned their homelands, seeking something better, or brighter.
By the 1930s in France, this very rail line I travel on now was freighted with so many outsiders, so many strangers to the country. There were thousands upon thousands of souls who had fled the Spanish Civil War. There were political activists trying to create communism, or run from it, or crush it. There were economic refugees—poor, jobless strangers filling the nooks and crannies of cities with their indecipherable languages and foods and ways of worship. And added to that were layer upon layer of still-new migrants from earlier waves—from the Russian and Ottoman Empires, from North Africa, from the remnants of Austria-Hungary. Pressures were mounting in the country. Resources were scarce. Provisions were getting harder and harder to acquire. People were hungrier and hungrier, inside and out.
Among the desperate people traveling on these tracks, looking out through windows pitched exactly as mine is now, were a great many Jews. Hitler’s rise itself was, of course, responsible for a good portion of the Jewish refugees in the 1930s. But it was also the simple, terrifying tenor of hatred throughout the German lands that led people to flee their homes: the caricatures, blown up to gargantuan sizes, of sallow-skinned Jews with huge beakish noses, cradling the world; the smashing of temples by neighbors or teachers; the beatings by police. Jews arrived not only from Germany and Austria, but—trickling in for years—from Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, with its own fraught history of pogroms and mounting political instabilities. By the last days of the 1930s, there were 350,000 or so Jews in France, more than half of them foreign-born.
For those Jews in flight, Paris—now teetering anyway, with its own ragged poor, and its own leftist parliament, and its rightist riots, and its trucks rolling over the detritus of violence in the streets and their “sinister din”—made for a tense new home. There were so many of them, and despite the urge to catalog them as a heterogeneous and ugly other, they made for a very diverse crowd. On the twisty streets of Montparnasse, or the Marais, or the Left Bank, you could expect to see any kind of Jew walking by. There were fancy Viennese Jews who might speak French already, and whose menfolk might wear shiny top hats and white gloves when they went out at night. The Jews from Eastern Europe—having escaped pogroms a decade or two earlier—might be businessmen from Odessa, or artisans from Warsaw. They might speak Russian or Hungarian, if they were of a certain class—the class of the shiny top hat—or only Yiddish, if they had never been much exposed to the world outside the shtetl. The men might walk the Parisian streets in long black coats, bearded, covered, strange. The very religious and the very political among the new arrivals could embarrass those who had preceded them.
Depending on class and language and background, these different Jews might also have very different ways of dealing with authority. French-born Jews and upper-class Jews from German lands tended to believe in the Law, and to refer to authorities when asked; the Central and Eastern Europeans, however, having lived through periods where no state would protect them, possessed life-preserving instincts to keep bureaucracies and police officers at bay. This would have very real implications for their survival in the years ahead.
In 1938 and 1939, Germany began its expansion into Austria, the Czech lands, and Poland, changing the equation yet again. Aggression mounted, and who knew where it would land next. By the spring of 1940, Hitler was strolling down the Champs-Élysées; soon the German army would occupy the whole of northern France. It was then, under occupation, that France began its twin response of resistance and collaboration. Jews rushed south to Vichy—nominally still under French control—in what was known as l’exode, the Exodus of 1940. They jammed the roads for hundreds of miles, carrying their possessions in cars and on bikes and in covered wagons. Thousands of Jews were captured and sent to French-administered concentration camps with names like Gurs, Rivesaltes, Compiègne, and the transport camp of Drancy. What had once been a general atmosphere of pressure and anxiety and dispossession became one of mortal danger. In the summer of 1942, thirteen thousand Jews—already wearing their yellow stars—were rounded up in Montmartre and other neighborhoods, and jammed into a bike-racing arena. Several days later, those Jews were sent to Drancy, and from there, to Auschwitz. By November of that year, Germany had invaded the South of France, too, and it became impossible to be both Jewish and safe. Native and immigrant Jews alike would all, very soon, be tempest-tossed.
Desperation looked like that: a tempest. Crowds of strangers; a fallen Tower of Babel with no common tongue, with no consensus on the meaning of a good society. It looked like a freighted train careening forward into the unknown, a covered wagon with all your possessions crammed in, with planes overhead and a parent lost somewhere down the road.
My own train speeds farther and farther from Paris, and as I look out the window again, the landscape has begun to roll.
By the 1930s, my mother’s ancestors, from Vilna and Kraków, were all in the United States; my mother’s few brushes with anti-Semitism, the usual: getting blamed, personally, on the playgrounds of Brooklyn, for the murder of Jesus Christ. Years later, in Russia, I realized that having Jewish ancestors from Vilna who spoke Russian by no means meant I would be welcomed there as some kind of long-lost compatriot. During the Soviet period, “Jewish” was something that got stamped on your passport, something that could bar you from getting into a university; that could keep you from jobs, or—during the worst of things—get you purged.
I was in Russia when Schindler’s List came out, and I watched it with a friend in a theater, sitting in the dark on rickety wooden seats, bundled into our winter coats and hats as the terrible story unfurled in blinking black-and-white and that one spot of rose-red. Outside, right on Nevsky Prospekt, neo-Nazis were protesting in the snow. Afterward, I noted that nobody seemed impressed by the film: “You Jews lost six million in the war? Russia lost twenty-five.”
Later, in work trips to Ukraine that followed, I came to realize that the war stories were told differently from how I’d expected there, with no sense of regret or shame, and with maybe even the sense that, to some Ukrainians there was something rotten about being Jewish. Jews were, in their minds, the same as communists. Communists were the same as Stalin. Stalin was the same as Hitler, or worse. Or worse. So, in Ukraine there was and perhaps still is a sense that the Jews got what was coming to them. More or less.
As for me, I didn’t have much formal Jewish education—we left our synagogue when I was around six years old after my mother had a fight with our brand-new rabbi over matters of principle (according to this rabbi, my brother, who came into our family when he was eleven months old, wasn’t allowed to be a Jew). From then on, most of our religious education came from my father, a Bahá’í. But there were vivid moments in my early Jewish life.
There was the time when I was on a walk with a small group of kids from my Hebrew school, out in the leafy suburbs. One of the kids stooped down on the sidewalk and, rock in hand, started smashing at small black dots on the ground. Seeing this, our teacher stopped everything: “Hey! You! Why are you hurting that ant? Don’t hurt that ant! It never did anything to you!” In that moment, for me, ants became beings—animated, precious, deserving of protection. And the world woke up in that way.
Then, there was the Shavuot, when I was little and lifted over the Torah by our wonderful first rabbi, unbound by gravity, the taste of honey candy in my mouth; and there was, sweet to my memory, the sound of my grandfather’s chanting, and the smoky smell of his skin as he wrapped me in hugs; and the voice of my mother, correcting my irreverent moments: “God doesn’t want to hear you like that.”
I look out the window again, as great trucks lose the race with my train. How many ghoulish caricatures do we make of each other? Of ourselves? How much hiding is there, in the black of night? How many raised fists; how much cheering for the nation or the kin or the kind? Academia has been like a soft padding, protecting me from the sound of the hardest questions. I can’t help but wonder: What does God want to hear?
At the Lyon-Perrache station, I transfer to a double-decker commuter train. I pick a seat on the top deck, in front of two young guys who are loudly joking, using little bits of English in their speech in a point/counterpoint—“It looks like a bird! It is not a bird! . . . It looks like a bird! It’s not a bird!”—and laughing hysterically. Soon, there are small farms in the landscape beyond. Geese wander in people’s yards. A man makes a fire with sticks on the far bank of a creek. Farms grow farther and farther apart; in between them, it’s all rust and rickety gray. And then mountains appear in the distance.
When the train stops at the industrial city of Saint-Étienne, I find a café where I can sit and wait for my bus to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. The young man who serves me has bright eyes and a dark brow; he speaks French with a little bit of an accent, and he looks confident, at ease. Halal kebabs are on the menu. And a creamy puffy pastry called la religieuse. All over Paris, there were signs of a full and diverse Muslim community, and signs of the city being now—as it has been for a very long time—a cosmopolitan haven for the peoples of the world, stuffed together in metro cars, hollering over one another’s heads in musical foreign tongues, lighting up the streets with the colorful swirls of their grands boubous, the smell of their varied spices, a handshake where one brown hand covers another brown hand and presses, a beautifully draped headscarf, the sale of some delicacy, some foreign song.
Finally, the bus arrives for the last leg of my journey. I ask for “one ticket to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon” and feel my throat tighten a little as I pay, and my change clangs musically in a tin dish next to the driver. I find a seat next to a window and the bus begins to wind its way out of the gray city, and soon there are hills in the distance ahead, and then forests and mountains. As the bus creaks ever upward, the palette outside begins to change, too, with dark green pines out the window, and craggy stones, and light white snow on the ground. The bus swings up, down, then over, higher and higher. Here and there are fields and cows and horses.
IT’S HIGH UP, the Plateau where I’m headed: three thousand feet in the air. High up and hard to get to. For centuries, its people were poor and isolated, their patois singular, the weather harsh. Centuries ago, Protestantism found a home on the Plateau, and to this day, the region is not only more religious than most of France, but more heavily Protestant—in forms that secular outsiders might consider quaint or even vaguely unsettling. The most religious of its people—les purs et durs (the pure and hard ones)—are known for their long skirts and dour faces and their habit of avoiding talk with strangers. There are winds in the winter so fierce and so familiar that they are given names, like La Burle or Le Mistral. Politically, too, the Plateau is an outlier. For centuries, it was—and still is—an island of political liberalism in a sea of the French Right. It is a quirk of a place, a geographic afterthought.
If you lived on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in the late 1930s, you would have been one of around twenty-five thousand people. You probably would have been Christian, though if you were a refugee you could easily have been Jewish or nonreligious. If you were, in fact, Christian, you were a bit more likely to be Catholic than Protestant, though Protestants made up a hefty 38 percent of the population on the Plateau (and over 90 percent in the villages of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its neighbor, Le Mazet-Saint-Voy). You would have grown up living in a cold and difficult place. You would have lived your days near the land, far from the ease and anonymity of big cities, speaking a dialect that outsiders called quaint. You and your parents and grandparents would have lived through an economic decline spanning many decades. You already knew what it meant to be hungry, when nature failed you.
More than that, you would have understood something about suffering. For centuries, on and off, the Protestants of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon—most, but not all, of the Reformed Protestant Church—had been subject to bloody persecution. At the same time, over those same centuries, the people of the Plateau developed a kind of habit of sheltering vulnerable outsiders from violence—hiding them, feeding them, shuttling them out of the country. They protected Protestants during France’s religious wars of the sixteenth century; then, during the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror that followed, they protected Catholic priests. In the nineteenth century, they took in poor children from industrial cities in early versions of fresh-air programs; then children from Algeria; then, during the Spanish Civil War, mothers and children from Spain, and political undesirables from all over Europe. During the Second World War they sheltered Jews, yes, but also all kinds of other refugees from the Nazi occupations. Accustomed to suffering themselves, they sheltered the sufferer. It was, you could say, a kind of intimate moral roundelay.
On June 23, 1940, just a month after Hitler invaded France, and a single day after Vichy was established in the south, Pastor André Trocmé delivered a bold sermon in the Protestant church of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. “The duty of Christians,” he said, “is to use the weapons of the spirit to resist the violence brought to bear on their consciences. . . . We will resist whenever our adversaries try to force us to act against the commands of the Gospel. We will do so without fear, but also without pride and without hatred.” On July 17, just three short weeks later, Vichy signed its first homegrown anti-Semitic legislation. The time was nigh for resisting; or not.
If you were on the Plateau, then, that summer of 1940, you had some thinking to do. You knew what suffering meant. You knew what a hard life was like. Your ancestors understood something about how to shelter people in need. Would you decide, all things considered, to choose the path of your own mortal danger? To protect people you didn’t know, people you had never met; who were unrelated to you; who spoke foreign languages; who didn’t share your religion; who had no real means?
Later in 1940, Tante Soly, a first home for refugee children, was opened in Le Chambon. The children there were mostly Jewish. Several more homes would open in the months that followed: La Guespy, L’Arbric, La Maison des Roches, Les Grillons, and others. The police presence mounted. The numbers of refugees—and the diversity of their backgrounds—increased. The mayor, Charles Guillon, quit his post in protest of the collaborating regime and began a massive effort to help the displaced. By August 1941, some open defiance was beginning to be seen on the Plateau: a religious woman refused to ring the church bells in honor of Marshal Pétain’s army during a high-profile visit to Le Chambon. Local pastors, including Trocmé, started taking children directly out of French concentration camps. Trocmé’s actions, in particular, began to cause some consternation in the Reformed Protestant Church hierarchy. In the summer of 1942, police authorities tried, unsuccessfully, to round up Jewish children at one of the homes. A month later, the BBC broadcast a story about how children were being welcomed in Le Chambon; under Vichy, the rescue was not yet a secret.
In this context, if you were, in fact, moved—as most of those on the Plateau were—to choose the path of your own mortal danger and protect perfect strangers, there were any number of ways that you could act. Those from larger towns like Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Le Mazet-Saint-Voy, Tence, and Saint-Agrève—about five thousand of the twenty-five thousand in all—could greet newcomers, find them homes, offer them a place to stay. They could give away some of their own scarce food or clothing, or the traditional wooden clogs they wore, called sabots. They could volunteer to teach—anything at all that they knew—at a local school; with wave upon wave of refugee children of different ages, everything from philosophy and theology to higher mathematics and farming techniques was needed, so there was plenty to sign up for. People might also volunteer to cook in one of the local residences for refugees, or to be in charge of forging documents. For the young and daring, there was the possibility to become a passeur, clandestinely leading refugees through the mountains to the relative safety of Switzerland.
The townsfolk had infrastructure on their side. With access to train stations and telegraph stations and even telephones sometimes, they could communicate with a plethora of organizations that brought aid and succor to refugees; notably, there was the Protestant Comité Inter-Mouvements Auprès des Évacués (CIMADE); the Jewish Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE); the American Friends Service Committee; and the Cartel Suisse Secours aux Enfants. They also had contacts with Resistance organizations large and small, like the Éclaireurs Israélites de France, and networks of Le Combat, based in Lyon. In towns, as in the countryside, big, active churches were able to do heavy lifting in the rescue: not only were priests and pastors sources of inspiration, but they also dispersed crucial information through Bible study groups, which—in their clandestine functioning—operated much like the secret cells of the communists in their formative pre-Soviet years.
These townsfolk, many of whom would have had networks far beyond the Plateau itself, were not the only kind of rescuers. Whether catalyzed by the thunder of a pastor or the call of their own hearts, it was the country folk—the farmers and shepherds and milkmaids—who made up the bulk of the twenty-five thousand on the Plateau in the late 1930s and, in everyday ways, lived at the heartbeat of the rescue. It was they who would secretly take in families, sometimes long-term. I had been able to learn their brilliant, varied stories—as recounted by survivors—at the Holocaust Museum. Often, it was women farmers who bore the brunt of the risk in helping the strangers, since their husbands had been forced to take up arms elsewhere. These women were the ones who answered the door in the middle of the night, who learned to bark at the police and then lie right to their faces. These farmers and shepherds and milkmaids would get information about what was needed from their Bible circles, often taking long walks through field and forest to get there. Information was slow to travel, but it traveled.
The Plateau is so small, so far away; France is so large. And yet, people found their way there. Somehow or other—whether through friends or aid organizations, at a stopover or mid-flight—they got word that this place was taking people in. They’d get word, and then somehow aim their exodus to this higher ground. They traveled on the great French railways, in trains and cars, in bikes or on foot. The roads south, toward nominal safety, were full and chaotic. On them, children might see dead bodies for the first time, after bombardments; people would hide among the roots of trees in the forests by the sides of roads; police were everywhere.
By 1940 and 1941, the first Jewish children had begun to arrive on the Plateau with regularity, mostly under the protection of the Swiss Red Cross. Pastors in the Plateau, like André Trocmé and Édouard Theis, and aid workers, like Friedel and August Bohny-Reiter from the Swiss Red Cross, and heroes of the OSE like Madeleine Dreyfus, were instrumental in identifying the children in Gurs and Rivesaltes near the Spanish border, and then bringing them up to the Plateau for safety. Once identified, most of the children would have to leave their parents behind in the camps, facing this next new chapter of flight alone.
The interviews I had watched at the Holocaust Museum gave me the illusion of intimacy with the people who journeyed to the Plateau during the war. They were boys and girls. They had French names and Yiddish names; Polish names and German ones. They spoke English with r’s rolled in the back of their throat; or French. Watching the people in those interviews—now aged and gray and lined—I imagined their faces as children, small and tender and full of longing. And full of fear.
There was Elizabeth, a teenager from Vienna, who got separated from her parents and brother after their exodus south from Paris, and who rode her bike for hundreds of kilometers, weaving among the cars and covered wagons that jammed the highways. Elizabeth kept meeting soldiers and other strangers along the way, who could have robbed her or raped her or fatally turned her in to the police. But somehow, she managed to find her mother in Toulouse, and one day she got a letter from her former teacher from Vienna, urging her to come to the Plateau. So, she went.
And there was Jacob, a tough and handsome kid from Kleinlangheim, Germany, who saw his mother’s teeth fly out of her mouth when a policeman punched her during Kristallnacht. Jacob was living in the lice-and-mud barracks of the Gurs concentration camp, near the Spanish border, when a member of the Swiss Red Cross came to the camp offering to find homes on the Plateau for a group of children. So, he went.
Then there was Étienne, who, even with his last name of Weil, was fiercely proud of his family’s French origins: “We’d been in France for one thousand years!” Étienne, fine of feature, was hiding with his mother right there in Saint-Étienne during the early years of the war. They were in constant, immediate danger, their names surely on the careful lists made by the regional authorities. His mother, trying desperately to inure her little boy to their false new identities, would cradle him every night before bed, incanting: “You are not a Weil, you are not a Jew, you are not a Weil, you are not a Jew,” like a lullaby of erasure.
And there was Paulina—with the Yiddish nickname Feigelah, like my mother, Flo—whose own mother would steal cherries and an extra glass of milk for her in the Rivesaltes concentration camp, also in the south. Paulina found her way to the Plateau with her sister, at just about the time when her mother was gassed at Auschwitz.
Up they went, all of them. Up into a brand-new place, where, perhaps, they would be safe for a time.
WE’VE LEFT BEHIND the cities now, left behind the din; one by one, the passengers leave until there are only a handful of us remaining. The bus strains with effort on its ascent, the temperature drops down and down. Soon, there are pine forests, and the smells of horses and hay; and soon massive stone houses dot the landscape; and cows, donkeys, and chickens nuzzle the ground for food. The greens grow deeper, the mosses richer, the air cleaner, the snow heavier, whiter.
And now: Night falls. I can see my thoughts better, in the dark.
WHY AM I HERE?
If ideas are shapes—as they are to me—then the idea that brought me here is surely the circle: the circle of a social group. I draw one in my head, now. To be honest, I seem to draw them in my head all the time—it comes from being trained as a social anthropologist, probably, but one with just a little excess of math in her background. Something about the circles comforts me—they have a way of cutting through the swirl.
So, here’s my circle: Black border around it. Nice and clean and clear.
Now, I can populate the inside of my circle with people. So I do. Hello, people. Who are you?
You could say that I am here on this bus, climbing up toward the Plateau right now, because I learned from Émile Durkheim, the great French father of sociology, that it is not only individuals who act—individuals like me, or a king, or a Nazi, or a charismatic—but groups act, too. Groups like the circle now in my head. The idea that groups act—that they can be the very unit of action—means straightforward things like how, if it’s an individual that lifts a pen, it’s a group that lifts a coffin; an individual that makes a loaf of bread, a group that makes a vat of wine. But as you push the idea further, the philosophical nooks and crannies come into view, and soon things get more complicated: An individual thinks up the theories of relativity (Einstein!); but a group also thinks up the theories of relativity (as ideas conceptually ripen broadly over time). An individual prays with private, desperate longings; a group prays with deep and social longings. An individual feels sad at the death of a loved one; a group feels trauma after a war. An individual remembers the tree she climbed in the neighbor’s yard when she was a girl, or how to ride a bike; a group remembers what it was like under Stalin, or how to behave with outsiders, or how to be kind to guests.
Okay.
Inside the circle in my head, I have now placed the villagers of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. I don’t know these people yet, so I’ll imagine them. I’ll like them already. Bonjour, tout le monde! Some are digging up gardens, some are struggling with a plow, some of them are working in little stores. Now, I’ll add a dimension: Let’s say the times are terrible and there is mortal danger everywhere around. Outside my circle, I now draw big fat arrows, in red, pressures from the outside, bearing down on the boundaries. What would you expect a circle like this to do under such circumstances? You would expect—let’s just say—for the black border of the circle to thicken, harden, make it more difficult to come inside. You would expect the group to look out for itself, to bar the vulnerable outsiders from entry.
Why would you expect that? Because in the world of social science there is an almost religious belief in something called rational choice, which refers to the pretty good bet that we will, in the aggregate, act in such a way as to maximize the best outcomes for ourselves. That is, every man for himself—with a nope and a sorry and the close of a door to others in need. And indeed, that’s what most people seem to do in terrible times. Certainly, it is what most people did during the Holocaust.
But lo and behold: The villagers populating the inside of my circle do something else. During these terrible times, they actually open the borders of the circle, change it to dotted lines, now permeable. As a group, they let rough-looking wayfarers inside. As a group, they give up their own food, their own sustenance, to those strangers. As a group, they repel the exigencies of a powerful state. As a group, they invite danger and death to themselves and their families, just as they share culpability when things go wrong. As a group, they absorb the sorrow that invariably ensues. They do all of this together, intertwined, collectively, sharing risk. Furthermore, they do it not once in some heroic dash, but day in and day out, for years on end. They do it during the Holocaust, that is, as they have done it for centuries, on and off. Taking in the stranger.
What a nice circle. What a rare circle. There’s resistance for you. There’s your subversive irrational choice.
The bus groans higher and higher. Why am I here? I’m here because this circle in my head is nearly singular. Because it’s an illogical thing of great beauty.
And because maybe, if I can learn its contours—its ins and outs and rules and habits and flows of resources and power—something might be done about the story that my own book of life will tell, someday.
THE DRIVER CLEARLY KNOWS the road so well that he doesn’t fear the hairpin turns up here among the snows and stones and deep green trees. Towns come into view: Dunières, Montfaucon-en-Velay, then Tence—where we barrel over a stone bridge across the Lignon River—then Les Barandons. These are names that I have read about in the Holocaust Museum, places that now have, for me, the whiff of the familiar. After one more breakneck turn, we arrive at a stop called Collège Cévenol—I recognize it from my reading of these past several months—and two messy-pretty teenagers are let off the bus.
The streets are now fully lined with snow as the bus takes a last left turn onto Route de Saint-Agrève, into the center of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. The door opens, and I scramble to get my bags. A rush of cold, wet wind hits my face as I step out onto the street. Here, in my first moments in the land of peace, I am alone, with no one to greet me.
I pull my coat closer and set out to find the hotel where I’ll be staying for the next few days, the Hôtel du Velay. I have to ring the bell and then ring again before a boy finally answers and calls his father over. A few moments later, I am in my room, square and small and gray.
I look out the window at the main crossroads of the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. There is a bank across the street, with the faded words CENTRAL HOTEL. On the other corner, there is the Office de Tourisme, and a bar, La Mandarine. I notice that the shutters in all the great stone buildings of the town are shut tight, to let no light in or out. Everything seems closed, and there is almost no one on the streets. I realize I’m hungry, and I don’t know how to get food.
The wind blows; the snow falls sideways; I’m a stranger here. Alone with my stories and the pictures and in my head. Breathe it in. The readiness is all.
In the small gray room, my own shutters are closed tight now. I’m cold; I use my coat as an extra blanket. Thank you, Muriel, for warning me about the cold. Thank you for each one of the exclamation points. I close my eyes. Images swirl in my head of pastoral beauty and of crowded roads. It’s the early 1940s, and children are arriving, one by one. I see the snows of a late winter. And a train . . .
AND THERE HE IS. A boy from the past. A boy of around twelve. Peter is his name. His hair is straight and dark, parted on one side. It’s winter, and he is alone on a train. He carries a little bag his mother sewed, and his father gave to him. He has seen many cities already in his young life: Berlin, Vienna, Brussels. He’s seen the fires of Dunkirk, and the raids of Paris. There are the memories he carries, too, of his mother being paraded through Vienna with a sign around her neck, Pig Woman; and of his father’s face, covered in black soot from being smuggled on a coal train; and of people dying right next to him on the road; and of his time in Gurs, where his mother slapped a nun, saying, “We don’t live to eat—we eat to live!” and the time his father gave him that little sewn bag before riding off on a bicycle, getting smaller and smaller in the distance; and the time when nuns prayed for nine days but still couldn’t keep his parents from the convoy to Auschwitz.
And the memory he carries, too, of the moment he lost his faith.
I see Peter on a train, traveling up the hills on this snowy night, holding the little bag. In it is a bit of French money, his father’s gold pocket watch, a small silver horseshoe, a large ring that his mother always wore, and a miniature sparkplug, for luck.
Peter is alone as the train churns up to its final station of Saint-Agrève, right at the edge of the Plateau. It is the very middle of the night and snow is everywhere when he arrives. Peter gets off the train, and standing there in the quiet of the station is a lanky man with glasses and dark hair and big ears. The man greets him and tells him his name is Daniel. Together, the two set out for a long walk up through the forest, toward the stone house that Peter will call home. Les Grillons. The Crickets.
Now. I imagine how the trees looked that night, heavy, aching with snow. And how the sky looked, lit up from a brilliant moon behind the clouds. And how there were two solitary figures, one long and one small, walking through those forest paths. And how, in the hush of snow and night, there was just the syncopated sound of footfall: one tread, and the next; one tread and the next. . . .
Now: Sleep.