The Sweetness of Forgetting

by Kristin Harmel

  As I walk on, I think of my favorite of her tales, the one in which the prince tells the princess that as long as there are stars in the sky, he will love her.

  “One day,” the prince said to the princess, “I will take you across a great sea to see a queen whose torch illuminates the world, keeping all of her subjects safe and free.”

  When I was a girl, I used to cling to those words, to imagine that one day, I too would find a prince who would rescue me from my mother’s coldness. I used to imagine climbing on this prince’s white horse with him—because of course in my imagination, the prince had a white horse—and going away forever to that fairy-tale kingdom with the queen who kept everyone safe.

  But now I’m thirty-six, and I know better. There are no dashing, heroic princes waiting to save me. There is no magical queen to protect me. In the end, you can only rely on yourself. I wonder how old Mamie was when she learned those same truths.

  Suddenly, although I have the sense I’m being cradled by my grandmother’s past, I feel more alone than ever.

  Rue Visconti is dark and narrow, more a long alleyway than a proper street. The sidewalks are slender ribbons on each side, and a lone bicycle propped against a black doorway makes me think of an old-fashioned postcard. I pass a few storefronts and make my way down nearly to the end, where I finally see number 24, a pair of huge black double doors under an arch. I enter the code Carole gave me—48A51—on the keypad to the right, and when the door buzzes, I push it inward. When I make it from the cool darkness of the arched courtyard up to the second floor of the building, the door is already open. I rap lightly against the doorframe anyhow, and from the depths of the apartment, a deep, froggy voice calls, “Entrez-vous! Entrez-vous, madame!”

  I walk in, close the door lightly behind me, and make my way through a narrow hallway lined by bookcases, all of which are overflowing with old, leather-bound volumes. I emerge into a sunlit room where I see a white-haired, stoop-shouldered man standing near the window, gazing out at the street below. He turns as I enter, and I’m surprised at how lined his face is; it appears as if he’s lived through hundreds of years of history, instead of just the ninety-three years Carole Didot had promised. I approach to shake his hand, and he looks at me oddly.

  “Ah, an American,” are the first words he says to me. He smiles then, and I’m struck by how bright his green eyes seem; they’re the eyes of a young man and appear out of place housed in his sunken features. “Madame Didot did not tell me you are American. In Paris, we greet with deux bisous, two kisses on the cheek, my dear.” He demonstrates, leaning forward to kiss me lightly on each cheek. I can feel myself blushing.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble.

  “There is nothing to be sorry about,” he says. “Your American customs are quite charming.” He gestures to a small table with two wooden chairs, which is situated near the window. “Come, sit,” he says. He waits until I’m seated, offers me a cup of tea, and when I decline, he sits down with me. “I am Olivier Berr.”

  “I’m Hope McKenna-Smith. Thank you for having me here on such short notice,” I say slowly. I’m trying to be conscious of both his age and the fact that English isn’t his first language.

  “It is no trouble,” he says. “It is always a pleasure to have a visit from a pretty girl.” He smiles and pats my hand. “I understand you search for some information.”

  I nod and take a deep breath. “Yes, sir. My grandmother is from Paris. I just learned recently that her family may have died in the Holocaust. I think they were Jewish.”

  He looks at me for a moment. “You learned this only recently?”

  Embarrassed, I struggle to explain. “Well, she never spoke of it.”

  “You were raised in another religion.” It is a statement, not a question.

  I nod. “Catholicism.”

  He nods slowly. “This is not entirely unusual. Leaving the past behind in this manner. Mais, in her heart, I suspect, your grandmother may still consider herself juive.”

  I tell him briefly what happened on Rosh Hashanah, with the crusts of the Star Pie.

  He smiles. “Judaïsme is not just a religion, but a state of the heart and of the soul. I suspect perhaps all religions are this way, for those who truly believe in them.” He pauses. “You have come here today for answers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “About what became of her family.”

  “Yes, sir. She’d never spoken of them before.”

  Again, he nods knowingly. “You have with you their names?”

  “Yes,” I say. I pull out a copy of Mamie’s list and hand it to him. As his clear eyes scan the page, I add quickly, “But Alain, her brother, isn’t in any Holocaust registry.”

  He looks up and smiles. “Ah yes. But my registries are different.” He stands, trembling a little on his feet, and then he gestures with a crooked finger. He moves slowly, one foot in front of the other in a shuffle, toward the hallway lined with books. “I was twenty years of age when the Second World War began, twenty-two years of age when they began taking us away, right from the streets of France. More than seventy-six thousand juifs were taken from France, most never to return.”

  I shake my head, suddenly mute.

  “I was at Auschwitz,” he continues, and suddenly, he stops his slow shuffle to the hall, pausing as if the memory itself holds him back. After a moment, he moves again. “More than sixty thousand were sent there from France. Did you know?” He stops speaking again for a moment, and then he coughs. “After la libération, I returned to find everyone gone. All my friends. My neighbors.”

  “What about your family?” I ask.

  “All of them, dead.” His voice is flat. “My wife. My son. Mother. Father. Sisters. Brother. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Grandparents. Everyone. When I came home to Paris, I came home to nothing. To no one.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I murmur. The enormity of it begins to hit me. I’ve never met a concentration camp survivor before, and as the images from the Mémorial de la Shoah play themselves over again in my mind, I blink a few times, feeling numb. The atrocities in the pictures had actually happened to this kind man before me. I can feel tears in my eyes. I blink them away before he notices.

  He waves a hand, dismissing my words. “It is the past. Not for you to be sorry about, mademoiselle. The world you live in today is very different, and I am glad.” He shuffles a little farther and regards his wall of books solemnly. He touches a gnarled finger to one book spine, then another. “The only place I knew to go when I returned was to the synagogue I had attended as a boy. But it had been destroyed. It was a shell, no longer a place.”

  I’m frozen as I watch him scan the books. He pulls one out, reads something inside, and then returns it to the shelf.

  “When I realized that the ones I loved were never coming home, I began to think about the great tragedy, not just of their deaths but of the loss of their legacies,” he continues. “For when you take away an entire family, and they all perish, who will tell their stories?”

  “No one,” I murmur.

  “Précisément. And when that occurs, it is as if their lives have been lost twice over. That is when I began creating my own records.” He reaches for another book, and this time, his eyes light up and he smiles. He flips through a few pages and stops at one. He’s silent for a moment as he reads.

  “Your own records?” I ask.

  He nods and shows me the page he’s stopped on. I see a cursive scrawl across neat, lined pages that are yellowed at the edges. “My lists of the lost.” He smiles and adds, “And of the found. And of the stories that go with them.”

  I take a step back and look in awe at his bookshelves. “All of these books are your lists?”

  “Yes.”

  “You compiled them yourself?” I look around in disbelief.

  “It filled my time in those early days,” he says. “It was how I stopped living in the sadness. I began visiting synagogues every day, looking at their records, talking to eve
ry person I could meet.”

  “But how did you put together so much information?”

  “To everyone I met, I asked them for the names of anyone they knew who had been lost, and anyone they knew who had survived. Family, friends, neighbors, it did not matter. No piece of information was small or insignifiant. Each one represented a life lost or a life saved. Over the years, I have written and rewritten their memories, organized them into volumes, followed the leads they gave me, and sought out the people who survived.”

  “My God,” I murmur.

  “Each person who survived a camp,” he continues, “has many stories to tell. Those people are often the key to who was lost, and how. For others, the only key we have is that they never returned. But their names are here, and what details we do know.”

  “But why aren’t these lists in the Mémorial de la Shoah?” I ask.

  “These are not the kind of records they keep,” he says. “They keep official records, the ones made by the governments. These are not official. And for now, I want my lists with me, because I am always finding new names, and it is important to keep up my life’s work. When I die, these books will go to the memorial. It is my hope that they too will keep them alive and, in doing so, keep the people who live in these pages alive forever.”

  “This is amazing, Monsieur Berr,” I say.

  He nods, smiles slightly. “It is not so amazing. Amazing would be to live in a world where there was no need to make lists of the dead.” Before I can reply, he puts a finger on the page of his open book and says calmly, “I have found them.”

  I look at him, confused.

  “Your family,” he clarifies.

  My eyes widen. “Wait, you found the names? Already?”

  He chuckles. “I have lived inside these lists for many years, madame. I know my way.” He closes his eyes for a moment and then focuses on the page before him. “The Picard family,” he says. “Dix, rue du Général Camou, septième arrondissement.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It was your grandmother’s address,” he says. “Number ten on the street of Général Camou. I tried to include addresses wherever I could.” He smiles slightly and adds, “Your grandmother, she must have lived in a nice place, in the shadow of the Tour Eiffel.”

  I swallow hard. “What else does it say?”

  He reads ahead for a moment before speaking. “The parents were Albert and Cecile. Albert, he was a doctor. The children were Helene, Rose, Claude, Alain, David, Danielle.”

  “Rose is my grandmother,” I whisper.

  He looks up from the book with a smile. “Then I will have to change my list.”

  “Why?”

  “She is listed as presumed dead, the fifteenth of July, 1942, in Paris.” He squints at something on the page. “She went out that night and never returned, according to my notations. The next day, her family was all taken.”

  I can’t seem to muster words. I just stare at him.

  “The sixteenth of July, 1942,” he continues. His voice has softened now. “The first day of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup.”

  My throat is dry. It’s the massive arrest of thirteen thousand Parisians that I’d read about online.

  “I was there too,” he adds softly. “My family was taken that day.”

  I stare. “I’m so sorry.”

  He shakes his head. “It was the end of the life I once knew,” he says softly. “The beginning of the life I now live.”

  Silence descends. “What happened?” I ask finally.

  He looks into the distance. “They came for us before dawn. I did not know to expect them. I did not know it could happen. As I look back, I realize I should have. We all should have. But sometimes in life, it is easier to believe things will be all right. We were blind to the truth.”

  “But how could you have known?” I ask.

  He nods. “It is easy to look back and question, but you are correct; it would have been impossible to know what was coming. For us, for my wife and my son, just three years old, we were taken with many others to the Vélodrome d’Hiver in the quinzième, just near the Eiffel Tower and very near the Seine. There were maybe seven thousand, maybe eight thousand people there. It was hard to count them all. It was a sea of people. There was no food. Hardly any water. We were packed together like fish in a can. Some people killed themselves. I saw a mother smother her baby, and I thought she was crazy, but by the end of the third day, I understood that she was merciful. Later, as she wailed, I watched a guard shoot her. I remember thinking quite clearly, She is lucky.”

  His voice is flat, but his eyes are watery as he goes on. “We stayed there for five days before they moved us. On the fourth day, my son, my Nicolas, he died in my arms. And before we were taken away to Drancy, and then to Auschwitz, my wife and I were separated, but I could see in her eyes that she was already gone. Losing Nicolas had taken her will to live. I was told later that she did not pass the initial selection at Auschwitz when she arrived, and that she did not cry, not once, as they led her away.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I murmur, but he waves dismissively.

  “It was long ago,” he says. I watch as he turns back to his book, studying the page that he said contained the records I was looking for.

  “Alors,” he says. He blinks a few times. “Your family. The Picards of rue du Général Camou. The youngest two, David and Danielle, they died at Auschwitz. Upon arrival. David was eight years of age. Danielle was five.”

  “God,” I breathe. “They were just babies.”

  Monsieur Berr nods. “Most of the young ones never returned. They were taken to the gas chamber immediately because the Germans considered them useless.” He swallows and continues reading. “Helene, age eighteen, and Claude, age sixteen, died at Auschwitz, in 1942. So too did the mother, Cecile. The father, Albert, died in Auschwitz at the end of 1943.” He pauses and adds softly, “It says here that he worked in the crematorium, until he became ill in the winter. That must have been terrible. He knew his own fate.”

  I feel tears in my eyes, and this time, it’s too late to blink them back. Monsieur Berr is silent as the rivers run down my cheeks. It takes a few moments for his words to fully settle into my soul. “All of them died there?” I whisper. “At Auschwitz?” He meets my eye and nods slowly, a look of pity on his face. “What about Alain? How did he die?”

  For the first time today, Monsieur Berr looks surprised. “Die? But he is the one who gave me this information.”

  I stare at him. “I don’t understand.”

  He squints at the page again. “Yes, this interview is dated the sixth of June, 2005. I remember him. A very nice man. Kind eyes. You can always know a person by his eyes. He was playing chess with another survivor, a man I knew. That is how I came upon him.”

  “Wait,” I say. My heart is thudding as I struggle to understand what he’s saying. “You’re telling me that Alain Picard, my grandmother’s brother, is still alive? And that you talked to him?”

  Monsieur Berr looks concerned. “Bien sur, he was alive in 2005. I do not know what became of him after that. He was never deported, but he suffered during the war. Everyone did. He told me that he went into hiding, and for nearly three years, he had very little food. A man, his old piano teacher, gave him a place to sleep on the coldest winter nights, but the man was afraid of putting his own family in danger. So Alain, he slept on the streets, and sometimes, the nuns at the church would give him meals. He would be eighty now, if he is still alive. Then again, I am ninety-three, my dear. And I am not giving up anytime soon.”

  He smiles at this. I’m too stunned to reply.

  “My grandmother’s brother,” I murmur. “Do you know where he is?”

  Monsieur Berr reaches for a pad of paper. “Do you have a pen?” he asks. I nod and fumble in my purse. He jots something down on a piece of paper, rips it off, and hands it to me. “This is the address he gave me in 2005. It is in the Marais, the Jewish quarter, near the Place des Vosges. That is w
here I found him playing chess.”

  “That’s near my hotel,” I tell him. I look at the address he’s handed me: 27, rue du Foin, no. 2B. I feel a chill run down my spine.

  “Well then,” Monsieur Berr says. “You should go now. The past waits on no one.”

  Chapter Twelve

  I’m in stunned disbelief as I bid Monsieur Berr adieu and hurry downstairs. My feet carry me back toward the Seine, where I hail a cab on the main street and hand the driver the slip of paper Monsieur Berr has just given me. The driver grunts in reply and pulls away from the curb. He veers across lanes of traffic, takes a bridge over the Seine, and cuts back to the east, where he parallels the river as I watch the twin towers of Notre-Dame grow closer and closer out the right window. Finally, he turns left and, after a series of twists and turns, screeches to a halt in front of a gray stone building with a pair of massive, dark wooden doors. I pay the driver, and as he pulls away, I approach the call box.

  There, in black and white, is the name Picard, A. I take a deep breath and push the buzzer next to the now familiar last name. Only then do I realize my hands are shaking.

  My heart pounds wildly as I wait. There’s no reply. I push the buzzer again, but there’s still no response. My heart sinks. What if it’s too late; what if he’s dead? I remind myself that it’s equally possible he’s merely out; it’s midafternoon on a lovely fall day. Perhaps he’s gone for a walk, or to the store. I linger outside the building for a few minutes, in hopes that someone will come in or out and I’ll be able to ask about him, but the street is quiet, and there’s no one coming or going.