For a long time I hid my feelings. Once my thunderous fit of anger was over—to get the fur-lined jacket being offered to French camp victims just after the war—I clammed up. If a friend suddenly asked me, “What about your parents?” my terse reply was “Auschwitz.” I’d bend my head, and the person I was talking to would go on to another subject. It had to be a friend, of course. People who have no particular affection for you are rarely embarrassed by your distress. Their shameless questions are intended only to satisfy their curiosity, and they feel no compassion afterward. How many times have I controlled myself from sending them packing? And how many times didn’t I control myself?
In the store, if I refused to give a big enough discount, for example, a customer would insult me. As stingy as a Jew, obviously. Or rather a kike, with two little kike daughters, as a parent said, according to what Francine and I were told too late after the incident for me to react. I would have gladly let loose my rage at the imbecile who uttered such an insult without thinking. Would anyone dare talk about “niggers” in the class? Fortunately not, but it took a long time for the words “nigger” and “Negro” to disappear from white people’s uninhibited vocabulary. How much longer do we Jews have to wait?
The author Israel Shamir maintains that the Jew carries antiSemitism inside him. That he creates it, in short, by his behavior and his beliefs. His words are so virulent that the Palestinians use them as part of their propaganda. I’m far from thinking, like Shamir, that we’re responsible for causing the rejection that has brought us so much suffering. But I do wonder about a few things.
For a long time, Jews would invite only people from their own community to their homes. Their dishes became impure if they were soiled by mixing milk and meat. I remember that Mama herself broke a dish in a thousand pieces one day in the spring of 1942. We had nothing to eat, and the only product available with our rationing tickets was ham. . . . Mama didn’t get flustered. She served us the meat and heaved a sigh of relief because that day her son and daughters at least had something to eat. But she gritted her teeth the whole time and then threw down the plate violently. Mama, so pious, didn’t forsake her children that day. But she didn’t renounce her faith, either, even though she didn’t have two cents to buy another plate. I can’t help thinking that maybe, in the twenties and thirties—even the forties—if the Jews had been more discreet in observing their customs . . . I don’t know. Maybe the same horrors would have been committed anyway.
We were considered inferior beings, and we believed it—at least the children did. For a long time I remained silent because I was convinced I belonged to the Untouchable caste. Fortunately, I didn’t adopt the opposite point of view, believing myself to be superior because I was Jewish. I became a “normal” person—that is to say, like other people—one who’s pleased with his good choices and admits and regrets his bad ones. Today I have completely removed from my mind any idea of belief in God or of belonging to any religion. I base my decisions on logic, maybe not with great intelligence, but with common sense. I just turned eighty, yet I still have no certainties and no answers. But I’ve stopped remaining silent.
I spoke about my past for the first time in Orléans. It was there that I met Simone Veil, who joined the Resistance when she was only sixteen and was sent to Auschwitz with her mother and her sisters. She was arrested late in the war, in 1944, and owes her survival only to chance: she lied about her age so she could be selected to work. I felt admiration for this woman, of course, but not more than for any other member of the Resistance, Jewish or not. Being seated next to her didn’t impress me. However, I quickly understood what made her an extraordinary woman.
First she asked me a question, discreetly, just before the conference began. “You often tell your story to others, don’t you?”
I was truly taken aback. “Um . . . no, not really. Why?”
“Mr. Weismann, it’s your duty to bear witness.”
You have to have a lot of charisma to pull an old man like me out from the wall of silence he’s lived behind for fifty years! Coming from anyone else, this statement would have provoked violent rejection on my part. But Simone Veil suffered the same things I did, since she lost her parents in the camps. In fact, she suffered even more because she was present at the death of her mother, exhausted and sick, and still had to summon all her strength every morning at dawn to go transport stones from one part of the camp to another. . . . Simone Veil’s remark was warranted: I did need to talk about what I had suffered. Until then, I had preferred to remain silent—so as not to suffer from reliving difficult moments through words, no doubt, but not only for that reason. I was conscious, and I still am, that my story is no more or less important than that of the six million murdered Jews. It’s different, that’s all.
In the early nineties, a short time after meeting Madame Veil, I told my story to Blanche Finger and William Karel. They were doing research on the Vél’ d’Hiv and looking for survivors who could describe the facts just as they experienced them, or as they remembered, in any case. They gathered their words verbatim in a book entitled Operation Spring Wind, the code name used by Vichy for the roundup. Joe Kogan and I told about crawling under the barbed wire, fleeing through the woods of the Loiret, the gendarmes. . . . I noticed a few differences in our accounts, inevitable so many years after the events. We should have written everything down right after our return to Paris, in August 1942. But we had other things to do. . . .
To publicize Finger and Karel’s book launch, a half-century after the roundup, Jean-Marie Cavada produced a TV special. Léa, my little Léa, watched it. She jumped for her phone, was able to reach the producer’s office, and was given my number. We reunited with enormous emotion. Physically, she was the woman one would have predicted during her childhood: little and slight. Her character, however, definitely had asserted itself! Léa is lively, chatty, and cheerful. She’s lived an incredible life, a lot of it in the United States, where she worked as an acrobat for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. She’s been married twice but has no children—by choice, she says. She didn’t want to take the risk of having a Jewish child who could be afflicted with as much misery as she suffered. Judith, her sister, followed the same career path. They never left each other’s side, and their family even grew: Their mother separated from their father shortly before the war and started a new life. . . . She gave birth to a third daughter whom she was able to hide, Annie. Completely by chance, both my adoptive sisters’ parents were sent to the camps in the same train. They never returned.
Once again, thanks to the TV show, several children from the different orphanages I was in contacted me. In Lamarck, Rothschild, and the Castle of Méhoncourt, I wasn’t really close to anyone, but I did have some friends. Of course, we didn’t have many happy memories in common.
The teacher who worked in the old lady’s village invited me to visit. It was fascinating to talk to someone I knew who was already an adult when I was as a child. Far from providing answers to the questions I asked myself, he raised others. He told me that he had no idea there was a Jewish boy in his class! When I arrived in 1943, without my parents, he didn’t wonder what had become of them. According to what he said, no one, absolutely no one, in the countryside had any idea what was happening to the Jews.
It’s true that in the 1930s, when the exodus of Jews began after Hitler’s accession to power, few Poles or Russians, if any, moved to his village. Families settled in Paris and in the other big cities of France to be close to one another and help each other out. With no land, no trade sometimes, incapable of speaking French correctly, how could they have survived in a rural environment? I’d like to think that today, the Sarthe, where I live—the region I love so much—would know how to welcome foreigners. . . .
Now, as Simone Veil advised me, I bear witness, I fulfill my duty. I go regularly to convey my message to middle schools and high schools that invite me. Each time, it’s hard for me to talk about our arrest, our confinement in the Vél’ d’Hiv—and about the moment when I was torn away from my family. Standing in front of the children, I try as hard as possible not to cry, but I often see tears welling in my listeners’ eyes. . . . Often, at the end of these events, they write to me, and I get the most satisfying reward. They tell me how touched they were but, most of all, they give voice to what they’ve understood—that this must never happen again. That’s the main goal of what I’m doing. It does no good for me to tell my story just to make them cry. There’s no benefit to humanity in that. I encourage them to reflect and, if necessary, to act.
When the children are listening to me, the look in their eyes makes me feel calmer. Certain other happy events have that effect as well. In the spring of 2010, three million people went to see La Rafle (The Roundup), Rose Bosch’s film that relates what happened at the Vél’ d’Hiv and at Beaune-la-Rolande. Ms. Bosch based much of the film on my story. She found an adorable, convincing boy, Hugo Leverdez, to play me. I also took part in the filming. When I entered the reconstituted Vélodrome, a putrid odor choked me. I walked out immediately and said to my daughter Isabelle, who had accompanied me, “What a horrible stench! How is it possible?”
She stared at me with her eyes wide open: “But Papa . . . there’s no odor!”
Plunged into the sinister setting that I knew sixty-six years earlier, I somehow called up the memory of the unbearable smell that permeated the Vélodrome. . . .
When I attended the preview of the film, I didn’t see anything. I relived the whole experience from inside and was completely incapable of telling Rose what she wanted to hear—that she had done a good job. Yes, she did. She showed the hate, the madness, and the stupidity in the eyes of the French civil servants who organized the roundup. Most of all, she showed the intolerable suffering of the 12,884 people arrested in Paris and in the surrounding area on the sixteenth and seventeenth of August, 1942. 12,844 is the official number—definitive, indisputable. There were 3,031 men, 5,802 women, and 4,051 children. Including my sisters. And me.
Me, lucky in the end because I survived. At the conclusion of the film, little Joseph escapes, a lot more easily than Joe Kogan and Joseph Weismann in real life, but what difference does it make? He escapes, and anything can happen to him after that. . . . After La Rafle came out, dozens and dozens of people, who recognized me from having seen me on TV or in the newspapers when the film was being publicized, asked me one question: “What happened afterward?”
Here’s my answer. Afterward, I was loved or rejected. I often cried, but I looked for happiness in the most remote corner where it could be hiding, and I was able to find it. And I imposed a new trial upon myself, the duty to bear witness. I owed it to my parents, to my two sisters, to Joe, and to the 75,000 French and all 6,000,000 victims of Nazi barbarism.
There you have it: the story of a little boy growing up in Paris in a Polish family. He’s poor but receives a lot of love, every day. . . . He goes to school, has friends, and doesn’t ask himself many questions. In short, he’s happy, until. . . .
I realize that a book is something fairly inconsequential. But my grandchildren, whom I cherish, will read it. They’ll talk about it with their friends, who, in turn, will perhaps speak of it to their families. Just as I have given up trying to understand how and why such horrors could have taken place, they’ll eventually give up as well. But after having listened to my voice and to those of others who decided to speak out like me, they’ll know. And all their lives they’ll do their best to make sure that History doesn’t repeat itself. At least that’s my hope.