The Shochet home was linked from the first-floor landing via a bridge to the family’s factory, a large diversified printing plant that employed three hundred people and also manufactured files, envelopes and adhesive tape, exporting these goods across Eastern Europe.
Following the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939, Jasło found itself in Nazi territory. The two brothers who were heads of the family business, Ludwig and Poldek, called all their employees and their families together and told them that as Jews they could not remain in Jasło and had decided to flee into the Soviet zone. Any employees and their families who wished to do so were welcome to go with them, regardless of whether they were Jewish or not. They could take no luggage so as to maximise space for as many people as possible.
Most chose to go. Mobilising all the village trucks, they set off in a convoy towards the east, and were arrested by the Soviets who transported them by rail to Siberia. In 1941, my father received a postcard in York from his uncle Ludwig, saying that he was in a Siberian camp, starving. My father contacted another uncle in New York, who arranged to send food parcels but none of them ever got through. By 1942, though many had died of starvation and disease, there were more than two hundred members of the Jasło contingent still alive, and they decided to break out of their prison and walk to Palestine. This was a journey equivalent to walking from Sydney to Perth. They were recaptured by the Soviets and taken back to Siberia, where they were so hungry they ate cow dung to survive.
In early 1945 the group escaped a second time and began a fresh attempt to reach Palestine on foot. Although twenty-six members of the family perished, the Shochets succeeded and made a home for themselves there, at 27 Pines Street, Tel Aviv, re-establishing an identical factory to the one they had left behind in Poland, connected to the house by a bridge at the rear. My father’s uncle Ludwig survived. The house was presided over by my father’s regal Great-aunt Fanny, who had emigrated to Palestine in 1911. Through her network of friends and acquaintances, she managed to find food, shelter and employment for everyone who had endured the migration ordeal.
When my father visited without warning in 1951, he was welcomed by an astonished Fanny and her son:
Down the stairs came my uncle Ludwig, wearing exactly the same jacket he had worn every day in Jaslo and presumably Siberia and on the march and he spoke to me in exactly the same tone as he would have used to me had I still been eight years old, as if the past sixteen years had not occurred, as if zillions of people had not been killed, ‘Harry, warum hast Du uns nicht gesagt das Du kommst?’ [Harry, why did you not tell us you were coming?]
That evening there was the same bustle of people, with children returning for dinner from the army and university. The same meal time discipline prevailed as had in Jaslo. It was the preservation of this discipline which brought these people through all that misery and suffering and pain and danger.
I visited Israel for the first time during my gap year at the age of seventeen with four girlfriends, all of them from Jewish families. For the final days of the trip, my father treated us all to the luxury of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, then the epicentre of backchannel diplomacy and intrigue, but we were ignorant of that. Tanned and lean, our hair matted and tangled with sand and salt from Eilat beaches and the Sinai desert, we soaked in the deep baths like hippos and sprawled beneath the domed ceilings of our rooms with their elaborately tiled walls, feeling like oriental princesses on the lam. We gorged on the hotel’s famous breakfast buffet before wandering the golden streets of the old city, haggling for trinkets and visiting the sights. (At one point a stallholder offered to buy me in exchange for three camels.) At no point did my father tell me that I had relatives less than two hours’ drive away.
Fifteen years later, I returned to Israel with my parents. We spent a week there, including the visit to Yad Vashem. No mention was ever made of the Shochets.
I look up the Schochet compound address on Google Earth. It’s a grand terracotta-coloured three-tiered structure, with shutters and a roof garden. It looks prosperous and splendid, a fitting sanctuary for those who made that remarkable journey, a monument to the endurance of the spirit. As I move the cursor to do all these things so effortlessly, I am swamped with feelings of regret and sorrow at how little I know, and how it is all too late. Or is it? I look up a couple of genealogy sites and wonder if any of my relatives live at that address today. And if they did, would they have the answers to any of my questions?
Many months later I meet a woman of my age, another journalist and writer, who tells me that, like me, she has a parent who left her native home thanks to Kindertransport. I am mildly interested, as I am each time I hear such an account: they all feature similar details, though each is subtly different in its tragedy.
The jolt comes when she tells me that her family also included a branch that walked from Siberia to Palestine. I am stunned: the way my father told it, the heroism with which he endowed the journey made it seem mythic and unique. I had no idea that this trek to freedom was the fate of others. Suddenly I feel destabilised, rocked by this information, even more so when she tells me that she went to Israel and met relatives she did not know she had.
A sudden ugly tide washes over me, like having a bucket of dirty water thrown on your head from an upstairs window. Envy: she managed what I had not, she found something I did not even know to look for until it was too late. Churned up, anxious, ashamed of my feelings, I find her on a walk a few hours later and confess the effect her revelations have had on me. She understands, and a fresh bond of kinship forged from a common past is made, there and then. Some families are connected by common blood, others by shared memory.
CHAPTER 8
Googling a murder
It was not until I was in my twenties that my mother told me why I did not have grandparents on her side of the family.
I had often wondered, but never asked. The radar of childhood picked up a current of sadness transmitted through silences and an absence of photos. I knew to avoid the force field of static electricity crackling in the air: lightning without thunder.
There were clues: in my teens, my mother took me to see a film she declared one of her favourites, Jeux Interdits. Made in 1952 by René Clément, it tells the story of a five-year-old girl, Paulette, whose parents have been killed by the Germans in an air attack. She is taken in by a family of peasants and soon becomes attached to their ten-year-old son, Michel. But eventually she is removed by gendarmes to a Red Cross camp and at the poignant, hankie-twisting end of the film we see Paulette running away into a crowd, crying for Michel and for her mother.
When the lights came up in the cinema, my mother was in disarray, blowing her nose loudly and wiping her face of tears while asking me if I liked the film. The question was jarring: why should I like something that had so visibly upset her? Confused, I mumbled in the affirmative, not wishing to disappoint her in such an obviously fragile state. But the paradox baffled me. I had not yet heard the word ‘catharsis’. Later, when I learned to play the soundtrack’s mournful melody on the guitar, my mother always paused in her ironing or cooking to give the tune her full attention as if it were an anthem. Which, in a way, it was. An anthem to a robbed childhood.
The first time she told me about her family, it was in a clipped précis, like the short synopsis of a film or a fairytale complete with wicked witch: she had lost her parents very young, been taken in by one of her aunts whom she hated and never wanted to see again.
An invisible cordon roped off this information, discouraging further probing, just like her delivery of the facts of life—in a green booklet—in my early adolescence. A well-trained jellyfish would have picked up that the tone in which she said, ‘If you have any questions, ask,’ meant the exact opposite. So I knew that she was born in Paris, and that something cataclysmic had happened in her childhood, something more terrible and tragic than being raped, and that it was never mentioned. Even my father, who was not renowned for his tact or sensi
tivity, tiptoed around it.
I cannot remember what emboldened me to ask her for more details later on. Another film perhaps, or a conversation with friends? ‘Ahhh, so now you want to know?’ she asked accusingly, her voice full of needle-sharp accents, suddenly more French in its emphasis. (Whenever we argued, it was in her native tongue, whose rolled Rs, sibilants and plosives seem ideally suited to conflict. No matter that the rest of the world considers French the language of diplomacy, it was never so in our household.)
In my twenties, she told me that her father, Roger, a sailor in the merchant navy, had shot her mother, Lucienne, and then turned the gun on himself. In broad daylight, on a busy street. The dates and details are sketchy on what happened next to their only child, Jacqueline, but in a highly unorthodox decision for the times, my mother’s maternal grandfather, Noel Duran, though divorced, was granted custody. A remarkable character who started life as an illiterate peasant, he had risen to the status of military magistrate and was also an active member of the Freemasons.
For the next six years, my mother lived happily with him. ‘I adored him,’ she says, her voice suddenly warm with affection. ‘I remember that he made me the most delicious hot chocolate I ever tasted and cooked me fried cubed potatoes over which he melted Cantal cheese,’ she said, licking her lips. When the war began, Noel rejoined the army and sent my mother to various families to look after her, but as long as she could return when he was on leave she made the best of her disrupted circumstances.
Then tragedy struck once again. Her grandfather was thrown from his motorbike in Blois. Being something of a mystic, he summoned my mother to his bedside and asked her to lay her hands on him. She did so. He died shortly after. My mother was eleven years old. Inconsolable, she blamed herself.
Jacqueline’s own relatives were not keen to take her in: even her mother’s sister, tante Marguerite hesitated, ashamed of the stigma of domestic violence. Instead, she farmed Jacqueline out to various foster families. One was a tax inspector’s. When it was time for her to leave, the man refused to let her take her favourite doll, one of the few treasures her father had given her. Marguerite, it transpired, had fallen behind on paying for her bed and board, and the man insisted on keeping the doll in forfeit.
Whether through deliberate cruelty or by sheer bad luck, Jacqueline was passed around like a parcel. Anyone she felt affection for was forced to give her up for reasons that were never clear. As soon as she did well at school, she was moved. She became a disruptive influence—most memorably when she persuaded an entire classroom to squint at a cross-eyed teacher she loathed. How I love that little act of spiteful subversion for showing that her spirit had not been crushed. When she was placed in a boarding school where she was especially miserable and lonely, she bit herself until she bled.
Eventually Marguerite ran out of options and took her in. Apprehensive, pious and humourless, she made a point of only dressing in brown. When she noticed the red buttons on Jacqueline’s winter coat, she removed them. Marguerite was on high alert for any signs of disruption: as the daughter of a violent man, my mother came with a reputation that preceded her as a potential trouble-maker. There had already been more drama and scandal in the family than Marguerite could tolerate. The last straw came when Marguerite’s sister, Jeanne, a doctor, threw my mother out after she complained that Jeanne’s husband had sexually harassed her.
While Marguerite was wary and suspicious of her unwelcome guest, her cardiologist husband Jean-Jacques appreciated my mother’s intelligence and quick wit, which only made Marguerite jealous. Sensing the potential for conflict, my mother took advantage of it and played her aunt and uncle off against each other. In the full fig of teenage revolt, during the Occupation, she sought out ways to shock and provoke tante Marguerite—once threatening to knit a row of swastikas into a sweater. Adept at needling and sharp-tongued, she was, by her own admission, a handful.
These details, extracted in intermittent conversations over many years, were like small detonating devices; though my mother dropped them with seemingly casual indifference, tinged with defiance and pride, they exploded with bitterness and pain. Every inflexion told a story of enduring grievance, of growing up feeling unloved and unwanted, angry and anxious, mistrustful and fearful. Once when we were talking about some aspect of my father’s family’s fate at the hands of the Nazis, she turned to him, eyes glinting like jet beads, chin thrust forward at an angle of vehemence: ‘At least what happened to you happened to others. What happened to me only happened to me.’ As if suffering were a competition.
She remembered nothing of her parents, not their voice, not their smell, though she mentioned that in childhood her father sometimes appeared to her as a ghost and she did not find his presence frightening. When Marguerite gave her photographs of her parents, she cut out their faces with nail scissors.
In France, so-called crimes of passion were recognised until the 1970s as mitigating circumstances by French law. Although it bore all the hallmarks of a crime passionnel, Roger and Lucienne’s murder–suicide was not one, because it was premeditated. Where did my grandfather, an amateur boxer, get the gun? We will never know, but he obviously had the temperament for aggression.
Years later a therapist told me that a killing of this kind rarely occurs out of the blue and is usually preceded by other kinds of domestic violence. It is highly probable that my mother witnessed her father striking her mother, but had wiped any recollection of it. Once I understood this, it made it easier for me to accept that she had been so passive when my father punished me with beating.
Her parents’ murder–suicide was the defining moment in my mother’s life. Forever after, she feared abandonment. She fought to save her marriage because anything was better than being left yet again. When I left England to live in Australia, she interpreted my departure as her cruel but inevitable fate, cursing her for a third time. Each time I left after an annual visit, she became almost ill with grief, as if part of her was being torn away. The guilt of causing such anguish was unbearable.
Now I am in my fifties and she is in her eighties. Last year, knowing only the bare bones of a story that caused her pain to relate, I felt the pressure of time draining away and wanted more information about how, where and when it all happened.
The story had, I knew, made the papers, because the shooting, unlike most domestic violence, had occurred in public. So I asked a friend in Paris to see what she could find in the archives. By sheer coincidence, her research yielded results while Maman was visiting me in Australia to celebrate her birthday. An email came through with copies of press clippings attached, providing details I had never heard, including eyewitness testimony from Lucienne’s sister Jeanne, who had come to meet my grandmother for lunch outside of where she worked and watched the tragedy unfold.
Le Petit Parisien featured my maternal grandparents on the front page. The paper was a well-known canard, a kind of French tabloid scandal sheet that specialised in reporting lurid crimes. But another domestic tragedy soon eclipsed it when Violette Nozière was arrested for the attempted murder by poisoning of her parents. In the end, she succeeded only in killing her father, whom she accused of incest.
Nozière’s trial was widely reported, because of sensational revelations that she had worked as a prostitute and was suffering from venereal disease. She was sentenced to death by guillotine but that sentence was eventually commuted, and when released from jail after eleven years in 1945 she married and then had five children. Later, her story was told in a stylish and sympathetic film by Claude Chabrol starring a young Isabelle Huppert.
That year, 1933, was a juicy year for violent and sensational crime in Paris. In perhaps the most disturbing case, the two Papin sisters, who worked as domestic servants, were accused of murdering their employer, having first gouged out her eyes with their bare hands. Later, Jean Genet immortalised their sociopathic relationship in his psychosexual play The Maids.
By comparison, the mere shooting by Roger
Legout, 29 (described as a mechanic and not a sailor as my mother had believed), of his wife Lucienne Duran, 23, lacked such warped details.
I kept my discoveries from my mother for several days, not wishing to ruin her birthday.
When I first moved to Australia thirty years ago, phone calls home were prohibitively expensive, inhibiting casual chitchat. The line was awful, with that awkward time delay that meant you always spoke over each other and missed half of what was said. My mother found those conversations excruciating: the technology only serving to underline how far apart we were. She came to dread calling and eventually stopped altogether except for birthdays.
But by the time Skype came along, my mother was eager for more regular communication and adopted it with enthusiasm. Both of us are grateful for the way it bridges the chasm of time and distance, allowing us to exchange the banalities of ordinary life with uncensored ease. First thing in the morning, London time, she switches on the video link, still wearing her floral nightdress, white hair unbrushed, eating a banana for breakfast just as I am about to start preparing dinner. She turns the volume up high to compensate for her diminishing hearing and leans in to see what I am wearing. We talk about nothing, that is to say, the news headlines, the latest series by her television darlings, David Attenborough and Jamie Oliver, the latest crime fiction she is reading. The easiest, least charged, most banal exchanges. My mother has never forgotten me telling her, in my bolshy teens, that her conversation made me tired. It was a casual insult aimed at her housewife’s litany of daily woes about tradies who failed to turn up. My remark cut deep: she has been verbally tentative with me ever since. Now we revel in being able to exchange pleasantries about the weather, both of us aware that such normality eluded us for so long.
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