A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

  “And of course you can, or of course you can’t. It all depends on how you look at it. Take your grandfather. Nothing was ever all right with him.”

  I nodded. “And you—”

  “As I say, whatever comes, comes for the best. Gratitude is the most important human emotion.”

  She put the cards back in their pile and gave her little birdlike cackle that reminded me of things pleasant and prickly and salty, like cocktail crackers or pickled beets. And then she looked at me, just as she had once or twice before in my life, and said, “You’re like me, Mirandali. You’ll sourrwvive.”

  Now I understood it was a command, not a prediction. And I looked at her indomitable smile, the coal-black streaks in her silver hair, and the turquoise and gold earrings quivering in her ears and wished for a lifetime more with her to figure out exactly what sourrwviving entailed.

  But there wouldn’t be a lifetime more of years, I knew. Anyway, Grandma had planted the seeds of my sourrwvival long ago. Sooner than I expected, and despite the grouchy man at the consulate, I got a job in Le Teil as an English teaching assistant, which came with a work visa from September to April. September was six months away, just the length of the tourist visa for which I was eligible after my three months in the United States. I gave my notice at the bookstore and bought a ticket back to France. “Good,” Grandma declared when it was time to say goodbye. “Good for you. Don’t come back,” she reminded me, pushing away the hug I’d attempted to give her.

  Julien came straight from work, dressed in plaster-spattered clothes, to pick me up at the train station. He’d bashed his lip with a hammer the day before. I’d been traveling for the past thirty hours and was wearing an oversize hand-me-down coat that made me look like a homeless highland shepherd. I needed a shower, and I probably also needed a haircut. Certainly, if you had seen us from afar, or even up close, that morning in early March 2005, we wouldn’t have looked particularly romantic. But in my memory, our reunion was a soaring, violin-tinged affair, filled with the peculiar yellow-gray light that suffuses the winter sky in the Dauphiné. We stood and hugged amid the noises of the trains and the echoing footsteps of other travelers, and just as I had that summer in the pool and that autumn in Julien’s wood-paneled house, I felt the full weight and force of my own life, lived for myself and not for the past or my grandparents. Our hands and faces were the only parts of us uncovered in the cold air. We touched them together almost shyly. Then, arm in arm, we walked out to the parking lot and got into the car, headed for Alba, headed for home.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  WHILE CONVINCED THIS ADDITIONAL YEAR IN France was simply a brief pause in my real life, I also shipped over a throw pillow, a couple of coffee mugs, a challah plate, and a handmade quilt, the items I’d been saving ever since my obsession with homes had evolved from building little dioramas to collecting actual objects. Julien’s coming-home present to me was even less temporary-seeming: he surprised me with an antique writing desk restored by a friend of his. An outside observer, or perhaps my grandmother, would have thought we at least sensed the meaning of these gestures, but one of the things that made our relationship work so well was our shared faith in the impermanence of all things.

  So for a few months, I continued to believe I was on a kind of warm-weather hiatus, writing a fairy tale—calamitous as it might be—in a fairy-tale setting. Three or four days a week I waitressed at my friend Françoise’s restaurant in La Roche, serving boeuf aux mille épices and lavender crème caramel to happy tourists and friendly regulars. Julien and I would wake up together and have coffee and croissants, and once he left for work, I’d sit and write until it was time to leave for the restaurant. From time to time, we went to see my grandfather, whose condition, to my great relief, seemed stable enough.

  During my stay in Asheville, my mother had given me the AUBETTE dish, a tiny shred of evidence that my grandparents’ love had, at some point, truly existed. Why else would they have carried it so long and so far? I looked at it a great deal but held it sparingly, as if I might rub off the last remains of their past. It smelled like my grandmother in reverse, mostly metal and a tiny whiff of roses. I reasoned and insisted it into a symbol of all they couldn’t say to each other, or to me.

  Armand in an internment camp in Wald, Switzerland, March 1943.

  Anna in 1942, a head shot most likely taken by the Swiss border police.

  I returned to their refugee files, which I had largely neglected the year before, trying to trace their steps in the months following their separation in Switzerland, searching for hints of what had come after.

  Each of their files contained a badly photocopied picture of them, looking shadowy and lost. As logical as it was to find their photographs there, I still felt startled and moved when I stumbled upon them, as we all must be when we come across little flashes of the people we love preserved as anonymous figures by hands who never knew them. Mostly, I gleaned useless tidbits, half-personal details, like how much soap my grandparents were allowed each month or that their meal rations didn’t include chocolate. In the hundreds of pages that documented their sojourn to Switzerland, Anna and Armand appeared never to have been in the same place at the same time. I briefly reconsidered my twelve-year-old fancy that they’d never actually met.

  The bulk of the pages consisted of entry and exit notices with dates and the innocuous-sounding names—Victoria, Bristol, Régina—of the empty resort hotels that had been converted into refugee lodgings for the duration of the war. Any list on which my grandparents had appeared was included in their dossiers. As a result, there were pages and pages of names: names of those to be sent from one camp to another, names of those given leave for a day, names of those released to attend school, to work in the fields, to participate in classes and conferences. I imagined the galaxy of memories that accompanied each name, and I hoped each one had a person like me attached to it, scrambling to remember, to stitch together a story before it was too late. I began to feel dizzy with all the remembering.

  In Geneva, I tried sounding out my grandfather about life in the refugee camps.

  “What is there to say? Mine was hardly an interesting case.”

  When I prodded him, he admitted, “It was prison. There was hard labor. Slave labor, almost. In the fields all day …” He trailed off, shook his head.

  “But you weren’t there very long, were you? Wasn’t there a program that helped you go back to school?”

  “Of course, yes, there were good people,” Grandpa amended. “I remember one woman, a social worker in one of my camps, telling me that if I asked to go to church, they had to let me out.”

  “Did you?”

  “I’ll never forget the sermon the priest gave.”

  “You actually went to church? Why didn’t—” I wanted to ask why he didn’t spend his free time elsewhere, but Grandpa cut me off.

  “Of course, what else would I have done? We were prisoners. They were monitoring us.” He looked around him as if that were still the case. “But the priest—he had white hair and very big blue eyes, and he leaned over his pulpit and shook his finger at the congregation and said, ‘If you imagine that you are worth more than the others because the war has spared you, you are wrong.’ ”

  My grandfather stopped. I saw he was weeping and reached across the table for his hand, something I never would have dared to do before his fading memory softened him.

  “Did you ever get out to do anything else?” I persisted, when he had put away his handkerchief.

  “To do what? You couldn’t just leave, you know.”

  “Did you write to anyone? Did you have contact with anyone?”

  He shook his head. “I had no one in Switzerland. Some very distant cousins in Zurich, but they had never been in contact with us, so I gave up on the idea of going to see them.”

  For my part, I gave up on being circumspect and took the plunge. “Did you ever see my grandmother? Did you write to her?”

  Instantly, my grand
father’s face darkened. “How could I?” he asked, incensed. “Where would I have gotten a pen or paper?” He stood up, and briefly I thought he was going to storm out of the room. “All of this has been written about before. I’ve already answered these questions. Just a moment.” He walked into his sitting room and returned with a stack of books about Swiss refugee policy, Swiss economic policy during the war, and Swiss collaborationism.

  “Is there anything about you in these books?”

  Silently, Grandpa pointed to one of them, and I opened it to a page he’d marked:

  In Arisdorf, corruption reigned in the camp: the refugees realized the milk was being skimmed and that very little meat reached them. M. Ja. was charged by his comrades with protesting these dishonest acts.

  “Monsieur Ja. is you?”

  He nodded. This was the first indication I’d seen that my grandfather had had any kind of status or engaged in any positive action in the refugee camps; he’d only ever spoken of his experiences in vague, pessimistic terms. “So you were a rabble-rouser,” I teased, smiling.

  He smiled, too. “I’m not sure you could say that. I was just better at putting things into words than the other chaps were.”

  “So you did have access to pen and paper?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose so, yes.”

  “So did you write to my grandmother?”

  The offended look returned. “How could I have? How could I possibly have known where she was?” I let it go, wondering whether he was rebuffing me because he didn’t want to talk about it or because he actually couldn’t remember.

  My grandmother was as voluble as my grandfather was taciturn about her experiences in refugee camps. She’d written pages and pages about her life during that time, pages I’d once set aside because my grandfather was not mentioned in them. Returning to those essays now, I had to admit to myself that I’d also discarded them because they described something I thought of as “after,” a time she was already “safe.” I felt ashamed of how conditioned I’d been by all the Holocaust literature I’d read, slightly horrified to realize that I had, unwittingly, neglected this period of her life for the spectacular and semiapocalyptic moments closest to oblivion, memories she barely could bring herself to recall.

  Despite what they now claimed, my grandparents would have been able to keep in touch through Ria’s family, who could have forwarded their letters. Reading my grandmother’s vivid essays, I wondered if she’d sent similar accounts to my grandfather. I wondered if he’d felt jealous of her status as a camp physician, or jealous of her camps, which were, on the whole, more comfortable than his.

  She’d first been put to work as a physician in a camp in Wesen, caring for ninety-six children and eighty-six women, under the direction of an authoritarian pro-Nazi who forced his charges to go on “health marches” around the freezing grounds of the camp. She had arrived at night, after a train ride with a young military escort who gave her dark chocolate to eat—the first she’d tasted in years—and perhaps listened to her reminisce about taking the very same train during her years in medical school. “When, as a student, we came along this lake,” she wrote me,

  the train-rails ran so close to the shore that one could hear the murmuring water … the hills and mountains on the opposite shore were clearly visible. The lake’s look was mysterious … overhanging mountains threw strange shadows which blackened the water … with the play of the sun it created iridescent hues of numerous shades.… In my fantasy I [would] stop … one day to explore its mysteries.…[My] fantasy was to be fulfilled, but not in the circumstances of my choice. I was to live along its shore, but hardly be able to enjoy its beauty.

  Upon her arrival, my grandmother was led through the cold, blacked-out streets to an uninviting hotel, which had been transformed by the Swiss military into refugee lodgings. She followed her escort through a lobby filled with women chatting in a mixture of German, French, and Yiddish. Their conversation died down as she walked past and resumed again as she climbed the stairs to a tiny, unheated attic room. Her new quarters, which must once have housed the hotel’s servants, contained a single bed, a rickety wardrobe, and a washstand. Even dead tired, Anna was careful to dwell on the positive: “My relief and thanks for having a single room were immense.” Left alone, she undressed and lay down, noticing as she did the extreme cold seeping in from the single, drafty window. She shivered miserably beneath the covers, unable to warm up. A bare fifteen-watt bulb hanging above her new domain only added to the gloom.

  Her battle against self-pity was interrupted by the sudden appearance of the village doctor and the camp director. She spent several tense minutes listening to them discuss her future. Dr. Gygax, who had been caring for the inmate population in addition to his normal roster of patients, had requested a pediatrician to relieve him; now he learned that Anna was a chest physician. The central administration, assuming that any woman doctor was necessarily an obstetrician or a pediatrician, had failed to ask her about her specialization. The two men argued back and forth until Gygax thought to ask Anna whether she had worked with Dr. Paul Rohmer, a renowned professor of pediatrics at the Strasbourg medical school. “My answer (I had done two instead of only one [rotation] in his hospital …) seemed to please him.” Dr. Gygax announced he would bring her a pediatrics textbook and let her figure things out for herself. “True to his word, he returned the same evening with the pediatric textbook. Did I start going through the book, which I finished in two days, the same evening and read through the night[?]” I wondered if she had written to Armand about that awkward meeting and whether imagining her receiving two men from her bed had sent him into a lather of jealousy that prevented him from empathizing with her lonely, chilly predicament.

  Since the hotel in Wesen was only a transit camp, it slowly emptied as the women and children were transferred to homes or other specialized camps. After a time, Anna was assigned to a new internment home, this time with Erna, who worked as the assistant to the director.

  This camp was being prepared for pregnant women, some very close to delivery, mothers with infants and/or toddlers up to age four. […] After arrival of the refugees, I only slept fitfully, a few hours, during the night. Frequently summoned by anxious mothers about their child who had awoken them or women with false or real labor pain, I had long days and insufficient rest at night. The women who had to be examined by an obstetrician, other than myself, or were ready for delivery, accompanied by me, had to be brought to the hospital in Sierre.

  I knew from the refugee files that my grandfather had been interned for a time in Sierre, and I considered the possibility that my grandparents saw each other there. I checked the dates; naturally, they did not coincide.

  It appeared as if their luck had diverged when they separated. While my grandfather slept in a filthy straw bed in a makeshift dormitory in an unused factory, my grandmother had her own room in the maids’ quarters of a vacant hotel. Then again, if my grandfather had dwelt upon the speed with which he was released from the camps to return to his studies, or upon the fact that he was often exempted from manual labor to help with secretarial tasks in his camps’ administrative offices, or the fact that his position as group leader afforded him a larger allowance than the other refugee laborers, and if my grandmother had dwelt upon her festering chilblain, frostbitten toes, hours of overwork, and unpleasant role as middleman between the inmates and the camp administrators, perhaps I would think of their luck in exactly the opposite terms. If their fortunes differed, it was likely because my grandmother had taken her stubborn high spirits with her when they parted ways.

  “My luck always held,” Grandma wrote, recalling the precious minutes she’d lose negotiating with the camp director for a taxi to the local hospital every time a new mother went into labor at night. By the time the director conceded and the taxi arrived, “I often feared the event would occur in the car. The driver, hearing the labor wails, became nervous and had to be reassured.” Anna would sit in the back, enjoini
ng her chauffeur to keep his eyes on the road, and then make the taxi wait while she checked the patient into the hospital. Afterward she’d rush back to the camp to update every baby’s nutritional chart so that the milk kitchen could prepare the correct formulas for the following day. Each baby was fed a carefully tailored combination of barley, oats, corn, rice, and wheat, whose ratios my grandmother would adjust over time. Her staff was given only two cans of Nestlé condensed milk per month, which was barely sufficient to supplement the formulas of the weakest babies and which explains why, ever after, my grandmother refused to purchase anything marked “Nestlé.” To reassure the mothers and give herself some measure of peace, she also posted her young charges’ growth charts on her office door, another task that ate into her already short nights.

  No matter how she slaved over their babies, the mothers questioned Anna’s every decision: “My skinny self way below one hundred pounds, due to starvation in France, and inability to gain weight on camp food, made me look much younger than my age, and invited mothers to point out my unmarried state and lack of children.” Her response to their objections echoed a warning I’d heard more than once during my teenage years: “What do you have to do to make a baby? Open your legs twice in nine months, that’s what. But to raise a child—that requires experience and wisdom.” In her essay, she’d concluded: “I advised that, having done the former, they should leave it to me to help them with the latter.”

  As ever, my grandmother’s heroism entranced me, much as she hated it when I used that word: “The wish of the young to make heroes of individuals who have experienced events—by chance or imposed by circumstances—can be explained by the affection they have for them.” But how else could I describe her losing sleep so new mothers would fear less for their newborns, standing up for her fellow inmates when they went on a hunger strike to protest their insufficient rations, saving a baby’s life by cobbling together an intubation system out of a length of glass tubing and a kerosene stove, or preventing a scarlet fever outbreak in a badly equipped camp by adapting a remedy she remembered from a book about medieval medicine?