1944

Sunday, January 10, 1944, evening

Will I make it through? It’s an ever more harrowing question. Will we come out of this alive?

Two main paths lie before us now, and both lead to danger and perhaps to annihilation: deportation, which hangs over us still, and what will happen here until the war ends—the events that will bring it to an end and which, as I now see more clearly since Gérard [Mantoux] talked to us about them, will be frightfully dangerous.

I fear for Jean, because his life will be in danger. If we do get back together after all this, if I avoid the risk we have been running for two years now, and if he comes out of this hurricane of fire safe and sound, then we will have paid a high price for our happiness. What extraordinary value it will have acquired.

How different his return will be from what I imagined. The doorbell won’t ring. I won’t have to wonder which would be the right room for welcoming him home. Will I even be here? Even assuming that nothing happens to me, where will we be in the great upheaval that will shake France from top to bottom?

In three months’ time, perhaps? Three months is a very long time for people who live through them expecting the landings to happen every day for no reason other than hope and misleading rumor. But once you look on it as something that will definitely happen, once you suddenly see it as a done deal, it becomes very short.

Yes, long, terribly so for those who are suffering, for people who as Mme Poncey told us are in a concentration camp near Vienna and are so weak that they topple over when hit by the crusts of bread thrown to them by French prisoners nearby. For the deportees, for those who are dying of hunger, for those under torture in prison.

Today, at Breynaert’s, François told the following story which he heard from one of his colleagues, a railway engineer at Châlonssur-Marne. A train carrying deportees (objectors to S.T.O.) stopped at Châlons. Prisoners in one of the carriages unbolted the floor and lay down between the rails, hoping they would get away. The train left. But the Germans had anticipated the prisoners’ trick: all the carriages are locked and sealed except the last one, which is open and full of German soldiers. As the train left the station, they could see the deportees lying on the sleepers, and they opened fire with everything they had, using explosive bullets which tear people to shreds. Two or three men got up and tried to run for it, but they were shot down. They carried on shooting until everyone was hit. Then they got off the train, prodded the wounded with their rifle butts to make them get up, then shot them again, and finally they piled all the bodies, including dying and wounded men, into the guard’s van, and the train moved off. With twelve dead men we shall never know about.

It is atrocious. Death is raining down on every side, copiously and blindly disbursed by that exasperated race for the sole reason that not everyone has accepted its claim to be the master race.

I couldn’t play any music because I suddenly had an acute foreboding of the evil that may befall us. For instance, Denise in a cattle truck; the idea was unbearable.

I felt almost angry with her because I thought: She doesn’t realize, she is unaware of the danger, and that’s criminal. She should go into hiding this minute. If we wait to be alerted, it could be too late. How can we stay here and take such a risk?

On Friday the issue was discussed at Mme Milhaud’s. She was saying: Later on, if misfortune should befall us, we will not understand why we stayed on, and if we had had the possibility of getting out, we will think that we must have been mad. Lack of awareness probably does play a role. But for my part, I am aware, and that is why I am so tormented.

Tuesday, January 11, 1944, evening

This afternoon I experienced afresh, in every detail, what it means to be reimmersed in atrocious reality.

Yesterday I thought I had grabbed a life buoy: André Boutelleau came into the library, chatted with me for two hours, and offered me a contract to translate A Defence of Poetry, something I had mentioned to him vaguely earlier on. All of a sudden it gave me a goal that was more accessible and more tangible than my dissertation. It really was a lifeline, because for a while now I have been drowning, literally. The conversation gave me back some of my confidence, I went back a little to being what I was three years ago, when I felt so excited about the awakening of literary sensibility, and everything seemed new and magical, the time that came to an end when Jean left, it was the time when I sat my English literature exam, when I worked and passed my diploma.

Now I can see that there was something rather forced about the pleasure I felt yesterday, because it can never be what it was. Then, it was a spontaneous gush, a permanent fizz. Now, I feel I am going against reality; I struggle to retain the sense of pleasure, because it is surely something indispensable if I am not to become completely unhinged. The tangible form in which this state of mind manifests itself is, for example, being certain that I live in two worlds and that I cannot integrate the one with the other, that André Boutelleau cannot and will not enter into the world of misery and suffering that I have discovered, and that I would be obliged to give only a part of myself to what he’s asked me to do. But the essential me is unity of purpose, single-mindedness.

So I had retrieved a little of my balance, but it was like a sick man trying to cure himself. The proof that it was an artificial, imposed, and fragile equilibrium was the fact that it took just one jolt to dislodge it. When I got to Neuilly, Jeanine told me that Mme Schouker had just had a telephone call informing her that her son (age eleven), whom she thought safe in Bordeaux, had been arrested.

That was all it took to reimmerse me in reality. I was haunted by a feeling of moral disquiet.

I spent the later part of the evening at the home of Mme Schwartz’s mother. Among other things I learned about the following:

the arrest of a young woman I had met at her home, a Mme Carcassonne, together with her husband and her eleven-year-old son. A fragile child (I think he was even abnormal). The doorbell rang at 1:30 a.m., the boy tried to escape down the servants’ stairs, he was beaten up. Down in the street, she went on her knees to beg them not to take her child (you have to have a fairly clear idea of what to expect to beg to be allowed to abandon a child). Request refused. The Carcassonnes had to wait for an hour in a car in the street while they went back up to wreck the apartment and loot it. Supplies for boulevard de la Gare. All three have been deported.

the sister of another lady I had also visited (who was also arrested subsequently), who was taken with her eight-month-old baby and another child of four. Mme Schwartz’s mother said: “What can you do with an eight-month-old baby? Here she took it for walks and put it to bed . . .” Words like that make you see it all clearly, with nightmarish precision.

at boulevard de la Gare there are aisles for every sort of thing, furniture, sewing kits, haberdashery, jewelry. Entirely made up of things stolen from the dwellings of people who have been taken and deported, which are packed and crated by the internees themselves. The crates are sent to Germany right away.

Thursday, January 13

I returned home this evening crushed by the full awareness of what is occurring. There are moments when I see it all, and I feel as if I am flailing in the ocean in the pitch dark, without a glimmer of light. I’ve felt like that quite often (I remember, last February, when they rounded up children). But now it comes back all the time, I think that’s what the normal, real state is, that’s to say reality as it really is, the state I would be in all the time if I were always fully conscious.

And what set off this new crisis? Just assembling a few facts, facts like thousands of others, that happened to be in my mind. This morning, for instance, I went out to the Sorbonne; I wanted to talk to Josette about my translation. (To say that I was moved and excited by reading Shelley yesterday evening—that self also exists, it is as true and deep as the other self, but does it have a right to exist?) The concierge at the English Department came up to me and asked if “there were any problems”; it’s always the same story, “someone” had told him to warn students in my category to be very careful. What could I say? I know all about it; I believe it’s perfectly possible I will be arrested; and I completely understand why he’s tipping me off. But after two years it has become so wearing.

Then the conversation turned to current events. He told me that the other day an Italian student had come up to him and said: “Concierge, I’ve seen something horrible!” “I’m not surprised, everything is horrible nowadays,” A. replied. “I saw a German lorry piled high with corpses that weren’t even covered.”

Probably men who had been executed; no one will ever know anything about them.

After that I sat in for an hour on Cazamian’s course on Walter Scott. A little respite. Then I went to Enfants-Malades to see my three wards. Mme P. spoke to me about her plans to take revenge on the disgusting cowards who denounce other people and pillage their homes when they are arrested (she knows a concierge who does exactly that).

After lunch I went to Neuilly to fetch two children to take them to Julien-Lacroix.

The little Schouker boy was arrested in Bordeaux during a general roundup: all the Jews of Bordeaux were arrested at 1:30 in the morning. When they get to Drancy we’ll try to have him released. Eleven years old, all alone, arrested at 1:30! That little fellow really must have been a threat to the security of the Reich!

Two weeks ago they tried to arrest the Chief Rabbi of Bordeaux. But as he was not at home, they arrested, by way of reprisal, all the old folk and sick people at the hospice. The local U.G.I.F. director, Mlle Ferraya (I always used to see her name when I was working in the Internee department) committed suicide.

A four-year-old boy turned up at Neuilly, we know nothing about him except his name, and yesterday we slipped him into the arms of a Turkish couple who had been “liberated” to go into the hospice. He’s very cute, he skips all the time, but he can’t tell us anything about Drancy.

Met Mme Bayer, who told me that they’d come to arrest Algerian families in her street, and that the French gendarmes went to fetch the children at school, keeping the mothers and parents back while they went to get the children from their schools.

Dr. Seidengart and his family come to mind: his parents, his wife, and a daughter age four living next door to each other while he is in a P.O.W. camp. One day they came to arrest the family. The wife disappeared, nobody knows what happened to her, and her father-in-law has been deported. Then his mother and his daughter went. When he comes back, won’t he be driven mad by what he finds?

Deloncle is dead, they say he was murdered by the Gestapo; at the moment they are settling scores with everybody who was too close to their doings at the start.

January 17, 1944

At Neuilly we’ve got a boy who arrived there who knows how; he was foisted on to a Turkish couple as they were being released from Drancy. He’s adorable, he kisses people all the time. He’s four years old and seems to know how to look after himself. He is very well brought up; the other day he went up to one of the nursing staff and said: “Please, miss, if it’s not too much bother, could you make up my room?” Apparently he cries when he goes to bed at night and calls for his mother. Where is she? In the camp? Deported? No one knows.

How many little children are there like that who are calling out for their mothers and don’t even have a Neuilly to go to?

Nicole S. turned up at the English Department in a state of great distress. Jean-Paul has written saying he’s going to leave again, and she is going to have a horrible time. I feel that he was her world, and that is probably what made her a little blind, or at any rate what made me wonder, when I was in one of my moods of dismay, whether I was mad, since everybody else seemed to be remaining calm, or whether I was not a Cassandra, exaggerating the coming doom. She said: “This is the worst catastrophe for him and for me.” I’ve been there too but not in the same way: I didn’t realize it until I had been without news for a long time. What could I do for them?

Gérard says it’s wrong to get out.

Saw André Bay, a nice man; was introduced to M. Catin and Marie-Louise Reuge.

Tuesday, January 18

I had only one free morning this week. I didn’t even dare make use of it, it was such a gift. At 9:00 the mail brought an S.O.S. from the Bordeaux people. I rushed around all day to no great effect. Parents don’t want me to go out. Rochefort, Denis, Lamarck, etc.

Odile Varlot was arrested two months ago when she was on her way to a convent with clothes for the children she had hidden there. She had been denounced and was deported in her sandals and summer frock (in Nice).

Saturday, January 22

More rumors about roundups; there were some last night. Mme Pesson alerted Maman.

Papa says we have to think about when we should leave. I’m still afraid it is too late. If they ring the bell, what do we do? If we don’t open the door, they’ll knock it down.

Open up and show our I.D.: the chances are a hundred to one against getting away with it.

Make a run for it: what if they are at the servants’ entrance? Quickly remake the beds so they can’t see we’ve just left. Up on the roof there’ll be the cold, the reaction and the knowledge that come the dawn we would be living like hunted animals. I’ve still never left home. Open the door, the warrant, dress in a hurry, no rucksack allowed, what should we take? Consciousness of the looming catastrophe, of total change, no time to think. All we’re leaving behind, the car waiting for us in the street, the camp, meeting all the others, unrecognizable.

Will it be or will it not?

Wednesday, January 24, 1944

An avalanche of new things, things to do, and a harsh descent into the depths.

Yesterday morning I took little Gérard to Mme Carp. He didn’t want me to leave him: “Will you stay? Will you have a meal with me?” he said in his pleading, affectionate voice. Fortunately he took to Mme C. right way. (The C.s really know the meaning of charity and simplicity. When I said that to them this morning, her husband answered: “Poppycock! The only problem is that there aren’t a few more of us.”) What a shame that one half of humanity is manufacturing evil and a tiny minority is trying to put it right!

Miraculously my afternoon, all of it, was free. I wanted to play some music with Denise. (But it would have been impossible because we’d discussed the risk she was taking, and that I was choosing to take, and I knew that she would be angry with me, or perhaps offended by my calling on her, but there was something that pushed me to override my feelings—but the atmosphere was quite spoiled.) As a joke I told myself: “Something is sure to turn up.”

At 2:00 the eldest of the Biéder girls came by; her whole family is in a panic, obviously, a single mother with eight children, and to have a little space she wanted at least four of them taken off her, that gave me something to do. I went back with the daughter, who is dim, to their place, and then to Marie M.’s, ever ready (yet another member of that small elite), then to Mme B.’s, where I failed to find Mme Milhaud.

Robert Neveux and his wife came to dinner. They talked about Jean, Robert’s brother, who was home on leave in his spanking German uniform, with both the French Croix de Guerre and the German Iron Cross in his buttonhole! What a problem of conscience! It’s driving me mad, because I just can’t imagine how free men, endowed with souls, consciences, and the faculty of judgment, can be turned into fanatics and machines. What’s been done to Jean Neveux is the same thing on a smaller scale as what Nazism has done to the Germans.

This morning when I got up there was a pneu from Danielle’s grandmother. It’s kept me busy all morning. I must jot down some details of the kind that must never be forgotten. Mme W. told me this: Near where she lives they arrested an old lady with an amputated leg; the wound hasn’t healed because she has diabetes. The first time they came, the inspector saw the condition she was in and left her alone. Two days later, they came back with a stretcher to get her and interned her at Hôpital Rothschild.

But Rothschild is packed to the rafters, and since other hospitals are not allowed to admit invalids of our kind . . . A few days ago Hôpital Saint-Joseph had to discharge a paralyzed woman, and “Jews” no longer have the right to be taken by ambulance, nor do they have the right to be seated in a German office anymore. An old lady in failing health was summoned the other day and went with her nurse to the Kommandatur to be greeted this way: “Sit down, you (said to the nurse)—Jew woman, stay standing!” (for two hours).

Who has the right to treat human beings like animals? This is what we have come to two thousand years since the coming of Christ.

Even private clinics are now obliged to turn Jews away. Denise had booked a room at the maternity clinic in rue Narcisse-Diaz for the birth of her baby. Yesterday the lady came (in tears) to give her back the deposit. What is to be done? And who knows about these things? I have to tell them. But people who have not had direct experience, even my friends, even the Léautés, who will hear about it from me, will never grasp it. They will feel sorry for us, as individuals, but they won’t realize the true import of this detail and what it means.

Another story: this morning Mme Biéder told me that her daughter had lost a printed cotton scarf: she was fond of it because it was a present from her father. The other day she saw it being worn by someone who lives in her area (Porte Saint-Denis). She asked the stranger if she had found the scarf by chance. The woman replied: “No, your concierge gave it to me, it belonged to her sister-in-law who has just passed away, and as she can’t wear it because she is in mourning, she gave it to me.” In fact the concierge picked it up on the staircase (and she has never worn mourning). Is it possible to be so base as to steal from a family of eight children with a deported father that can barely scrape by? Just to think of it nearly made me vomit with indignation. Poor Mme Biéder is constantly obliged to give the concierge something (wine, potatoes—but she and her children have only had boiled potatoes to eat for a month) to ward off the risk of denunciation. She is in the concierge’s hands.

Monday, January 31, 1944

Georges came to lunch yesterday as usual. I had brought Raphaël and Dédé from Neuilly. While they were playing in the drawing room I suddenly intuited (such intuitions have become so familiar) that Georges was giving the parents bad news. I creeped closer. I wasn’t wrong.

Suzanne is all alone, completely dispossessed (she hasn’t even got her handbag); Marianne, Edith (François’s wife), and Mme Horace Weill senior have been taken; fortunately Emmeline wasn’t in, nor was Jean-Paul; young Bernard was saved as well.

I felt a pain in my heart; there is no other kind of news these days. But when close friends and relatives are involved, the pain is of a different kind. The wheels of horror are turning and turning and grinding away without stopping. Some turns of the wheel crush strangers, others crush your own folk, leaving nothing behind but an inextricable mess of suffering and cares.

The W. R. family is a case like a thousand others. We can all tell stories like this: François, killed in June 1940, an officer in a tank battalion, fatally wounded in his lung by shrapnel as he was giving the order to scuttle his own tanks so they would not fall into enemy hands. I never managed to understand that, and the injury that his death dealt to his family has never healed. He left a two-year-old baby, Bernard, and a wife, a Litwak nobody knew very well. François’s grandmother has been almost solely responsible for looking after the child.

August 1941: Maurice, François’ father, is arrested in the first roundup of lawyers. He spends a year at Drancy before being deported in such pitiful health that it is virtually certain he won’t come back.

December 1941: Georges and Robert, Suzanne’s two brothers, are arrested. Released after a hundred days at Compiègne. Robert died three months ago, probably from the effects of Compiègne.

After Maurice’s deportation, Suzanne goes to be with her children in the Free Zone. And now . . . Marianne, her daughter, her mother-in-law, and her sister-in-law have been deported.

Not long ago I quoted a sentence I appreciated from a Russian play that I came across in [Kuprin’s] The Duel: “We shall rest . . . We shall rest!” The sleep of the dead is what is meant. I am more and more inclined to tell myself that only the dead can escape from this oppressive persecution; when I hear of the death of a Jew, I think in spite of myself: “Now he’s out of the Germans’ reach.” Isn’t that horrible? We have almost stopped grieving for the dead.

The life we lead is so oppressing and a man’s life is worth so little that you are obliged to wonder if there isn’t anything more than this life. No doctrine or dogma will ever make me believe in the hereafter; but the spectacle of the life we lead may succeed in doing so.

I don’t want it to do so because it would mean that I no longer have any taste for living. There surely is a good life, there surely is happiness in some other part of the world, being kept in waiting, for me if I survive, and most certainly for other people. But what will never be erased from my mind is the awareness of how little a human life is worth, or of the evil that is in humanity, or of the enormous strength that evil can acquire once it has been awakened.

January 31, 1944

Françoise came yesterday to bring me the response about Danielle. She told me that one of their friends who works opposite the Gestapo H.Q. (place des Saussaies) has been obliged to move offices, because he couldn’t bear hearing the screams all day long. Prisoners have things shoved under their fingernails to make them confess, they’re interrogated for eleven hours at a stretch, then they are sent to “rest” under the guard of an enormous police dog that will tear you limb from limb at the slightest move, such as taking a handkerchief out of your pocket.

What is going on in our prisons? Those people too will have tales to tell.

Tuesday, February 1

Yesterday morning I went to get Doudou out of the hospital. His nurses and the other children in the ward didn’t want to let him go.

Then I called on Mme Weill. She’s in a desperate state of nerves. Concerned about the children. Worried about coping.

Must not forget this. Pierre, at boarding school, has an old teacher who has to be humored with gifts. In class, in front of all the others, after some kind of reprimand, he said directly to Pierre: “As for you, you would do better to stay with folk of your own faith in Le Bourget!”

It makes your heart bleed. When you know just how atrocious the implications of that remark are, when you know what Drancy actually means.

Of course Pierre’s classmates immediately quizzed him about his faith. Can you force a child to lie? How could he ever get out of such a tangle? One to one, “swearing not to tell,” he admitted what he was.

Nowadays, and this is new, when I see a German man or woman, I notice, with amazement, that a wave of anger rises up inside me, I want to strike them. For me they have become the people perpetrating the evil I come up against every minute. I used not to see them that way. I saw them as blind, dumb, and brutal zombies but as people who were not responsible for what they were doing, and maybe I was right? But now I see them through the eyes of a simple person, and I have an instinctive, primitive reaction—have I learned to hate?

Why should I reject this primitive attitude? Why do I try to argue, to elucidate the causes and origins of who and what is to blame, when they don’t do so themselves? A question worth asking? Does the conscious effort to suppress hatred in any way mitigate the evil that has been done? Will they ever understand anything other than an eye for an eye? This is a harrowing question.

Yesterday was the eleventh anniversary of Hitler’s accession! Eleven years, we now know, of a regime whose mainstays are concentration camps and the Gestapo. Who can admire that?

I hardly slept last night; yesterday evening, when I arrived at home, Papa announced his decision not to spend the night here anymore. I am torn between Papa, now committed to a decision that has been gestating for quite a while, and Maman, who is too worn out to accept it. Who will turn out to be right? Papa, who can see the facts, or Maman, who has her feelings? Is Maman blind and Papa clear-sighted? The truth is that all the care and fatigue of the life we lead will be borne by Maman; it’s always the woman. Before dinner, Maman wept as if she had suddenly broken down. It’s true, for months on end she has been putting up with everything on behalf of everybody and hasn’t let herself go. She is overstretched. My God! What will come of all this?

We will have to give up even the little bit of family life we had left. Our evenings together. On the other hand, should that carry any weight in the face of danger, if the danger is real? Papa has already seen what the risk is; I understand his decision. But I also understand Maman’s extreme weariness.

Friday, February 4, evening

This time, the storm will break soon. The abscess has been swelling since the beginning of the week. At noon we had a visit that left us “bewildered”—some woman sent to alert us by Mme D. There was talk about a marriage which confused us, made us think it was all a red herring. We scratched our heads, and I was sorry not to have a detective’s mind.

But it was genuine. When I returned home, I encountered Papa coming down the stairs. N. had called on him to say: “Alert for the next three days.”

I had been at Nadine’s. Lessons have been suspended yet again. The pianist who played with us was arrested on Monday evening with his sister and has surely been deported. Denounced. Mme Jourdan and Nadine played a Beethoven sonata. Suddenly, during the Adagio, the cruelty and lunatic injustice of this new arrest— after a thousand, ten thousand others—seared my heart. A boy of such talent, a boy able to offer the world such pure joy through an art oblivious to human malice—up against brutality, matter devoid of spirit. How many souls of infinite worth, repositories of gifts others should have treated with humility and respect, have been similarly crushed and broken by Germanic brutality? Just as a precious violin, full of dormant capacities to awaken the deepest and purest emotions, may be broken by brutal, sacrilegious force. All these people the Krauts have arrested, deported, or shot were worth a thousand times more than they are! What a waste! What a triumph of evil over good, of the ugly over the beautiful, of strength over harmony, of matter over mind! Souls like Françoise’s, entire worlds of purity filled with marvelous abilities, have also been swallowed up by this machinery of evil.

Let’s close our eyes. Let’s forget what is, and ask: “Can you imagine that in some other place, evil men are able to slaughter some other multitude of innocent people in their millions, as has happened here to the Jews?” Because when you strip it down to the essentials, in the mind of any decent human being, that is the question, that is what has been done, what the Germans have done.

Yet I still believe that good is superior to evil. In the present moment everything contradicts my belief. Everything is trying to prove to me that true superiority, real and concrete superiority, is on the side of might. But the mind denies the facts. What is the source of this ineradicable belief? It certainly does not derive from tradition.

Poor Jean Marx. How is he going to bear it all? Although I can’t say why, I feel that artists suffer a hundred times more than men of action. Because it wrenches them completely out of the ideal world in which they live. And then, they are hypersensitive to the slightest scratch.

And Jean-Paul came back today!

Another phase comes to an end. I’m going to live like a tramp and a down-and-out. Here endeth my “official existence.”

Monday, February 14, 1944

Schwab, Marianne, Gilbert.

More than a week ago I stopped writing this diary, wondering if I had reached a turning point in my external life. Nothing has happened yet. I carry on sleeping at Andrée’s, and the parents sleep at the L[oiselet]s’. Every evening as we are on the point of leaving, a question hangs in the air; uselessly, because we have already gone over things and are past reopening the discussion. We know that no one can aspire to being absolutely right, and we have no right to go against Papa, who has already been through it.²³ It’s just fatigue, the temptation to spend the evening at home, to sleep in our own beds, which reawakens an opposition that has already been considered and consciously rejected.

This week we received a message from Marianne asking for warm clothing. They are at Drancy. We made a parcel of our own clothes; I made her a little sewing kit, which I would like to have myself. There are many details in the life of a deportee that I can imagine. A trainload of fifteen hundred people left on Thursday. Maybe they were on that train.

Gilbert’s mother has been arrested in Grenoble. That brings a life of suffering full circle: they lost all their money, then her husband died, and a year later her son Yves passed away suddenly at the age of eighteen. She had stayed in Grenoble only for the sake of her aged mother-in-law, who was not taken.

Yesterday Georges told us the story of a woman of eighty who was arrested together with her husband in the roundup at Troyes. Her son was concerned not to have had news of her. He inquired at the hospice, then at the hospital. In the end they told him she was at the morgue. She died at Drancy, and they took her to the morgue, without a nightdress or even a sheet to cover her, which means they removed the clothing she was wearing when she was taken in. Maman cried: “Things like that must be recorded, to be remembered afterward!” Does she know what I am doing, and that I’m trying to forget as little as I can?

During the alert the other day, thirty people with stars were arrested, sent to Drancy and deported, just because they were out and about (simply to amuse themselves, obviously!)—Rabbi Sachs was returning from a funeral. Another man was turned out of the métro station at Cité (presumably not an official “Air Raid Shelter”) on his way back from a church service in memory of his son, who had died in the war, and was taken by the German police. “Aryans” who break the curfew get fined 1,500 francs, others are deported.

Tuesday, February 15, 1944

This morning at Neuilly I saw Mme Kahn, who has just had a week at Drancy. She was arrested at Orly and, as a member of [the U.G.I.F.] staff, was released the day before the last convoy departed. From her I learned details we will only ever know from people coming back from deportation. She went so to speak to the very brink. From that point on lies the unknown, secrets only known by deportees.

Life is bearable inside Drancy itself. She wasn’t hungry during her week there. What I wanted were details about the departures. I know the camp at Drancy, I went there every day for two separate fortnights last year; I can imagine the life people lead inside. I can still see the big windows of the buildings and faces at those windows, faces of people shut in, condemned to idleness, or else scrabbling about for whatever food they could find and eating on their bunks at any time. Just opposite the P.Q.J. was the Klotz family, father, mother, a son, and two daughters, the mother a beautiful, distinguished woman with white hair. I would like to tell about that, but who am I to tell the story in the place of people who were inside, and who suffered?

I asked for precise details. A day or two before the convoy is scheduled, they sort them into rooms which correspond to a wagonload, sixty people, men and women together (families are not separated, presumably as far as Metz). For sixty people they put sixteen straw beds on the floor of a sealed cattle wagon, one slop pail (maybe three); when are they emptied? For food, each deportee gets a parcel before departure containing four large boiled potatoes, half a kilo of boiled beef, 250 grams of margarine, a few dry biscuits, a piece of Gruyère, a loaf and a quarter. Rations for a six-day journey.

Do they starve? In what must be a stifling atmosphere, in the smell of slops, the smell of bodies. No ventilation? I don’t expect so. And what about cramps; not all of them can lie down, or even sit, when there are sixty to a wagon.

Invalids and old folk in with them. It might be manageable if you were with respectable people. But you have to reckon on all types being unpleasantly close.

Washing, in the camp, is done by men and women together. Mme Kahn said: “You can manage washing without being seen, if people are decent, and then when a woman is not well, when she goes to the bathroom, another woman stands to shield her.” Mme Kahn is very brave, and she is a nurse. She said: “For people who become embarrassed about these things, it is obviously a huge bother.” But there are such people.

I asked: “Who empties the slop pails in the cattle cars?” (The question bothers me.) She doesn’t know. I asked her if she saw arrestees coming into the camp (I was wondering if she had seen Marianne and her grandmother, but she was released before they were jailed). She said: “In my room, for instance, there was a family of thirteen people, parents and children, who had been arrested in the Ardennes; the father was wounded in the war and had a medal, with eleven children from fifteen months to twenty years old. When Fuidine (another Orly staff member) saw I had taken them into the room, he said: ‘Well that’s a great find you’ve made!’ But I can assure you they were clean and well brought up, all of them. And the mother was so dignified! Never said a word.” My heart wept as I listened to her tale.

Eleven children! What ever are they going to do with the younger ones? If they deport them to put them to work, what use are the children? Is it true they are put in German workhouses? They don’t send wives and children with the non-Jewish workers who go to Germany. The monstrous incomprehensibility and illogical horror of the whole thing boggle the mind. But there’s probably nothing to work out, because the Germans aren’t even trying to give a reason or a purpose. They have one aim, which is extermination.

So why do German soldiers I pass on the street not slap or insult me? Why do they quite often hold the métro door open for me and say: “Excuse me, miss” when they pass in front? Why? Because those people do not know, or rather, they have stopped thinking; they just want to obey orders. So they do not even see the incomprehensible illogicality of opening a door for me one day and perhaps deporting me the next day: yet I would still be the same person. They have forgotten the principle of causality.

There’s also the probability that they do not know everything. The atrocious characteristic of this regime is its hypocrisy. They do not know all the horrible details of these persecutions, because there is only a small group of torturers involved, alongside the Gestapo.

If they knew, would they have feelings? Would they feel the suffering of all these people torn from their homes, of women severed from their own blood and flesh? They’ve become too stupid for that.

And they have stopped thinking, I keep coming back to that, I think it’s the root of the evil; it’s the solidest prop of this regime. The destruction of personal thought and of the response of individual consciences is Nazism’s first step.

Mme Kahn said: “I saw people coming in from Bordeaux, from Nice, from Grenoble (Mme Bloch?), from the coastal towns.” I reckon the suffering of people like that must be even worse because the change was so abrupt. Here we, I for instance, know it all, we know better. But for them, the people who were living almost normally at the other end of France, what a wrench! How hard it must be for them to adapt!

“Going into Drancy was nothing really; the shock came when they told me I was getting out.” I too know the “landscape” of Drancy. But, what will it be like when I feel I am locked up right and proper, that an entire portion of my life has ended and, who knows, maybe my entire life, though I do want to go on living, even in the camp.

Isn’t all the above just like a newspaper article? “I saw X, who has just come back from . . . He agreed to answer these questions.” But what newspaper would publish articles about these things nowadays? “A Visit to Drancy.” Who will talk about that?

Is it not an insult to the unspeakable suffering of all these individual souls, each person with his or hers, to speak of them as if for a news article? Who can ever say what each person’s suffering has been? The only truthful report worthy of being written down would be one that included the full stories of every individual deportee.

All the time at the back of my mind are passages from Resurrection, from volume two, where the journey of the deportees is described. It almost comforts me (strange comfort) to know that someone else, Tolstoy as it happened, saw and wrote things of the same kind. Because we are so isolated, our special suffering creates a barrier between us and everyone else, and as a result our experience has become incommunicable, without precedent and without connection to any other experience of the world. Afterward this impression will fade and vanish, because people will know. But it must never be forgotten that while it was happening, the human beings who suffered all these tortures were completely separated from people who did not know about them, that the great law of Christ saying that all men are brothers and all should share and relieve the suffering of their fellow men was ignored. Because there is not just class inequality, there is also inequality in pain (which sometimes, especially in peacetime, corresponds to class inequality).

This time last year I wrote to Jean about Resurrection in oddly exalted terms. I even copied a page out for him, the passage in which Tolstoy tries to account for all that evil. Now I can’t even mention it to him. The other day at Andrée’s I came across my diary, begun in a year that turned out to be both tragic and wonderful, the year I met Jean, and when we picnicked at Aubergenville.

Now tragedy has become unrelievedly dark, and tension is a permanent condition. Everything is shrouded in gray; there is nothing but unending, monotonous worry, all the more dreadful for being the monotony of anguish.

. . . It was two years ago. It makes me dizzy to think that two years have gone by, and it is still going on. I sort the months into years and they turn into history; and that’s when my shoulders feel as though they are going to collapse.

When we were in the sickroom undressing two four-year-old twins who had just come in, Mme Loewe asked me: “Well, then, how are things going for you?” I answered: “Not good.” So she tried to boost my morale and said: “Come on, now, don’t let it get you down. They’ll pick us up at the same time and we’ll make the journey together. Nous serons de la même fournée.”

She thought I said what I said because I was frightened for myself. But she was wrong. It’s for everybody else, for the people who are being arrested day after day, for all those who have already been through it. It pains me to think of others in pain. If I were the only one, it would all be so easy. I’ve never thought about myself, and I’m not going to start now. The thing itself hurts me, the monstrosity of organized persecution, deportation in itself. How wrong she was!

7:15 p.m.

I’ve just seen a former prisoner from the camp where young Paul is, who had written to ask what I could do for him.

His eyes were hollow and he was as thin as only released prisoners can be. I was happy to see him because he is a man who has suffered, who has seen and understood. He didn’t know the Germans were attacking women and children. But he didn’t try to stop me getting him to accept that fact.

He told me that on a farm near Hamburg, he saw twenty or so Jewish women of all social classes, including the better kind, coming in from Vienna. I asked him how they had been treated. “With unimaginable brutality. Awakened at 5:00 a.m. with lashes of a whip, out in the field all day long, back at nightfall, sleeping in two tiny rooms, tiered bunks. The farmer beat them, but his wife had a little pity and fed them, more or less.”

Who gave that farmer the right to treat human beings like animals?—human beings whose spiritual value was surely superior to his?

He also told me, about the pits at Katyń, that he had witnessed identical scenes. In 1941, thousands of frightfully deprived and starving Russian prisoners came into his P.O.W. camp. Typhus took hold and hundreds dropped dead each day. Each morning the Germans went round with guns finishing off those who were no longer able to stand up. So the sick, trying to avoid this fate, used to get themselves propped up by their healthy comrades. The Germans used their rifle butts to smash the hands of the men holding their comrade upright. The sick fell to the ground, they piled them onto carts, stripped them of their boots and clothing, hauled them to a pit, unloaded them with pitchforks and threw them into the pit alongside the corpses. A sprinkling of quicklime, and that was that.

More or less the same story as what the young man at Enfants-Malades told me. Horror! Horror! Horror!