“My father’s gallery was considered one of the most elegant in that very elegant neighborhood; it stood at the corner, near avenue Matignon. It had beautiful exposition rooms filled with extraordinary light from the windows, and a glass ceiling in one of the rooms. It was soft filtered light that was perfect for the paintings. My father believed in providing rich backdrops for art, and he had walls covered in red silk brocade and blue damask. The exposition rooms were like a museum, and clients came just to sit there and admire the art … at different times my father represented Cézanne, Renoir, Degas, Marie Laurencin, and, of course, Picasso and Matisse, to name only a few.
“When France and Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, I was nine years old. My father was worried because we were Jewish, but he did not want to flee the country at first. He was a clever man and he believed in studying situations, appraising everything, and he wanted to see what would happen. And so he continued to study and evaluate the situation before making any rash moves. However, because he was afraid Paris might be bombed by the Germans, fearful that the gallery could be damaged if such an event occurred, he decided it would be wiser to move some of the paintings from the gallery. He began to systematically send them down to the Gironde, to a chateau in the countryside just outside Bordeaux, which belonged to an old friend of his. He had thought of storing the paintings in the cellars of the cháteau, and his friend agreed that this was a prudent move. And so arrangements were made.
“Jacques Pointine was my father’s right hand, and it was Jacques who transported the paintings down to the chateau. Pointine was married to an Englishwoman, Phyllis Dixon, who also worked for my father as a personal assistant, handling many of his art deals. She was very knowledgeable and intensely loyal. A little later Phyllis and Jacques took another collection of canvases to Bordeaux, where they were stored in a bank vault my father had rented. He was sure the paintings would be safe there, and he suggested to several artists that they take the same precautions with their work.
“My father had all of the paintings registered under the name of Jacques Pointine’s married sister, Yvette Citrone, again as a precaution. Then he shipped one hundred and twenty more to a warehouse in Grenoble, this time in Phyllis’s name. Altogether he managed to move over five hundred paintings out of Paris, some of them from his own personal collection; the rest were part of the gallery’s considerable inventory. Other dealers were taking similar steps, especially the Jewish dealers and gallery owners, and a number of painters were doing the same thing … Picasso, Braque, and Matisse included.
“In November of 1939 my father decided we could no longer stay in Paris, and so he took the whole family to Bordeaux, which he knew was safe, and where he rented a large apartment. He insisted that Phyllis and Jacques come with us, and Papa left the gallery under the management of Alain Brescon, who had worked for him for years and was as loyal and devoted as Phyllis and Jacques.
“Our life in Bordeaux settled into a relatively normal routine, and anyway, it was the period known as the Phony War, when nothing much was happening. Every day I went to school with my brothers and sister; my mother and grandmother supervised our household; Papa worked with Phyllis and Jacques on the inventories of the art, and stayed in daily contact with the Paris gallery. He also talked with many of the other dealers and artists he was close to and cared about. But in a sense, I suppose, we were all holding our breath.
“But by June of 1940 that Phony War had become a real war. The news was suddenly alarming. On June third Paris was hit by eleven hundred bombs from two hundred Third Reich planes. The Wehrmacht was on its steady and relentless march across France. Its destination: Paris. The French Army was almost at the end of its strength and resolve, and the roads were overrun with hundreds and hundreds of refugees fleeing south. The Germans entered Paris on June fourteenth, and France fell. The French government in exile in Bordeaux surrendered, and was replaced by the right wing Vichy government, under the leadership of Maréchal Pétain. Almost immediately, Vichy passed anti-Jewish laws, and long before the Nazis had demanded that any measures be taken against Jews.
“My father had gone down with bronchitis that same June, and it turned into pneumonia, and as often happens with this kind of illness when it strikes in summer, it took him a long time to get well. Even then he was left debilitated and listless. Certainly he was not in a frame of mind to move out of Bordeaux. In any case, we were in the southwest, which was Unoccupied France, and my parents believed us to be safe.
“It was not until July of 1942 that disaster and tragedy struck my family. I have often wondered if we stayed too long, have asked myself what I would have done in the same circumstances. But I have no real answers. The times were difficult, the situations hard to gauge accurately, and in any case, we were not being bothered.
“I will never forget the date. It was the sixteenth of July and I was almost twelve. My mother had asked Phyllis Dixon to take me to the doctor that afternoon, because I had been complaining of my tonsils. We were walking down the street toward our apartment, when she suddenly grabbed hold of me and dragged me into the doorway of a building. ‘It’s the police,’ she whispered. ‘There is a French police truck outside the door of your building, Rosa. I cannot take you home.’ I remember that I started to cry and frantically tried to pull away from her, to escape her clutches. But she was too strong for me. She held on to me tightly and wouldn’t let go of me. She kept peering out, and it was when I heard her choke on the words ‘Oh my God’ that I knew the police had come for my parents. Finally we heard the truck driving off. I wanted to race home to make sure my parents were safe. I kept telling myself that I had been wrong, that they had not been arrested. But Phyllis wouldn’t let me leave the doorway for a very long time.
“When we did eventually return to my family’s apartment, there was no one there. Not Papa, or Mama, or Grandmama. Aunt Sylvie was gone as well. And so were my brothers and sister. They had taken them all … even the children. Phyllis and I were in a terrible state of shock. Jacques was in Grenoble, checking on the paintings in the warehouse, and we didn’t know what to do, since he wasn’t coming back until late that night. Phyllis was afraid to leave me alone; anyway, she didn’t know whom to go and see to find out what had happened. In the end, she grabbed a few of my things, threw them in a suitcase, and took me home to their apartment. It was not far away, and it was there that we waited for Jacques.
“When he returned home at about nine o’clock in the evening, he was as shocked as we had been, and as frightened for my family as we were. He had always been very close to my father. Jacques immediately went to the authorities in Bordeaux. Eventually he discovered that my parents were being held in the prison there, along with other Jews … men, women, and children. It seemed there was nothing he could do.
“I never saw my parents again. Nor the rest of my family. The next day they were shipped to a French concentration camp in Drancy, just north of Paris. It was the first stop on their fearsome journey … to Auschwitz.” Rosa stopped, her voice suddenly trembling, and then after a moment she continued more steadily. “They all perished there … Papa, Mama, Grandmama, and Aunt Sylvie … my brothers, Michel and Jean-Marc, and my sister, Marguerite. Just like that, in the blink of an eye, everyone I loved was gone, ripped away from me forever. I couldn’t believe it, I had seen them only a few hours ago, and been with them. Suddenly I was alone except for Phyllis and Jacques. I will never forget how stunned and terrified I was. And Phyllis and Jacques were terrified for me. They feared the police might come back to get me. Later that night, Jacques sent me with Phyllis to his sister’s house at the other side of Bordeaux, until he could work out a plan for me, for all of us. The Pointines were not Jewish, and Jacques hoped I would be safe with his sister. For a while.
“Jacques Pointine was sharp, clever. I suppose he was the kind of man we would call street smart today, and he was beginning to worry about the art. But even so he did not fully grasp exactly what was
going on, or the extent of it. But then, very few people did. It was only later that information about the massive looting of artworks came out.
“Jacques also worried that he and Phyllis could be in danger because of their association with my father, and he determined that we should all disappear.”
Rosa paused in her sorrowful tale and drank some water before continuing.
Neither Megan nor Laura spoke.
Megan leaned back against the needlepoint cushions and sighed, looking around this gracious room, her mind awash with thoughts of evil and man’s baseness and cruelty and inhumanity. And once again her heart went out to Rosa Lavillard, as it had when she had first heard her story so long ago.
Laura wanted to say something to Rosa, but she did not have the right words. There were no right words. Words were meaningless. Anything she could say would sound trite, even ridiculous, in view of the enormity of what had happened to Rosa all those years ago. It was beyond human comprehension. Glancing at her grandmother, she tried to imagine what it would be like to have her family taken away and murdered in cold blood in a death camp. She couldn’t envision it; the mere idea overwhelmed her.
In a low, subdued voice, Laura finally said, “How … how did you manage to go on, Rosa? The horror of it …” Laura was unable to finish her sentence and she felt sudden tears pricking behind her eyes.
Rosa said, “I don’t know, I have often asked myself that. And there were times when I wished I had been at home, that I had been with my parents, my family, so that I could have shared their fate, been taken with them to Auschwitz. At least we would have all been together. But I wasn’t, I was saved by chance, by luck, and by Phyllis Dixon. There were times afterward, when I was growing up, that I thought I might have been saved because I had a special purpose in life. But I don’t know. It’s as I just said, fate played a hand, along with Phyllis.” Rosa looked at Laura. “You asked how I managed to go on … I suppose because I was a child. Children are resilient. I wept a lot, I worried about my family, and sometimes I was almost paralyzed by fear for them, but we were on the run, moving around a lot, and Phyllis kept telling me I had to keep my wits about me in order to survive.
“It was soon very apparent that the Vichy government was deporting Jews to Germany on a large scale. Jacques and Phyllis found it incomprehensible that the French state was so casually delivering children to their murderers. There was complicity everywhere. Perhaps you do not know this, but the French Jews were the most assimilated of all the Jews in Europe, and they had become, over the centuries, part of the fabric of French life. It was obvious that ordinary French people were turning Jews in … without those dossiers at the prefecture, Jews would not have been found. They could not have been deported. Or killed.
“Jacques was conscious of this, and he became convinced that my father and the family had been turned in by a collaborator, which is why he feared for my safety. You see, I was not only another Jew to be exterminated, but I was also the heir to Maurice Duval’s immense and valuable art collection. And so we moved around a lot. We went to stay with relatives of Jacques in Mérignac, then we moved on, and stayed in Grenoble for a short while, before going to friends of Phyllis who lived near La Martellière. It was there that we moved into a small house. It was on the outskirts of La Martellière, and belonged to a sister of one of Phyllis’s friends. At first Jacques was relieved that we had a respite, could stay put for a while, that we did not have to move around so much. But then it became a nightmare. Suddenly, Jacques was convinced the police were watching the house, and just when he had finished making arrangements for us to leave, Phyllis broke her shoulder and leg when she fell down a flight of steps leading into the cellar. She was incapacitated, and so Jacques had to cancel our plans to go to Bellegarde, near the Swiss border. He thought it was too long a trip for Phyllis.
“One day, about a week later, Jacques was told by a member of the French Resistance Movement to hide me, that the French police were looking for me, that they were convinced I was being sheltered by Phyllis and Jacques. The information had come out of the Bordeaux prefecture … the woman from the Resistance told Jacques that they were looking for the Duval girl to deport her.
“It wasn’t safe to send me to any of their friends, and so Jacques hid me. In a hole in the ground—”
“Oh, my God, no!” Laura exclaimed, her voice rising. She stared at Rosa aghast.
Rosa nodded. “It was the only thing he could do. There was no other place. The hole was actually a small cave in the side of a hillock, at the end of a field. The field abutted the garden of the house, so Jacques felt secure about putting me in the cave. It was dry, and air came in from somewhere higher up, above a ledge in the cave, and so I knew I would not suffocate. But I was always worried something would happen to Jacques and that I would be stuck in the cave forever. You see, in order to properly hide me securely, he had to roll a large stone in front of the opening. I wasn’t strong enough to move it myself. Often I panicked, and I hated being in that dark hole. Jacques would let me burn candles only in the daylight, when it didn’t matter, because the candle flame couldn’t be seen. I wasn’t allowed to light them at night. But he always brought me out at night, surreptitiously, cautiously. I was able to go to the house nearby, have a bath, eat, see Phyllis, and be comforted by her. But it was a horrendous experience. I’ve hated dark places ever since.” Again Rosa stopped talking, sipped her glass of water, endeavoring to relax.
“How long were you in the hole?” Laura ventured, her voice strained.
“For a year. Phyllis could not travel, she was sick a long time. Finally we were able to leave the area. Jacques thought we were too close to Mérignac and Dax, where many Jews were still being arrested and deported to Germany. He wanted to get closer to Switzerland, hoping one day to cross the border. But we never did. Anyway, we kept on moving around a lot, until we finally settled in the countryside between Lyons and Bellegarde. Life was hard, we were always afraid of being caught by the police, and food was scarce. And I saw so much killing and ugliness…. However, I was out of the cave, I was no longer living like the troglodytes of Tunisia. But that year was the worst in my life.”
Glancing around the spacious living room awash in pale colors, Rosa added quietly, “I’ve surrounded myself with airiness, lightness ever since. Anything dark is forbidding. It reminds me of that hole.”
24
Megan leaned forward and said, “Are you tired, Rosa? Oh, how silly of me to even ask that! Of course, you must be exhausted, telling this story again, reliving your early life. It must be harrowing for you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked you to do so.”
“No, I’m all right, I’m not tired, Megan.” Rosa glanced at Laura. “I’ve tried hard to get past the Holocaust, but it’s always there, hidden deep in my heart, because it involves my family, whom I loved, and I can never forget them.”
“I understand,” Laura said. “It must be almost impossible … to ever forget.”
“Eventually you do bury most of it deep, that’s only natural. No one could live with that kind of mental anguish on a daily basis. And once it is truly buried, it becomes very hard to dredge up. Far too painful. But their memory lives on in my heart….” She sighed and shook her head as she continued. “Anyway, I have never wanted to force all the details of what happened to me on anyone. I’ve tried not to be bitter, to move forward always, to look to the future in a positive way. I was spared. I was given a life to live, and I’ve tried to live it … as my parents would have wanted me to, as best I could. The Germans murdered my whole family. But there is no reason why I should allow them to ruin the rest of my life. If I did, then I would be letting them triumph over me.”
“Your spirit is indomitable, Rosa,” Megan murmured. “I’ve always admired the way you’ve managed to cope so well.”
“I’ve done my best to be … happy, as I just said. After all, I’m living proof that Hitler didn’t succeed, didn’t win his genocidal war against the Jews. He
lost it, just as he lost the war against the Allies.”
“You’ve been through so much, Rosa, I don’t know what to say to you, how to express my feelings. There are no words to tell you how your story has affected me,” Laura began, and hesitated. “To offer you sympathy, to say I’m sorry, would be … banal in view of the enormity of what you experienced. Your suffering would be diminished somehow. Well, that’s what I think.”
Rosa simply nodded.
Laura hesitated once more, and then she said slowly, in the gentlest of voices, “You must have a brave heart, Rosa, a very brave heart.”
For a few seconds Rosa was silent, her face very still, expressionless, then she reached out, touched Laura’s arm. “That you understand it all … that is enough.” Pushing herself to her feet, Rosa got up and asked, “Shall I make some fresh coffee? I know I would like some.”
“That’d be great, Rosa,” Laura answered, and this time she did not offer to help, since she knew she would be refused.
When they were alone, Laura said, “It is a remarkable story, Grandma Megan, isn’t it?”
Megan nodded. “Yes. But she’s left a lot out tonight. … Perhaps she wasn’t up to telling it, or maybe she thought you’d find it too upsetting.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“Goodness gracious, I can’t go into it now, child!”
“I understand. Anyway, what I find strange is that Claire—”
“Not now, Laura dear,” Megan cut in quickly. “We’ll discuss everything when you take me home.”
“Yes, of course.” Laura glanced at her watch. “You know, it’s turned eleven, Gran! Perhaps I shouldn’t have agreed to have a cup of coffee. Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
A Sudden Change of Heart a Sudden Change of Heart Page 24
