Double-Edged

He was first bullied because of his origins as a teenager, and this is perhaps why Jean-Claude talks about it in such a detached tone; it’s an old story.

As a student at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, whenever he was trying to win the companionship of other students, he would hear over and over: “Get lost, dirty Jew! No one invited you.” Audacious, he would retaliate, blows would rain down upon him, and he would return home with his lips bloodied. Was France so fundamentally anti-Semitic? Was poor little Jean-Claude condemned to suffer abuse by such brutes?

That “poor little” Schreiber will soon be a member of the International League of Fighters for Peace, and will fight against the Croix-de-Feu militants. Among his best friends will be two young aristocrats, Féral and Curial: two barons who, like him, will experience having unsophisticated insults hurled in their direction: “Death to the Jews!”

In 1940, the young Officer Cadet Schreiber shares his first lunch with the officers in the regiment. One of them, without really lowering his voice, starts yammering about the lack of courage that, according to him, Jews usually demonstrate. Schreiber stands up and asks Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel to give him permission to go “bust in that gentleman’s face.” But the “gentleman” is already out of his seat and moving toward the officer cadet, hand outstretched: “Schreiber, I did it on purpose. I wanted to know if you had it in you. And you do! Don’t be angry with me, and please accept my friendship.” This was Lieutenant Ville, the one who would write a whole poem in the Journal of Marches talking about the “smiling and fearless kid,” that same Officer Cadet Schreiber, that supposedly fearful Jew whose bravery would astonish even the “old warriors.”

Much later, in 1942, in the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp, Jean-Claude Schreiber’s origins arouse the suspicions of another officer, Captain Combaud de Roquebrune, as we have already seen. A brief test is imposed: “And Guy, what if I asked your daughter to marry me?” “I would agree to it. But my son would never marry your daughter. Because of the blood …” This was still the era when political correctness did not forbid a person from expressing their prejudices. Which allowed honest and sincere people to dispose of them. The captain also appears interested in attending the operation that will be performed on the prisoner Schreiber by a doctor, also a prisoner, who will be armed with a blade cut from inside a jelly jar. The boils are lanced, with no anesthetic whatsoever, and the patient clenches his teeth, not producing the slightest complaint. After the procedure he asks Combaud de Roquebrune: “Might I ask, my captain, why you have honored this somewhat medieval act of surgery with your presence?” The officer seems embarrassed, puts forth a few fairly improbable excuses, then confesses: “You see, Jean-Claude … I was always told that Jews couldn’t handle pain, and that at the slightest pinprick they squealed like pigs having their throats cut. I see now that this was a ridiculous lie and … I’m asking you to forgive me.”

During the first postwar days in Paris, Jean-Claude tries to explain away his feeling of isolation with that ancestral distrust that his name and birth—his “different” blood—usually provoke in other people. He remembers situations where an attitude of rejection or scorn made him suffer, conflicts that were often petty and all the more hurtful for it.

Yet he knows that this is not what makes him such a foreigner in the eyes of Parisians celebrating their victory in this month of May 1945.

It is his very life that distances him from his compatriots. He is becoming a bothersome witness. For certain people, the return of this soldier awakens a guilty awareness of their well-behaved inaction during the Occupation. As for those even younger than he is, they are irritated to have Lieutenant Schreiber and his combatant’s shadow hanging over their sparkling and untroubled youth. Their eyes reflect the trees in bloom on the boulevards; his, the snowy plains blackened by explosions and tagged with bodies. Their ears are cradled by the lascivious undulations of saxophones. His hearing echoes with the shouts of the wounded, the banging of shots on armored plating. They theorize about existence with pretty phrases while he carries, in his memory and in his bruised body, the density of an existence that refutes, by virtue of its truth, every one of those charming commentaries.