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

by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

  Berchtold was the middle age French woman widowed by her Swiss husband, where [your grandfather] found lodging when liberated from camp to study in Geneva at the École d’Interprètes at the University. Forgot her first name, could be Irma. (Your grdf should remember she was very fond of him, not so me, but let me stay at her lovely apt. with elevator to 4th floor with balcony over the street). There I got pregnant when living with him and attending the 6 month course “pour réfugiés d’après guerre.” I saw her regularly when I visited from America and after my separation from your grandf. She was employed during WWII by the International Red Cross to research the whereabouts of French prisoners of war and you all had three names because she explained to me that someone … could only safely be traced by a second or third different name.

  I marveled at everything she had packed into that paragraph: her nagging insecurity that my grandfather’s refined allure was more potent than her guileless, tactless charm; her faithful visits to her onetime landlady long after etiquette would have allowed her to stop; the odd formulation she used to account for the conception of their child; and tacked on at the end, an explanation for our all having three given names, which I always had chalked up to my family’s eccentricity. Not a word, though, about what it had been like to live with Armand.

  In the geriatric ward, the doctor encouraged me to speak with my grandfather about his past. This, of course, I was eager to do. I mentioned the Koppelmans, and his face darkened. “Terrible people,” he sniffed. “They don’t merit any discussion.”

  I tried Mrs. Berchtold. This time, he looked dreamy. “Yes, she was very kind to me at one time. Very kind. I stopped speaking to her, after the war, though. She appeared to have taken sides with your grandmother.” As always, he uttered those words as if they carried dangerous, ominous overtones, “and so you see I had to stop all contact with her.”

  “Do you remember living in Rive, during the war?”

  “Rive. That’s in Geneva. I used to live there.”

  “You still do.”

  “No, no,” Grandpa shook his head.

  “Where do you live, then?”

  He looked at me haughtily. “I’m afraid I’ve not been provided with the information necessary to answer that question.”

  I learned from the refugee records that Anna and Armand spent four months in Madame Berchtold’s apartment on the Cours de Rive. They were required to report to the Geneva central police station every Monday to prove they weren’t violating any rules, hiding any illegal refugees, holding any unauthorized jobs, engaging in any political activities, or working as spies. For four months they slept in a bed of their own, cooked meals, went shopping, followed the news. Would they have heard that French troops had pushed through to the Rhine and captured Strasbourg?

  I knew from my grandmother how much the two of them wanted a baby. At the end of the summer, a doctor—a colleague perhaps, or someone treating her for the pellagra she’d contracted in the camps—told my grandmother that years of starvation had shrunk her uterus to the size of a walnut. He said there was no hope. My grandmother went to another doctor and another. By December, the Battle of the Bulge had begun, and hopes flagged. A million men fighting in the woods, in the snow. The Allies registered huge losses.

  My grandmother found a doctor who was researching the benefits of high doses of vitamins. He gave her regular vitamin K injections and told her not to worry. The Nazi forces withdrew from the Ardennes. The Soviets captured Warsaw; they liberated Auschwitz. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met at Yalta. By January, my grandmother was pregnant.

  When I finished assembling this chronology of events, I read it to Julien.

  “Can I see that?” He took the paper from me and scanned it. “Do you really associate your mother’s conception with the Battle of the Bulge?”

  “I’m being symbolic.”

  “Come on,” he objected. “They must have known better than to pin their lives on the ups and downs of the war. Did they even know what was going on?” Julien flipped through the stack of travel permits I’d assembled. “It doesn’t look like they saw much of each other.”

  “No!” I exclaimed. “That’s why I’m reduced to the damn Battle of the Bulge. Even afterward—if you look here, they lived together from November 14, 1944, till”—I shuffled through the pages—“1944 … November, December, January, February, 1945 … till March 6, 1945.”

  “That’s it?” Julien picked up my grandmother’s letter again. “Where did she go on March 6?”

  “To a professional course of some sort.” I found a letter from her refugee file and read aloud:

  Major de Rham, who greatly appreciated Mme. Dr. Jacoubovitch’s services during her time in Leysin, has asked her to run a course being organized in les Diablerets. Given that Mme. Dr. Jacoubovitch is pregnant, this will allow her to continue her excellent work under less physically tiring conditions than in her current post in the sanatorium. Mme. Dr. Jacoubovitch has enthusiastically accepted the proposal. She will, naturally, be performing this work as a volunteer.

  I flipped forward a few pages. “And here it says her permit was extended to July 31, 1945. Do you think they were avoiding each other?”

  “How much choice could they have had?” Julien asked. “Wouldn’t they have had to take whatever jobs were being offered? Where was your grandfather?”

  “In Geneva.” I handed him another of my grandmother’s letters from the file, this one in my grandmother’s handwriting:

  Since my letters of July 9 and 25 went unanswered, I am taking the liberty of confirming the information I gave therein, and I ask again that you notify me of your continued approval. As my contract with the Military Hospital ended on July 31, I advised the Commandant at Leysin that I would be traveling to Geneva, where I would like to remain until my husband, who will be repatriated to France around August 25, 1945, leaves the city. Please allow me to go to Sierre after his departure. My delivery date has been estimated for mid-September, and I would like to be certain that I can prepare for the event at the La Providence maternity hospital, whose director is a friend of mine.

  “I guess they spent a few weeks together right before she gave birth,” I said. “And then my grandfather left the country, to start preparing for the Nuremberg Trials.”

  “So once they were married, they lived with each other for”—Julien counted—“November, December … four months—and then maybe three weeks before your grandfather left.”

  “Plus the five-day leaves she talked about in her letter,” I pointed out. “That would make … two leaves—ten more days.”

  “What do you think those months were like?”

  I recalled the picture in my mother’s album of my grandmother leaning against the railing on Madame Berchtold’s balcony and gazing at my grandfather.

  “Maybe that was their problem,” Julien suggested. “Maybe they’d spent so much time apart, they’d started to idealize each other, and it was a disappointment to live with the real thing.”

  I was still thinking of the photo and the erotic tension it seemed to betray. “Or maybe they spent just enough time together to keep idealizing each other, and the disappointment set in later.”

  “When the war was over,” my grandmother wrote on a page in her notebook titled “Free Associations,”

  for me it was strange, to feel so little, not to say nothing. All the—over four years—of hoping, waiting, imagining what it would be like, what I am going to do, flew away, when the moment of realization that it had really happened arrived. And then suddenly, doubt, fear, what now? Put together a life, different because the world was different, was it possible? Could one do it? Another memory was the sadness for what had been lost, the carnage, cruelty, and inhumanity, never dreamt of it could exist, became a burden to be part of one’s life from now on, not to be forgotten or repressed because it would be an insult to the victims, and only our memory could serve their heroism or cowardice. I remember becoming busy, with what? as if to
rush into what would be real life, as if the other one during the war years, wasn’t or hadn’t been real.

  Indeed, everything seemed to accelerate in 1945. My grandmother returned to her work as a physician; my grandfather completed his training as an interpreter and was recruited to work at the Nuremberg Trials. On August 22, 1945, my grandfather left Geneva for Paris, with a laissez-passer that read:

  It has been Switzerland’s privilege to offer you shelter in your time of need. It was not always possible for us to give everything we might have wished to the numerous refugees to whom we offered asylum. We hope nevertheless that your stay in Switzerland was of service to you and we wish you all the best for the future and the future of your country.

  All those years of tension and waiting culminated in a few polite lines printed on a flimsy piece of paper. Suddenly, it occurred to me to ask what had followed the war’s end. The kaleidoscopic fragments of their lives shook out into a new pattern to decipher, and I began to wonder whether the fissures in my grandparents’ relationship might have come after, not during, the war.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IN THE GERIATRIC HOSPITAL, MY GRANDFATHER HAD to be sedated most days. Otherwise he’d run away, or become hysterical and barricade himself in his room, or scream for help long into the night.

  During one of my phone calls to the hospital, a nurse inquired, “Was your grandfather a lawyer of some sort?”

  “No, why do you ask?”

  “Sometimes he recites things … it sounds like legal language. Like a trial. I just wondered. I wouldn’t bother you with it, only sometimes it’s rather gruesome.”

  When I was younger, the Nuremberg Trials had been one of the few parts of his past about which my grandfather would talk freely—or so I thought. He showed me the pictures of him in General Telford Taylor’s memoir of the Trials. He made me laugh with his description of Henri Donnedieu de Vabres’s giant mustache, which the French judge used for cover as he whispered commentary on courtroom proceedings to my grandfather, who had been selected to facilitate the judges’ deliberations partway through Trial One. He told me about being inducted into the U.S. Army and receiving a uniform and better pay. He explained the system of lights the interpreters used: yellow to slow down the speakers, red to signal a technical breakdown or a problem at the interpreters’ desk. He took pride in the fact that he never leaked anything to the press. He recalled French prosecutor François de Menthon’s kindness in helping to arrange his French citizenship—the first time in his life my grandfather had ever been a citizen of any country. He described how hard it was to interpret for Göring and how he grew to see Speer as “le moins pire”—the least worst. He remembered some of the female interpreters refusing to translate obscenities. He told me about the tensions in the judges’ secret meetings; about their endless debates and disagreements; and about the Russians’ insistence that the Nazis had committed the Katyn Forest massacres, prompting Judge Donnedieu de Vabres—again under cover of his mustache—to lean toward him and breathe, “They’re liars.”

  My grandfather (second from the right) in the interpreters’ section at the Nuremberg Trials, probably taken during the shooting of a publicity film that explained the innovative translation system and technologies the Trials employed.

  So I thought I knew quite a bit about my grandfather’s first experiences as a professional interpreter. I had filed his role at the Trials under “proud accomplishment” and forgotten it in my quest to trace the story of my grandparents’ relationship, overlooking its importance because my grandmother hadn’t been there. All over again, I was awed by their ability to camouflage the very existence of their continued relationship: until now, it had never crossed my mind that they had been married at that time. Married but far apart from each other. What effects did this separation have on their lives?

  Armand on his first visit to meet his new daughter, Angèle, during leave from the Nuremberg Trials in December 1945.

  A photograph from a series of Anna with Angèle taken in 1946 and sent to Armand while he was working in Nuremberg.

  I remembered a photo of my grandfather holding my mother as a baby, looking pleased and slightly surprised, as if she’d landed in his arms out of nowhere. Now I realized that the photograph must have been taken during one of his leaves from Trial One and that it documented meeting his daughter for the first time. Similar pictures of my grandmother, in which she observes her new baby with intense, almost ferocious, love, had been taken in Armand’s absence, as he worked in a corner of the courtroom in Nuremberg.

  My grandfather’s refugee file ended with his departure for France, but my grandmother’s continued through 1949. I noticed my grandfather’s handwriting on one of its pages:

  Armand Jacoubovitch

  c/o Tribunal militaire international

  20, place Vendôme—Paris

  Nuremberg, 2 January 1946

  Federal Department of Justice and Police

  Police Division

  Reference: refugee no. 7130 Vö

  Dear Sirs,

  I thank you for renewing the refugee permit of my wife, Madame Anna Jacoubovitch-Münster, until 1 May 1946. I am particularly grateful for your efforts given the peculiar situation in which I currently find myself: my parents were deported in 1942, our property was pillaged in 1940 when the Germans entered Strasbourg, and, finally, our house was destroyed by bombing. I am therefore obliged to start over from nothing, and, since I am currently working in Nuremberg as an interpreter at the International Military Tribunal, I am unable to bring my wife and baby to France, as I possess neither furniture nor household linens, and you are certainly aware of how difficult it is to find housing in Paris at this time.

  I therefore propose to bring my wife and my child to Paris upon my own return to the city; that is to say, once the Nuremberg trial is over, no doubt sometime in April.

  Under the circumstances, I would be most obliged to you if you would kindly ask the Geneva Police to renew my wife and child’s residency permit, which currently runs only to 31 January.

  If you could extend the permit to 1 May 1946, my wife would be able to avoid taking the steps that would otherwise be required for its renewal, steps that are rather difficult for her given that she is all alone and still nursing her baby.

  Sincere regards,

  A. Jacoubovitch

  Until April! Poor Grandpa—that main trial had lasted until October 1946. Transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials are available online through the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, but I’d never taken the time to look at them. I clicked through until I came to January 2, curious to learn what my grandfather’s work had been like that day. I scanned the page, and the enormity of what I’d been missing hit me.

  Car after car was filled, and the screaming of women and children and the cracking of whips and rifle shots resounded unceasingly. Since several families or groups had barricaded themselves in especially strong buildings and the doors could not be forced with crowbars or beams, the doors were now blown open with hand grenades. Since the ghetto was near the railroad tracks in Rovno, the younger people tried to get across the tracks and over a small river to get away from the ghetto area. As this stretch of country was beyond the range of the electric lights, it was illuminated by small rockets. All through the night these beaten, hounded, and wounded people moved along the lighted streets. Women carried their dead children in their arms, children pulled and dragged their dead parents by their arms and legs down the road toward the train. Again and again the cries, “Open the door! Open the door!” echoed through the ghetto.

  I began shaking. That familiar, gruesome sorrow gripped me. I shut my computer and tried to breathe. All those words had come out of my grandfather’s mouth as he worked. How foolish I’d been. I’d never considered what impact this experience might have had on him.

  When I next visited my grandfather, he seemed more at ease, despite the nurse’s reports. “This mission is quite dull, really,” he infor
med me in a low voice. “I’m hardly in the booth at all. I’ll be going home soon.”

  “I see,” I replied, not quite sure how to tell him that wasn’t true. “Do you think about the Nuremberg Trials? Do you remember them?”

  “Of course.”

  “It must have been very difficult for you.”

  “Well, interpreting is quite a difficult job,” he said, as if I had suggested he was mentally impaired. “Not everyone can do it.”

  I wondered if this might be a personal jab, since I myself was working as an interpreter by then, but I doubted he remembered that. “I meant the content of the Trial,” I elaborated. “The things you were interpreting. Do you remember any of that? The nurse said …” I groped around for the right way to describe it “… she said you were having nightmares, and I wondered if it was about that.”

  My grandfather was silent. “It’s like a black box. I carry it … I have it with me, but when I open it, there’s nothing inside.”

  I began researching the Trials and my grandfather’s role in them. I learned from an interview my grandfather had given to the Berliner Zeitung in the mid-nineties that he broke down in the interpreters’ booth during Göring’s testimony. In another account, I read that Göring had criticized the interpreters directly; at one point, he supposedly barked, “You are shortening my life by several years.” I could find no record of his comment in the trial transcripts, but I wondered whether my grandfather had been the unlucky recipient of one of his barbs and whether it had contributed to his crumbling under the strain. Certainly, interpreters’ breakdowns were common during the trial, so common that they kept a team of substitutes waiting at all times. Armand and the other Jewish interpreter had been furloughed to the translators’ section when what they were hearing got to be too much for them.