I had been in Alba just a few weeks, and already the baker knew what kind of bread I bought, the grocer knew the brand of dish soap I preferred, and the man at the newspaper shop knew I read Le Monde and the International Herald Tribune. There were no house numbers in the village, but the postman delivered my letters to me all the same, from the very first day. People in villages are masters of discreet prying. Several times a week I found myself explaining who I was to a total stranger—only to realize halfway through the telling that they knew already and were just seeking confirmation. “Jacoubovitch,” they’d muse, when I mentioned my grandfather’s family name. “Ah, yes, that house by the river. I remember.”
I thought of my own arrival in Alba: Youssef bringing plastic sheeting for my windows; the innkeepers offering me work when they learned I needed money to fix up the house; my neighbors bringing me vegetables from their garden. Perhaps Grandma had wanted a house in a village in the South of France as a kind of insurance policy. If she was capable of sending a jug of kerosene to my mother through the U.S. Postal Service “just in case,” then why not hang on to the house in La Roche for the same reason? Maybe this was the place she’d always intended me to be, so that I, too, could learn to sourrwvive.
It was the summer of 1942.… Under the Vichy Government [the] foreigners [had been] assigned to “forced residencies” under surveillance of the gendarmerie. In [St. Paul,] this small town of 2,000 inhabitants, the largest group resided in its only hotel. Many were old, feeble, and sick.
After the roundup, all were taken to the gendarmerie to await a truck, which would transport them to a destination unknown to the locals. Clever tactic! as many French, though looking benevolently on German rules, nevertheless would shy away from a “final solution,” meaning pure and simple, unadulterated murder. Only the victims knew.
By eight a.m. the collected group was still crowded in the narrow entrance hall of the gendarmerie, sitting on benches, on the floor, or their scanty luggage containing the few essentials they were allowed to take with them. They hadn’t eaten since the day before and were full of apprehension and foreboding. So was I. To allay anxiety and fear I started going from shop to shop begging for food. Most, so approached, gave, some generously. Guilt, pity, powerlessness, shame? Who knows? Some food items we hadn’t seen in ages, traded on the black market and not given out, even when we had rare coupons for them.
To convince a French inhabitant to bring food to the gendarmerie was hopeless, and their warnings that I risked to be equally retained and shipped off if I went were not encouraging. But I did go, ashamed of my fear and heart beating into my throat. The gendarmes, when I arrived, ignored me, looked away, some scanning the road for the expected truck. The misery I saw was difficult to bear, and what could one say? Some women weak and sickish had collapsed or fallen asleep wherever they were, and the air was filled with gloom. At noon the truck had still not arrived. I made a second trip. The atmosphere had become more unbearable.
I learned later that the truck hadn’t come but close to five p.m., when I was on my way for a third visit and had been retained by a gossipy neighbor, which might have saved me. The memory of this day never faded. For a long time during and after the war, I had to deal with “survivor guilt,” and this brief, evanescent, modest act did not count.
On that day in 1942, when the gendarmes arrested Erna and her Polish roommate, they were sent south toward the sea, to the camps France had originally set up to house refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Now they were overcrowded with luckless people for whom both visibility and invisibility had failed: refugees from the north and the east, Jews, Communists, political dissidents, gypsies, homosexuals, and foreigners. The camps had harsh names: Gurs, Argelès, Rivesaltes, Le Barcarès.
When my grandmother delivered food to those awaiting deportation, Erna’s roommate gave her a pale pink damask napkin as thanks, to remember her. At five p.m. she was taken away, most likely to Rivesaltes, where she would have waited no more than a week before being deported to Drancy. Two or three days at most in Drancy, and then to Auschwitz. Of the 41,951 people France deported to Auschwitz in 1942, 784 men survived to the end of the war. And only 21 women.
My mother used the damask napkin every Passover as our matzo cover, doing her sad best to adopt its owner into our family and our memories. I have spent many an hour searching for traces or hints, a way to dredge Erna’s roommate out of the silence, but the French were not assiduous record-keepers. Someday perhaps I will come across a table or a list. In the meantime, she and I will have to make do with this ghost of an echo and the unsatisfactory mantra I remember.
Erna fared better than her roommate, the Polish seamstress. She was not Jewish; she was an Austrian ex-baroness, and a Catholic, and she was not deported as quickly as the other inmates. She was sent to a camp by the sea. Its big rolls of barbed wire looped all the way down to the beach, and conditions were so disorganized that it was easy enough to slip away for a walk. One day Erna was walking near the water when she saw someone on the other side of the fence. He beckoned to her.
When Erna approached, he asked, “Would you like to leave?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Come on.” He pointed to a place where the big loops of barbed wire grew wider and higher and helped her push them aside until a gap appeared. When she’d made it through and stood up, he rearranged the fence behind her, and they walked away.
The man was a priest, and he escorted Erna to a safe house. There she learned the address of a convent in Lyon, where the sisters might help her escape to Switzerland. Erna could have gone straight to Lyon. But she didn’t. Instead, she traveled back to St. Paul de Fenouillet, back to her friends Anna and Armand, and saved them.
“A miracle.” How many times had I heard Grandma use that word? That you even exist is a miracle; a miracle that you’re here; a miracle we’re alive; a miracle that we survived. As a child, I’d thought miracles were good. But Jewish tradition teaches that miracles are ambiguous. After all, if the universe really was created in the image of the Divine Spirit, there should be no need for miracles. A miracle happens when we humans rip holes in the universe’s perfection, and the Divine Spirit bleeds through the holes. Thus a miracle cannot prevent or undo the damage humans inflict; it can only alleviate some of the suffering caused by that damage. The question that follows a miracle is the same as the question provoked by tragedy: Why me? In those days, the only answer I could summon was, To remember. And I would look around the bleak living room in La Roche and feel afraid, as if I had faded entirely out of the present and transmogrified into some kind of remembering hermit crab, holed up in a bunker for unbearable memories.
Each time I visited my grandfather, I found that the mess of papers and books had encroached on the apartment a little further, despite my regular efforts to tidy up. He did seem to be managing with his new hot plate and kettle. I noticed he had kept the instructions I’d pasted to them, as well as the notes I had left on the fridge and on the door to remind him to check his supplies and bring a list when he went shopping.
I’d try to find ways to test his memory, to gauge the extent of the loss and how far back in time it had seeped. “Did you buy Le Monde yesterday?”
“Why wouldn’t I have bought Le Monde yesterday?”
“Do you remember where that Indian restaurant you like is?”
“I haven’t been there since I gave up my car. But don’t you recall? The waiter was quite impertinent the last time we were there.” Like my grandmother, he seemed more and more tired. Often he retired right after dinner, before I could work up the courage to ask him any questions about the past. And even when he didn’t, I’d find myself at a loss for what to ask: the subjects about which I felt most curious sparked so much anger and chagrin in him that I didn’t usually have the heart to broach them. Once asking questions had felt dangerous to me, like provoking a spider or driving on the wrong side of the road. Now it felt dangerous for him, to set off so much emo
tion in someone who was becoming so frail. Once he was in bed, I’d sit with my memories in that high-up, quiet apartment. I’d call Julien or distract myself with a book. One night, after he’d bidden me goodnight and closed his bedroom door, I wandered into the kitchen. At the table, which had once been his favorite sitting spot, a pile of papers had engulfed the radio, the teapot, his crystal ashtray, his silver cup of pencils and pens. Idly, I began sorting them into piles. If he got mad the next morning, I reasoned, he’d forget it before lunchtime. Mostly, it was just old copies of Le Monde and newsletters from the various charitable organizations he supported, which I piled on the floor to be recycled. But not very far down I noticed a single photocopied sheet of paper, looking battered and worn, as if a storm had tossed it up from somewhere deeper than those newspapers. I pulled it out and saw a poem:
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.
I shivered. It was that poem, his explanation for why he couldn’t come to my bat mitzvah, why he couldn’t bear the thought of facing my grandmother. What was it doing there? What had I stirred up inside him?
Slowly, almost without realizing it, I made a life for myself in La Roche. As the summer went on, friends visited me in the house and lent a hand: we stripped the blackberry cane out from among the tiles on the terrace, painted the shutters, weeded the garden. I saved my pennies and ordered glass for the windows and a door for the terrace. Julien and I went to parties and cookouts and on excursions together. He drove my friends back and forth to the bus stop and the train station. I met his friends, his mother, his father, his stepmother, his brothers. And we laughed a lot. One afternoon in particular, I remember sitting on the couch with him. The front door was open, the sunshine was pouring in, tinted green from the honeysuckle vine on the terrace, and we just sat in the soft end of the day and laughed and laughed. We laughed so long we forgot what started us laughing, and then we laughed some more. And I remember looking at him and thinking, This is what falling in love is like.
Through all of it, I wrote to my grandmother. It was the best habit I ever acquired. Grandma was a firm believer in the adage that actions speak louder than words, but since letters combine the two, she liked them better than almost anything. That year in France I learned she was right. Our letters to each other brought back the closeness we had shared when I was a small child, and though she is gone now, when I open her letters, she is almost there again.
Not that she answered any questions in the way I wanted. She still zipped off on a tangent from whatever subject I raised. She was far more interested in what I was making of my life on the other side of the ocean than she was in digging up the past. “Write about your life now,” she urged me. “Tell me your plans.” But what was interesting about the now? What were my stories worth compared to my grandmother’s memory of November 11, 1942, the day Nazi Germany invaded France’s Free Zone, where she and my grandfather were living?
Your question brought back to memory another “miracle” I never recorded, not even “en passant.” When I returned from Lyon and by “miracle” wasn’t apprehended in the junction waiting room (which later on saved three, Armand, Erna, and I), I arrived late in Perpignan, no more buses for St. Paul—the Nazi organization frighteningly efficient!!! Every major street already bearing signs in German to the “état-major,” the hotels, different military services. I was told that there was not a room to be had anywhere, all occupied by the Nazi Army. Besides, I was afraid to go to one; everything seemed dangerous.
Anna had been to Lyon to bring food to Armand’s sister Rosie, who had just given birth to twins. Even before she learned that France had fallen, she had bad news to bring back to St. Paul. Although Armand’s brother’s wife, Rose, already had been deported from Tours, Armand’s parents, Leon and Gitla, had refused to travel from Tours to Lyon to shelter with their daughter Rosie, saying that no fate could be worse than disturbing her new family. Now I pictured Anna alone in the cold streets of Perpignan, sick with fear.
After eating in a “better” restaurant surrounded by German officers who eyed me strangely, I got even more scared, how to survive the night till a bus to St. Paul. Through the St. P. village doctor, well inclined toward me but unable to help or use my knowledge, I got to know an ophthalmic surgeon (friend of his) in Perpignan who occupied in a fancy quarter, in a beautiful apartment building, a whole floor, part practice part living quarters. I had twice done anesthesia for him and assisted in his operations, so—it was already dark, late fall—I went there carrying my suitcase through the unlit streets. A “miracle” itself to find the house and climbed one? two? three? floors to the apartment. A dark and unfriendly woman opened, standing in a way not to let anyone enter. I stated who I was and my plight. She regretted [to say] the doctor was away (I believe it was a weekend) on his country estate. While I pleaded and envisioned myself at least being hidden in the building, under the stairs maybe, three German officers, one older, two younger, noisily climbed up, startling us both in front of the door to silence. One of the officers in grammatically correct but strongly accented French said to the woman, they must see the apartment and requisition any available rooms for their officers. She stared, looked frightened; I repeated what had been said, and the officers were ready to shovel her aside, so she entered the hall, me after her, and the officers following. She showed them first (smart) the practice room, then, their big bedroom and others definitely not bedrooms, coming to a small—back-looking-out—bedroom, where, tired, I deposited my suitcase, and she said I was her daughter who had just arrived and that would be the only room otherwise available. The officers left, she and I were saved. I was too tired, scared, agitated. Still don’t know if she was the doctor’s wife or housekeeper? I had to ask for a glass of water, I remember, and left very early for my bus to St. Paul the next day, through empty streets patrolled by Nazi soldiers. A miracle!!! Upon return to St. Paul, we planned our escape out of occupied France. This was a labor of love for you. I am not too well and can hardly write anymore. Can you read it?
I pictured my grandfather waiting for my grandmother all through that long night she spent in Perpignan. I pictured him pacing the floor, then seated by the stove with his head in his hands, certain she was lost. I pictured him filled with guilt and regret—it was his sister she was visiting, after all. I pictured their mute relief when she walked through the door and how quickly it must have been replaced by more fear.
If this were a novel, I would say their love shone like a searchlight against this backdrop of heroism and terror and survival. But it is not. I have no evidence there was much light of any kind. All I see now is the tarnished gleam of a little silver dish with AUBETTE stamped in the bottom, which one of them packed in a pocket or bag when it got too dangerous to stay in St. Paul de Fenouillet and they left for Lyon.
One night in late summer, it was insufferably hot. The heat was keeping us from sleep, or maybe it was after a party, or maybe we were on our way back from Le Camping. Whatever we’d been doing, when the heat didn’t dissipate, Julien and I made our way down the footpath and into the darkness cast by the trees over the river. The nighttime in the woods and vineyards and fields was unusually still. We crossed the little wooden footbridge over the Escoutay, clambered up the bank on the other side, and checked for cars. Ahead of us, a glimmer or two escaped from the surface of the municipal pool. We climbed the fence and dropped onto the concrete surrounding the pool, which had been warmed all day by the sun and the slap of children’s feet and still smelled of hot terry cloth and sunbathers. We stripped off our clothes and jumped into the water. It whispered over our heat-cranky skin. I paddled around for a while, and then I flipped over and drifted on my back. Above my head was the awesome hulk of Alba’s castle, where a single light gleamed from a tower window. Beyond that La Roche look
ed like an old man drowsing in a battered nightcap. The lights of the village and the hamlet gleamed green and gold in the dark sky, where the Milky Way was just barely visible, a silver fuzz of stars stretching through the firmament. The water lapped around my back, my kneecaps, my ears. It was so quiet you could hear the figs growing. I felt something inside me begin to shift, fingers letting loose. Lying in the water, I thought, Maybe despite all my efforts, my grandparents’ story will slip away from me. Maybe I’ll never know all the things I want to know. And for a sliver of a second, I thought, Maybe it doesn’t matter. Right here, and right now, I am happy.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, THE GLASS PANES I HAD ORDERED for the windows arrived, and Julien installed them. The figs had ripened and were beginning to fall off the trees; the grapes in the vineyards had turned dark purple, and tractors towed vats of them through the village to the vintners’ cooperative. The sun was beginning to slide through the day sideways, filling the air with a yellow as rich as lemon bars, and the nights were growing cold. For a week or so, the house felt blessedly quiet and protected, with the plastic gone and the new glass sparkling in the window frames. But the north wind blew hard against the walls, and soon the stones lost all the heat they’d stored up over the summer. Just as I had when I’d first arrived in April, I wore more clothes inside than I did outside. I knew I was going to have to give up.
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 15
