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

by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

  Historians and eyewitnesses of the Trials agree that of all the defendants, Göring was the most daunting: he spoke in long, tricky sentences and deliberately obfuscated, baiting the prosecutors, derailing direct examinations, and tearing through cross-examinations at a speed that often tripped up the interpreters or the cross-examiners themselves. I remembered my grandfather telling me stories to that effect, though at the time I’d thought they were amusing anecdotes: in German, verbs are conjugated partly at the end of sentences, and by the time Göring arrived at the end of his sentences, he’d often forgotten how they’d begun. “Sometimes he didn’t make any sense,” I remembered my grandfather recounting, “and I had to tell the judges that the sentence was of no importance.” In his memoir of the trials, Richard Sonnenfeldt recalls, “At Nuremberg, as I anticipated meeting Göring, I felt the Jewish refugee I had once been tugging at my sleeve,” and I thought, Grandpa still was a Jewish refugee at the time. What must it have been like for him, speaking for Hitler’s second-in-command?

  I contacted Tomas Fitzel, the author of the article in the Berliner Zeitung, to see if he could give me any more information; he replied,

  Unfortunately he broke off contact because I wrote that he had a breakdown when he had to translate for Goering. A colleague told me this information about him, not he himself. Perhaps he felt ashamed, but my intention was to talk about this extremely hard and sometime inhuman job he and his colleagues had to do.

  In our interview, he wanted to say that because you had to be so concentrated on your work of translating, afterward you could not remember; it passed through you. But instead he used a wrong—or better—the right metaphor: the work had been like a filter. So the knowledge of the horrible testimonies was to a certain extent kept out. But in reality the filter was he himself, without being conscious that what he translated became something he kept in him.

  I remember that I never thought before our interview of who he might be: a Jew, a victim, has his family been killed? The moment I rang the bell of his apartment in Geneva, I looked at his name and felt like I was reading it for the first time; I thought oh my God, how stupid I am.

  If indeed my grandfather had a breakdown, he never mentioned it to anyone, and he went back to interpreting quite rapidly. But the content of the trial altered the rest of his life.

  My grandfather was present when the films shot by the U.S. Army upon liberation of Nazi concentration camps were projected on November 29, 1945. The court was shown affidavits signed by the filmmakers attesting that the films had not been tampered with or altered in any way. That’s how unbelievable they were.

  No one knew what to expect when the American prosecutor Thomas Dodd said, “This is by no means the entire proof which the prosecution will offer with respect to the subject of concentration camps, but this film which we offer represents in a brief and unforgettable form an explanation of what the words ‘concentration camp’ imply.”

  It’s said even some of the defendants wept openly in the courtroom. Supposedly, one of the judges took to his bed for three days.

  And my grandfather, alone in a wrecked city in former enemy territory, new to his job, shy around his colleagues, sitting awkwardly near the projection screen in his corner seat in the interpreters’ section? My grandfather can only have thought:

  Those are my parents.

  He was one of the first to see the human skins tanned for lampshades and paperweights, the scars, the tattoos, the piles of clothes and shoes and gold fillings, and worse. Much worse. He saw all these things before they became common knowledge. He saw them before there were words like Shoah or Holocaust, before six million became a meaning-laden number, before the documentaries and museums and archives and memorials and school lessons gave us some sort of awkward carrying device for that terrible darkness.

  My grandfather was thirty years old when the trial began. In trial footage, he looks younger but haggard, as if the testimony he was hearing were taking years off his life and causing him to relive the war, this time knowing all that would happen. He moves restlessly as he works, hunching over and then leaning back, fidgeting with pencil and paper, unsure where to put his hands, twisting in his seat. Seeing him for the first time in video clips preserved by the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, I had the creepy sensation of watching myself: I moved in the exact same way when I worked in the interpreting booth—another strange imbrication of my life and my grandparents’.

  I knew from experience that the intense focus required by the job would have meant that as long as he kept working, every sentence he said would be replaced by another and another; he didn’t have time to remember or think about any particular one. But inevitably, every day he worked in Nuremberg became a day of knowledge he possessed and my grandmother did not. What happened when he returned to her? He would have arrived carrying all those words, packed away somewhere in his mind. Did he know the damage this was inflicting on him? Regardless, he must have seen that the fault line separating their personalities was becoming unbridgeable.

  In the very days and weeks when my grandmother was returning to the world of the living, nuzzling their new baby and nursing sick refugees back to health, my grandfather was sitting in a dim, smoke-filled courtroom, helping invent a vocabulary for a universe more frightening and hellish than anything he ever could have imagined. As one witness, Dr. Franz Blaha, said when he asked to testify in German instead of his native Czech: “A large number of special and technical expressions relating to life in and about the concentration camps are purely German inventions, and no appropriate equivalent for them in any other language can be found.” Imagine being one of the people who had to bring to life concepts and acts so inconceivable that the vocabulary for them did not exist in other languages.

  No amount of loyalty and optimism on my grandmother’s part could pull him out of that abyss; no amount of sorrow could match the horror he had felt; no amount of pride in his intelligence and accomplishment could palliate the pain of participating in the world’s attempt to bring some measure of justice to the unpardonable—especially as atrocities such as the Katyn Forest massacre came to light and undermined his confidence in those who claimed to be among the just. They broke apart because of what he knew and my grandmother did not.

  They broke apart, but how could they let go of each other? How could they let go after all they had been through?

  In November 2006 my grandfather was transferred to the extended stay unit of a new hospital, too quickly for me to come and accompany him for the move. For a while, his nightmares and anxiety worsened. When Julien and I visited him for the first time, we checked in at the nurses’ station before going to his room, and the nurse on duty said, “I need to warn you, he’s looking very unkempt.”

  “Why?”

  “He won’t let us near him to cut his hair. We’ve tried clippers and scissors, but he completely panics and calls us the ugliest things. I take it he’s a Holocaust survivor.”

  I nodded.

  “Poor thing. They’re always the hardest with grooming and personal care. They like being handled even less than the other patients. Maybe it’ll be different for you, though,” she suggested. “Would you mind trying?”

  She handed me a sheet and a pair of scissors. “Don’t worry about the hair on the floor. We’ll come sweep it up when you’re finished.”

  My grandfather’s face lit up when he saw us. “Hello!” he called joyfully. “How on earth did you find me here?”

  “I always know where you are,” I assured him. “I talk to your doctors and nurses and make sure everything’s all right—even when I can’t come visit.” I braced myself for an outburst, but my grandfather smiled.

  “That’s a comfort.”

  “You could use a haircut,” I ventured.

  He reached up to touch his hair. “I know,” he acknowledged ruefully. “But I don’t have any money to pay a hairdresser.”

  “Well, it’s your l
ucky day.” I showed him the scissors and sheet and bowed. “Miranda the hairdresser, at your service.” Once again I expected a tirade, but my grandfather sat down and looked up at me expectantly, with the same meek, trusting smile I’d noticed that spring. So Julien sat on the bed and chatted with him while I snipped. Grandpa relaxed visibly under my fingers. The room was spare and quiet and looked out over a tree-filled park. The window was open, and we could hear birds singing. Grandpa stopped talking and bowed his head slightly. He looked peaceful, more peaceful than I’d ever seen him. I wondered if the memory loss might actually be something of a boon to him.

  When I’d finished his haircut, we walked to the hospital cafeteria for coffee.

  “Do you think about anything in particular?” Julien asked him.

  Grandpa shook his head. “Not really—I watch the trees in the park … and the birds …” He pointed to the gardens through the window and trailed off. We waited for something more, but it didn’t come.

  “When you think about your life, is there anything in particular that comes back to you?” Julien pressed, gently.

  “Not particularly—the war. The war, I guess.”

  “Which part of it?” I asked. “Your time in the army?”

  “No, not really—that was quite dull.”

  “About the Pyrenees?” I suggested.

  “Yes.” He picked up a packet of sugar and hesitated, trying to recall whether he’d already put some in his coffee.

  “You put in one sugar,” I pointed out.

  “What? Oh, thank you.”

  “That’s a difficult time to remember,” Julien said. “A sad time.”

  My grandfather nodded, squinting out the window into the sun as if he were looking for something hidden over the horizon. “No doubt …,” he drew the words out slowly, picking each one with care, “no doubt the woman with whom I was living … she was very practical … no doubt she contributed greatly to our survival.”

  The hair stood up on the back of my neck. “You mean my grandmother?”

  Grandpa looked blank.

  “You mean … you mean Anna Munster?” I suppressed an urge to look around and make sure the building was still standing. It was the first time in my life I had uttered her name in his presence.

  He nodded slowly. “Yes, that’s her. That’s the name. She’s the one.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THANKS TO THE GOOD OFFICES OF MY GRANDFATHER’S niece and her husband (with whom Armand had been close and then, as was typical of him, stopped speaking to years ago for a mysterious set of reasons he kept recorded in a special binder he would brandish at me from time to time), Grandpa was placed on the emergency list of Geneva’s one Jewish nursing home. In the spring of 2007, his social worker called to let me know there was a room available for him. I traveled to Geneva to prepare for the move, and Julien joined me that weekend to help get him settled.

  When we opened the door to my grandfather’s apartment, the familiar scent of bergamot, rosemary, paper and pencil, and pipe tobacco bowled me over. I stopped on the threshold, and Julien squeezed my hand. “Think of how much better off he’ll be,” he reminded me. This was undeniably true. I squared my shoulders, and we stepped inside.

  I took out the list the nursing home had given me: trousers, shirts, underwear, socks …“All his clothes are in there.” I gestured at the blue lacquered doors of his bedroom wardrobe, lowering my voice as if we might disturb someone. “I guess I’ll take care of his toiletries and the personal things.” We began making neat piles on the bed.

  Still shy of invading Grandpa’s privacy, I waited until everything else had been packed before I emptied the drawer of his bedside table. While Julien organized bags to be brought down to the car, I gingerly tugged it open. Inside was an unmarked, unsealed manila envelope. Out of it, I pulled a photocopied booklet folded in half over a single sheet of paper, a letter. “Dear Monsieur Jacoubovitch,” it read,

  The French State wishes to extend its deepest regrets over its part in the deportation and subsequent death of your parents, Leon and Augustine Jacoubovitch.

  There was the deportation date, their arrival date in Auschwitz, and nothing more. Nothing about the state’s great guilt, nothing about the suffering it had inflicted, no real apology, nothing. Just that terrible withering down to numbers, place names, and dates. I lifted the letter and saw the title of the booklet beneath it: Suicide, mode d’emploi. Suicide: A Manual.

  Julien was outside, loading the car. I was alone in the apartment.

  Not knowing what else to do, I folded the papers and put them back into the envelope. I sat on the bed for a moment, holding my grandfather’s terrible secret. It occurred to me again that his dementia might be a reprieve, granting him the freedom to live a few years with those unspeakable memories effaced, to be relieved of the task of remembering.

  I directed my attention once more to the drawer, wondering what red thread he’d clung to all those years, what had kept him from following through with the instructions in that manual. The drawer was empty, save for a travel alarm clock and an old wallet. I opened the wallet. It looked empty, too, but I looked through the pockets anyway. In one of them I found a white rectangle marked with a date. I took it out and turned it over. It was a photograph of my grandmother. She was young and beautiful, smiling for the camera, her black hair curled around her face and a polka-dotted scarf knotted around her neck. I looked at the date again: July 12, 1944—my grandparents’ wedding day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  LATER, MUCH LATER, MY GRANDMOTHER FINALLY told me about her married life, what little she had of it. In an essay titled “Marriage,” she confirmed what I already had observed in my grandparents’ refugee files:

  Married life consisted of being together during my leaves from camp, every 6 weeks for five days until I was recognized to have pellagra … which liberated me from camp and allowed me to participate in a 6 months course (on scholarship) preparing a group of individuals for after-war assistance in the East when camps, prisons, and populations were freed from Nazi occupation.

  I wondered if either of my grandparents thought to comment on the irony of being brought together twice by the same nutritional deficiency, first in the dissertation Armand had helped Anna to edit and then in its physical manifestation in my grandmother. Pellagra causes skin lesions, hair loss, and edema, as well as disorientation and confusion. In my experience, my grandfather’s penchant for venom disappeared in the face of others’ weakness or suffering, and I hoped he had been kind to my grandmother in the first weeks of their life together in the room they rented from Madame Berchtold. In another letter, Grandma wrote:

  We were so busy, that except for meals or evenings we hardly saw each other, or weekends. But there, I became probably more aware of the opinion he had of me as, yes, a well educated, but unsophisticated Romanian peasant, one of his favorite insults among many others. I had a strong and well-established ego from home and always knew that his insults revealed more about himself than me. At work, in studies, I was usually well appreciated and regarded; preventing a total break, though often during our relationship, I thought I had come close to it.

  What really ended the marriage was my discovery that affective and cognitive development can be totally divorced from each other. By that I mean that intellectual understanding and brilliance in abstract notions had little or nothing to do with affection, empathic feelings, and consequently the need to respect others’ aspirations and meet them. The shock of this discovery revealed also, in great part, my naïveté, having been dazzled by the brilliance, but also the underlying hardness (like a diamond), never guessed.

  So that’s what Grandma had to say, sixty years later, about her husband, their relationship, the fault lines in her marriage: Grandpa was brilliant, but he was cruel, and he didn’t—he couldn’t—love her. Her letter ended, “Don’t forget my memories from so long ago had been most likely modified by time and events.… I keep thinking much about you and wishin
g, that whatever happens, together you’ll make it as you have each other to sustain you.”

  Untangling the thread of my grandmother’s memory, I saw there must have been a kind of honeymoon period in the four months she and my grandfather spent at Madame Berchtold’s. My grandmother’s illness, the newness of their being together, the fact that they “hardly saw each other,” all would have limited my grandfather’s inborn peevishness; what’s more, given the level of irritability common in both their families, my grandmother likely would have taken an occasional volley of cranky, nasty insults in stride. I knew my grandfather dealt with stress and pain by being mean. The closer he was to you, the freer he became with his hypercritical nastiness. If he had loved her, if he was intimate with her, I only can imagine how horridly he must have treated her—but in a way to which she sadly must have been accustomed, and which would have been mitigated by the good news of the end of the war, my grandmother’s pregnancy, and my grandfather’s new job.

  Probably Armand’s first passport photos, taken in Paris in 1946 after the French legal team at the Nuremberg Trials helped him obtain French citizenship.

  The more I considered it, the more certain I became that the rupture must have happened later. I recalled my grandmother telling me that in 1948, when she took her parents on the train to Marseille and bought the house in Alba on the way back, she broke down and confessed to her mother how bad things were. Between my grandfather’s departure from Geneva in 1945 and that train ride in 1948, one major event had occurred: Nuremberg.