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

by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

  After the Trials, the hardness set in. For how could Armand possibly have described to her the chemical tinge of the lights, the rustle and thud of papers and binders being distributed, the high-pitched clatter of the steno typists returning to their machines, sounds that seemed to suck all possibility of the outside world from the big brown room? How could he have told her of the cold sweat that must have gripped him when Fritzsche or Speer nodded hello to the interpreters as they filed in? How could he have conveyed how he fidgeted off his drowsiness when it was not his turn to work, turned his attention to the people in one corner of the courtroom and then another, stared at the men sitting and listening to the charges against them, fought off waves of boredom, anger, hostility, grief, exhaustion, disbelief, then coiled himself awake, into the tensest, densest kind of listening, when it was his turn to work? The interpreters had little recall of the words they rattled off all day long, but nearly all of them complained of nightmares.

  And every so often, like a diver surfacing for air, Armand would notice the words he and his colleagues were saying and feel a wave of understanding splash over him. And then the torrent of words would rush forward again, and he would forget the phrase and lose track of the meaning. The words seemed to roll off him. As they came out of his mouth, he learned the crimes committed against his family. And then his mind closed back around them, and nothing ever looked the same again. Who could wear a wedding band after learning of the stacks of them stripped off perished fingers? Who could read by the light cast through a lampshade? Coats, hats, children’s toys—everything had been marked, stained, destroyed. My grandfather’s personality could not withstand it. He hardened around that knowledge, and his hardness cut my grandmother to the quick.

  The enormity of my grandfather’s silence, I realized, was commensurate with the enormity of the knowledge he carried away from Nuremberg. He did not know how to live in a world where love and that existed. And my grandmother, whose zest and ingenuity had carried them both so far—my grandmother did. And because she was able to continue loving, she left. I thought of the courage it must have taken to break her bond with that terrible weight of sadness and bitterness, a weight the whole world believed she ought to bear with Armand, and go live her life. She could love a man with whom she had been through so much, but she could not let him drag her down into an existence devoted to remembering. Anna was brave enough to move forward, even if it meant leaving the one person who connected her to her past.

  But she’d never fully abandoned him. All the ways she nudged me back to him over the years, starting with sending me to boarding school in Geneva when I was a teenager, were, I believe, her final attempts to save him, to show him how to love again. And in the process, she saved me. She’d refused to let the weight of our sad past pull me under; recognizing my childhood fears, my frequent illness, my sense of displacement, she had pushed me away, pushed me to the house in La Roche, pushed me to be alive. Unlike her, I was lucky enough to be young in a time where I could live and love as I wished. While I was trying to remember, Grandma was urging me to forget, to put it down on paper and get on with the labor of living.

  By the time I finished reconstructing and recording my grandparents’ story, my grandfather was too senile to read it, but I had grown up enough not to regret that: I’m sure it would have taken him about a paragraph to fly into a rage and never speak to me again.

  But as I had dreamed, my grandmother did read it, all the way through, at the age of ninety-seven. I was nearly five months pregnant, and I had flown back to the States to visit her for what we both knew would be the last time. “I loved it,” she told me. “I’m glad you got it all written down.”

  “But did I get it right?” I asked. “I can’t have. It must be full of mistakes. What should I change?”

  She sighed and leaned back on her pillows. “Mirandali, it’s so long ago now. Who can remember?”

  I stretched out next to her in the bed, and she scooted over to make room for me. We lay there spooned up against each other, and I tried to soak up all I could of her, so that the little baby I was carrying could get a whiff of that indomitable zest for life, that ineffable perfume of contradictions. I hoped she couldn’t see the tears squeezing out of my eyes because I knew she wouldn’t approve of them.

  “You know I don’t want you to come to my funeral,” Grandma said, into the silence.

  “Oh, Grandma, I can’t promise you that.”

  “You’ll be too pregnant, anyway,” she predicted. “That’s good. You know I’ll be right here.” She tapped herself on the chest and head.

  I changed the subject. “Do you know, I was at a party with Julien’s tante Chantal, she’s about your age, a little younger—I think you’d like her so much.”

  “You wrote to me about her.”

  “Well, we were talking, and you know what she said? She said she was so glad to live to see the day when a young man from a French bourgeois Catholic family could marry a Jewish girl.” I stopped short. This was, I realized, not necessarily the fate a Jewish grandma would wish on her only granddaughter. “Is it okay with you?” I asked. “Is it okay that I moved to France and married a goy?”

  Grandma made an impatient noise. She reached around and smacked me on the bottom. “Mirandali, forget it. All that is in the past. You have to live your life forward. Go eat some lunch.”

  My grandmother died on September 19, 2010, the day after Yom Kippur. I was, as she had foreseen, too pregnant to fly home. Our daughter, Estelle Anna, was born three months later to the day, on December 19, 2010.

  On the eve of Yom Kippur, through fasting and prayer, you are supposed to break your bonds with the physical world in order to make yourself right with the Holy Spirit, in order to be sealed in the book of life for another year.

  I stood in a synagogue in Paris thinking hard about all the bonds I had and hardest of all about the one I didn’t want to break. I knew Grandma was lying in her bed in Pearl River, with my mother and uncle beside her, preparing to breathe her last breath.

  I listened to the cantor begin Kol Nidre, the prayer that cancels debts, vows, and obligations, and as the congregation joined in, I broke my bonds with my grandmother. “You can go,” I whispered to her. “We’ll be all right without you.”

  “What do I regret?” my grandmother wrote once, many years ago.

  Looking back … I regret deeply only to have lived in a world which never replicated the simplicity and happiness experienced in my native country’s villages. Seeking villages, when occasion permitted, I tried to see if they could replicate what I searched for, but it was in vain. Most probably the exaggerated feelings I thought I experienced as a child and teenager, meaning elation, happiness, hope, started to fade and [I found them] irreplaceable when I reached adulthood and the world around me started to disintegrate. And thus only living in the present—not looking back, or too much forward—made sense. I became the person full of awareness that the past can’t be brought back and regrets are futile, impeding going forward.

  My mother says that on the day before she died, my grandmother’s eyes flew open, and she looked up toward the ceiling, as if she were being greeted by all the elation, happiness, and hope that had faded when her world disintegrated. The last words she responded to were my mother’s telling her that Julien and I were expecting a girl and that the girl would be named for her. When she heard that, she smiled.

  After our daughter was born, Julien and I moved back to Alba, where we bought a medieval ruin of our own. (Which, incidentally, was previously owned by the wife of John Ford, who filmed the Nuremberg Trials.) And so I am writing these words from a village—exactly the kind of village my grandmother longed for as a young medical student; the kind of village that saved her and my grandfather during the war; the kind of village she feared would be lost forever to her family when she moved to America.

  Now I know the house is not a rocky exoskeleton meant to hide me from the pain of remembering; I can’t come to La R
oche to escape the past, to live smoothly among flowers and stones. Life here is no less fragile, no less shattering. It is just like any other place in the world: ugly, mundane, dirty, and boring, but also beautiful, exalted, and full of love. That is the gift—the miracle—my grandmother made in buying the house: the opportunity for me to live my life forward, even as the past swirls and eddies around me.

  When I first arrived in La Roche, I believed in a fairy tale: Anna and Armand fell in love, bought a house, and never spoke again. Then I tried to tell the tale, and it fell apart on me. Maybe my grandparents loved each other, maybe they didn’t. Maybe both. Maybe they would have divorced anyway, without the war—but perhaps that’s a moot point, since maybe they wouldn’t have married without the war. And after all that searching, all those facts, and all that doubt, I came home to La Roche and realized it really was that simple: Armand and Anna fell in love, bought a house, and never spoke again. The point of a fairy tale is never in the details. The point is that it’s easy to remember, to carry, to tell. We’ll continue telling until the stones fall down, and then we’ll rebuild and start again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would never have made it to its current form without the steady guidance, good humor, encouragement, and understanding of my agent, Lydia Wills. Nor would it be what it is today without Miriam Chotiner-Gardner, in whom I found the thoughtful, smart, engaged, and rigorous editor every author dreams of. I am deeply grateful to both of you for your hard work and commitment to this project. This book has also benefited from an exceptional team of dedicated, gifted, and enthusiastic people at Crown, and I am thankful to each and every one of you.

  My heartfelt thanks to my readers: Annelies Fryberger, eagle-eyed critic and tireless breakfast mate; Anne Chernicoff, Erin Fornoff, Keramet Reiter, Ria Tabacco Mar, and Rachel Taylor; and Matthew Quirk, for reading the most drafts and for the bicycle lessons.

  This book also owes its existence and an immense debt of gratitude to the following people and organizations:

  To the Harvard College Research Program, for early research support; to the Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship, for a postgraduate year to work on this project; and to the Harvard Hillel Netivot Fellowship, which encouraged me to grapple with the big questions that underlie the little ones in these pages.

  To Patrice Higonnet, for teaching me how to write history, for encouraging me to write other things, and for giving me my first translating job. His personal insight and excellent graduate seminar on Vichy France helped me to lay the historical groundwork for this book.

  To Mary Lewis, whose course on comparative citizenship in France and Germany helped me with certain knotty questions regarding my grandparents’ nationalities (and my own).

  To Rachel Taylor, for seeing my path and pushing me down it.

  To Leslie Epstein, for his enthusiasm and encouragement before I had any idea of what I was doing.

  To David Zane Mairowitz, for a room—and a bathtub, a library, and a workspace—of my own.

  To the village of Alba, for taking me in.

  To Marie-Hélène Frizet, for all her advice to—and patience with—my family.

  To Grant King, with noble assists from Tom McEnaney and Forrest Richards, for braving the spiders with me; to Elizabeth Thornberry, for helping me paint the shutters; to Erin Fornoff, for being my shining star, for hoeing my garden, and for all the rules of engagement; to Elizabeth Janiak, for being there staunchly and always, and bringing me books. And appropriate shoes.

  To Eve-Marie Cloquet, for another room of my own.

  To Tomas Fitzel, for sharing his memories of my grandfather.

  To Martha Zuber, benefactress, fairy godmother, cheerleader, maven, dear friend, and all-around mensch.

  To Jonathan Zeitlin, Froma Zeitlin, and Daniel Mendelsohn, for their kind and enthusiastic support, and for leading me to Lydia.

  To everyone at Moog Music, for standing by my family; to Mike Adams especially; and to Ian Vigstedt and Krystal Smith for help with printing and scanning.

  To Christine Kane, for business advice that helped keep me afloat while I was finishing this project.

  To Nikki Layser, for appearing with ideas and connections when I thought all was lost; to Nora Spiegel, for hard work, kind words, and meeting me in the rain; to Ben Wikler, for help with the title.

  To the extraordinary staff at the EMS Les Marronniers, for taking such good care of my grandfather; to Michèle and François Fraiberger, for getting him there; to Jean-Philippe and Danièle Deschamps, whose hospitality, generosity, and affection got us through so many tough moments and created so many delightful ones.

  To Hélène Deschamps, for giving us a roof over our heads when we needed it, for all the hours of grandmothering, for helping us to pursue our dreams.

  To my four wonderful parents, for their love and enthusiasm throughout—Robert Richmond and Kathleen Mavournin: to both of you, for sharing your appetite for the written word from day one, and for reading all those drafts; to Dad, for help with the German translation, the broken rib scene, and countless other details. Robert Moog and Ileana Grams-Moog: to Abah, for more than I could ever say, even had there been more time to say it in; to Mom, for everything, really everything, and especially for being smarter than any pig.

  To my grandparents, for all they were, all they endured, all they taught, all they remembered, all they did and didn’t say.

  To Estelle Anna, whose brightness, beauty, and determination bear witness to the star for whom she was named.

  Last and most of all to my husband; for his unwavering support; for his wisdom, rigor, and kindness; for teaching me courage and helping me to be a better person; for making me laugh; for all the joy and love, every step of the way. Doudou, I think you know by now: it was never about the indoor plumbing.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  Below, for the reader who is curious to learn more, is a nonacademic and nonexhaustive list of sources I consulted to complete this book. I have included the works I found the most useful, informative, thought-provoking, and inspiring, so my list is divided by topic rather than by chapter.

  All of the research for A Fifty-Year Silence was conducted in French and English (along with a little German, with help from my father, Robert Richmond); all translations in the text, unless otherwise noted, are my own. For the convenience of English-speaking readers, I have cited all French sources in their English translations, except for cases in which a translation is unavailable.

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  My main primary sources were, of course, my grandparents. In addition to my conversations and correspondence with them, my work would not have been possible without the sources listed here.

  The Swiss Federal Archives in Bern: these archives contain some 45,000 personal files on the civilian refugees interned in Switzerland during the Second World War, including those of my grandparents and my mother (which may be found in Dossier No. 07130).

  The Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: this extraordinary repository contains all kinds of information, including footage from the Nuremberg Trials in which I was able to observe my grandfather at work.

  The Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School: complete transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials, available through its website, were of great help in reconstructing my grandfather’s experiences.

  SECONDARY SOURCES

  World War II in France

  BLOCH, MARC. Strange Defeat. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968.

  BURRIN, PHILIPPE. France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: New Press, 1996.

  FRY, VARIAN. Surrender on Demand. Boulder, Colo.: Johnson Press and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1997.

  LEBOVICS, HERMAN. True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.

  MARRUS, MICHAEL, AND ROBERT PAXTON. Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford, Cali
f.: Stanford University Press, 1995.

  PAXTON, ROBERT. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

  ROUSSO, HENRY. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

  Refugees in Switzerland

  MUNOS-DU PELOUX, ODILE. Passer en Suisse: Les passages clandestins entre la Haute-Savoie et la Suisse, 1940–1944. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2002.

  REGARD, FABIENNE. La Suisse, paradis de l’enfer? Mémoire de réfugiés juifs. Yens-sur-Morges, Switzerland: Cabédita, 2002.

  The Nuremberg Trials

  GAIBA, FRANCESCA. The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: The Nuremberg Trial. Ottawa, Ontario: University of Ottawa Press, 1998.

  GASKIN, HILARY. Eyewitnesses at Nuremberg. London: Arms and Armour Press, 1990.

  KOHL, CHRISTIANE. The Witness House: Nazis and Holocaust Survivors Sharing a Villa during the Nuremberg Trials. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Other Press, 2010.

  RAMLER, SIEGFRIED. Nuremberg and Beyond: The Memoirs of Siegfried Ramler from Twentieth-Century Europe to Hawai’i. Kailua, Hawaii: Ahuna Press, 2008.

  SONNENFELDT, RICHARD W. Witness to Nuremberg. New York: Arcade, 2006.

  TAYLOR, TELFORD. The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

  Miscellaneous

  Sándor Márai’s Embers, translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), is the best literary exploration of a couple’s long silence I have come across. Many thanks to Bertrand Deschamps for giving it to me. “Donal Og,” my grandfather’s mysterious poem, was written long ago by an anonymous poet and translated from the Irish by Lady Augusta Gregory. It appears, in a version slightly different from the one my grandfather had, in The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (Paris: Gallimard, 1999; available in translation through the University of California Press), Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) are the three books on remembering the Shoah that have stayed with me the longest and affected me the most strongly. Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 2004; available in translation from Vintage Books) is an excellent snapshot of the chaos of the drôle de guerre. Leslie Maitland’s Crossing the Borders of Time (New York: Other Press, 2012) is a moving and meticulously researched family saga about two lovers separated during World War II, and I am deeply grateful to Ms. Maitland for her close reading and invaluable comments on my own work. Iron Curtain, by Anne Applebaum (New York: Anchor Books, 2013), provided precious last-minute insights into the aftermath of the war. Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985) helped me to think about fairy tales and how we read them. Michel de Certeau’s L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975; available in translation through Columbia University Press) probably made this book harder to write than it otherwise would have been, but I am grateful for all the ways in which de Certeau’s work deepened and complicated my thinking about history and memory. And Romain Gary’s Les cerfs-volants (Paris: Gallimard, 1980) remains the best piece of writing, fiction or nonfiction, I have ever read about the Second World War in France, or about any subject, for that matter. I am currently translating it into English, but until I am done, it is worth learning French for.