The Department of Missing Persons

by Ruth Zylberman

  Your devoted Ovadia.

  Translated from Czech

  Paris, July 3, 1941

  I am writing to you in mid-flight, Ricky! And in Czech as an extra precaution. We are leaving Paris for Toulouse. We will be there with the children at Mindla’s sister’s house. Our temporary address: 17 rue de Rome. I hope you will be able to leave Paris very soon. Don’t hesitate to join us.

  Your devoted Ovadia

  P.S.: I’m leaving the ticket with the concierge. Her face worries me. I really think it’s urgent that you get out of Paris.

  The letters were sitting on my mother’s desk: there were the white pages with the French translations she had recopied in her steady handwriting, and on the grandfather’s brown sheets was the disorder of different languages, the passage from Hebrew letters to the accumulations of consonants in Polish and suddenly the polished heights of German capitals. The missives became less legible as the years went by; he wrote more quickly, rushing, as if the frenetic wind of danger were pushing against his neck. The letters pulsated, and as she went about her most trivial tasks I’d see my mother glance discreetly at the white and brown pile, the incandescent pile.

  I monitored her slightest gestures and her slightest looks because she had abandoned me: I interested her less. Still, I became a very nice young lady. Polite, presentable, independent. Had I not been at the same level as the miracle of her survival? But my mother no longer looked at me; she had gone back to her childhood, and having no other choice, I ran behind.

  Soon she became bolder, she began writing to Germany, to Poland … She wrote letters in clumsy English. She asked for information, birth certificates, death certificates. She closed herself in her office for hours on end to worry over those interminable correspondences. They answered her in German, in Polish. They didn’t know. The archives had been lost, the archives had been burned. But she found the addresses of other archives.

  On the plastic table in the kitchen, she would spread out the letters she’d received, her notebooks filled with columns and dates, and she would start the same letter again, writing the address on the envelope in round letters to be sure the letter would not get lost in transit.

  Then one day came the call to action. She had decided to travel, to see “for herself!” First step, the last camp: Bergen-Belsen. She wrote to very friendly archivists—it was inevitably the Germans who were the friendliest, in proportion to their sense of guilt, and this feeling would continue to grow as years went by—who warmly invited her to visit in person to examine the documents regarding the camp’s liberation.

  Everything started at Roissy, direction Hanover. In actual fact, for me everything had started at the Golden Circus Bar in Terminal 2D with three glasses of lukewarm vodka, the only remedy for my horrendous fear of planes. The takeoff in particular, the precise moment when the airplane left the ground, plunged me into unrestrainable terror; there were a few seconds of vertigo during the diagonal rise toward the sky. The abrupt acceleration, the plane’s taking flight, and its tumultuous passage through the layers of clouds were among, I was sure of it—and my lips were dry, my hands clammy, my heart on alert!—the most uncertain of wagers.

  I latched onto the flight attendants’ faces. I interpreted their smiles, their expressions. It was exhausting work, watching endlessly for the moment of the fall. And naturally, every time, the landing was a renewed miracle.

  The airport in Hanover was empty. So was the town, in fact. Just the blinking of bright signs. Faintly, through the taxi’s open window, I heard Madonna songs playing from loudspeakers set on the corner of pedestrian walkways.

  The buildings were new, the streets were clean, the cars were prudently aligned behind each other. On the highway, I looked at the green fields. We could also see houses with red roofs, neatly positioned cows, and, sometimes, a silhouette in knee-high boots, immobile among the trenches drawn by tractors. It was as green, red, and plastic as a Playmobil toy landscape. I could almost have taken the houses in my hand, moved them around as I liked from one side to the other, and placed the little man astraddle on one of the roofs. In the taxi, we listened to the metallic voice of the GPS giving the driver directions to the hotel in the middle of the countryside where my mother had reserved two rooms. The landscape before our eyes was transformed on the computer screen into long, thin, pixelated rectangles, and I watched us with fascination as we navigated along those virtual fields and roads.

  After straying onto the streets of the small town of Celle—receiving from the GPS, the farther we strayed, directions that were closer and closer together and more and more authoritarian, zur linken, zur rechte—we finally arrived in the middle of a paved courtyard bordered by stately buildings made of gray stone.

  Two uniformed grooms rushed toward the car and, each opening one door at the same time, they offered us an arm to climb out. With the same swiftness, they packed our luggage onto a gold trolley and then followed us until we reached a hall crammed full of imitation Louis XVI paintings and furniture. An enormous crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling; its transparent pendants chimed faintly as they touched. Behind the reception desk, two blonde women with impeccable makeup smiled at us rigidly. I looked at my mother and motioned for us to flee but it was too late: we had landed in all of the splendor of a German luxury hotel.

  We were escorted to our rooms through corridors lit by electric candles. The rooms resembled what, to the German imagination, probably evoked seventeenth-century France. Canopy beds, flowery drapes, assorted footstools, and bookshelves filled with trompe-l’oeil books.

  It was clearly indicated that smoking was prohibited, our escort explained to us in perfect English. Perhaps he was trying to offset the threatening nature of the small placards placed at regular intervals around the walls of the room, on each of which a cigarette was crossed out with a huge black X and the word verboten. Obviously, as soon as he left, trembling with fear, I ran to lock myself in the bathroom, opened a skylight above the jacuzzi tub, and hurried to light a cigarette, all the while carefully examining the ceiling to try and spot the inevitable smoke detectors. I hadn’t even smoked half of it before someone knocked on the door to my room. I began frantically stirring the air in the hopes of making the smell disappear and then innocently opened the door. The hotel manager was on the threshold, imperturbable. With a gracious smile he said, “Shall I remind you, Madam, that we have a strict policy regarding smoking and no smoking.”

  “Yes, yes, absolutely, this is something I can quite understand, I heard you perfectly,” I sputtered.

  He smiled. “Thank you Madam.”

  As I closed the door, I decided to get my revenge by attacking the mini bar and began looking for it without success. Finally, after a long half hour, I suddenly pressed on a painted panel depicting a pastoral scene in which, against a Roman Campagna background, two young shepherds dressed as lords were embracing each other among their sheep. And just like in the most brilliant spy novels, under the pressure of my hand the panel abruptly turned around on itself, uncovering a stockpile of small, perfectly organized bottles of alcohol.

  Later at dinner, in the room where we were, of course, the only guests, I regretted my misjudgment. I was afraid I would fall down in front of the hotel manager, the same as ever, who now stood behind our chairs ready to pounce, to refill our plates, or to anxiously wonder whether the meal was going well.

  “Is everything fine, Madam?” To be honest, everything was not fine for Madam, who was smoking cigarettes on the sly and who had guzzled down two mignonettes of vodka in fifteen minutes. No, really, everything was not fine: this faux chic could have been the decor in a low-budget erotic film, I was terribly nauseous, and my mother, sitting across from me, her head lowered over her plate, was obediently eating the endless sequence of dishes. She was afraid of the hotel manager.

  Foggy from the alcohol, I felt that in spite of everything we had to try to fight against this stucco kitsch, this gastronomic overload, against the hotel manager�
��s servile posturing; we needed to take a machete to this monstrous scene in which my mother and I were losing our grip.

  It wasn’t very subtle, but the first thing that came to mind was the following sentence, whispered between the salad and the potatoes and the garlic leg of lamb: “Mother, what time is our appointment at the concentration camp tomorrow?” I cleanly separated out the syllables in Con-Cen-Tra-Tion Camp as if I were hoping for a sudden explosion that would annihilate the manager and send him crawling on his knees to clear the table as fast as he could, that would return the walls to their natural plaster state, disintegrating the porcelain plates and the imitation painted masterpieces. But none of these things happened, and my mother settled for answering me between two conscientiously chewed bites of glistening potatoes: “Nine o’clock. The archivist is expecting us at nine o’clock.”

  “Some more wine, Madam?” Without hiding my belligerent intentions, I interrupted the minion who had already raised the bottle to refill my glass by waving my hand. “No, thank you very much, sir.”

  “And how are we getting to the Con-Cen-Tra-Tion Camp, Maman?”

  “A taxi, I think,” and my mother jabbed two pieces of roasted garlic with the end of her fork.

  “And could I suggest, Madam, to have a look at our dessert menu and shall I allow myself to recommend some of those desserts.” In my opinion, he was doing it on purpose. I simply shook my head without taking my eyes off of my mother. “No sir, thank you very much.”

  But my warlike passions were no match for my body’s weaknesses. Reeling, I stood up from the table and ran to take refuge in my freezing room (like the castles of ruined aristocrats where appearances are maintained but the heat is only turned on for two months out of the year to save a little money, or perhaps this absence of heat was simply respecting the rules decreed by a stern nineteenth-century naturopath who had concluded that souls and bodies needed to be tamed with a bit of rigor). The fact remains that, shivering, I relinquished myself to a repugnant intestinal chaos on the immaculate ceramic of the jacuzzi bathroom.

  I was frightened being alone in that room. Bent in half, I dragged myself to the connecting door that opened into my mother’s room. I glued my ear to the wood of the door: everything was quiet. I peeked under the door; there was no light. I pushed the handle; the door gently opened. I took a few steps; there was only the illuminated beam coming from the door behind me that weakly lit the room. I moved forward, and then I saw her. My mother, pale in a white nightgown, sleeping curled up in the middle of the bed. She had arranged the photos of her father in a semicircle around the pillow: Ovadia at the office, Ovadia in Prague, the close-up portrait of Ovadia. The grainy material of the photos shone strangely with the effect of the light; they encircled my mother’s head like a glowing, protective halo. I came closer again until I could hear her breathing, I lay down at the foot of the bed, curled up in her same position, and waited until morning.

  The next day, my mother asked the taxi to drop us off in the forest a few hundred yards from the entrance to the camp. The road led straight through the pine trees. The sky appeared from between their somber mass like a narrow gray net. My mother went in front. I was unable to walk quickly. When she got too far ahead, I’d run to where she was, then she’d leave me behind again and I would run to catch up. I took a strange pleasure in this race, it was almost a game: I exaggerated my slowing down and speeding up. I tried without success to break the walking rhythm my mother had instinctively adopted. I didn’t want a straight and linear step, though that was the very one I knew she was searching for again, the vibration inside her body. I heard the even sound of her heels on the path, her feet crushing the residue of moss, twigs, and small stones that went flying. I would have liked her to suddenly turn her face toward me, but she was sucked in by the straight line running along the black trunks.

  “Maman, wait for me!”

  I was no longer sure if I’d actually yelled, maybe I had only whispered it. The words expanded inside me, the way the shadows of the trees were expanding, their branches outstretched over our path.

  “Maman, wait for me!”

  I had a cramp, my back was sweaty, and this time I had shouted, I was certain, because all of a sudden the sound of the forest, the wind, and the bird calls went quiet. In this silence, she abruptly stopped and reached out her arm toward me. It was what I’d hoped for from the beginning: she took my hand, and I stayed several steps behind her. I felt her warm fingers against mine, and she dragged me in her wake until the entrance to the camp suddenly appeared, a large naked plain surrounded by forest.

  On the side was a concrete building in front of which a middle-aged woman was shuffling back and forth. As soon as she noticed us, she came over to greet us.

  “Hello, my name is Inge. I was waiting for you. I’m thrilled to welcome you here.”

  The newspeak was starting again.

  With authority, she led us into the concrete building. This was the exhibit center, the archive center, and the multimedia center, she explained to us in her enthusiastic English. She talked about all of the visitors to the camp, among whom were numerous scholars who had come from all over Europe because Bergen-Belsen was taking part in a European program called “Se Souvenir Toujours” or “Remember Forever.” They spent, on average, an hour and a half in the museum even after a long visit to the camp itself.

  She reeled off all of these things as she descended a flight of stairs that led us to a room in the basement. On the walls were displayed enlarged reproductions of photos taken by the English during the liberation. Suddenly her face grew solemn; she slowed her step and reassured my mother that it was a moment of great emotion to welcome a child of Bergen-Belsen here. A flicker of compassion passed within her eyes, she twisted her mouth a little bit, and after having very meaningfully squeezed my mother’s arm, she continued on with her guided tour. There were computers, books, photos; we could search, scan, copy; there were lines of archives for miles and miles, the equivalent of an entire Amazon forest, she explained with a laugh. As she said this, she pushed forcefully on a swinging door and paraded us before the metal library shelves on which, in fact, thousands of black and gray boxes were crammed together. She pointed to one shelf: “The Camp’s Beginnings,” then another, “Deportations, 1943.” She took another step, “Civilian Population in the Area Surrounding the Camp,” then with another step, “Liberation Committees.” She had the garrulous congeniality of a real estate agent.

  My mother smiled politely, turning her head left and right, agreeing when it was necessary. “Here we are, here we are,” Inge suddenly whispered. She stopped short in front of several boxes identical to those we had just passed. Delicately, she unwound the string around the first in the pile and took hold of a few sheets that had been placed on top of it ahead of time. The brown paper was growing tattered on the edges, and Inge held the sheets out to my mother, who passed them straight to me. I didn’t know what to do with them, so I put all of them on a small plastic shelf and all three of us leaned our heads over as if it were not a pile of paperwork but a living and fragile baby. There were columns, names, dates of birth. It was the report by the French Mission for Repatriation and Research, which was in charge of keeping a record after liberation of the living and dead among the French deportees. One of the pages was entitled “List of French Individuals Whose Trace Has Been Lost Since April 19, 1945.”

  Between Arthur Cuvillier, born in Amiens on 07.17.13, and Jacques Dahaux, born in the Loiret in 1925, we saw his name. What was most likely, Inge explained, was that those without a trace had died after the liberation and then been buried in the communal graves without having been identified. Those without a trace were simply those without a grave, in other words.

  My mother quickly raised her head. “Yes, but we don’t know, their trace really may have been lost, we don’t know what happened exactly to them. They might be dead. They might be not dead.” Despite her halting English, she had said these words with such a s
tubborn fervor that the positive, rational Inge straightened up and looked at her in disbelief. Inge was speechless. She was beginning to understand …

  But she immediately composed herself, smiled wide. “Well, well, let me show you other documents.” The smell of mold leaking out of the cardboard boxes and the millions of tattered brown sheets were stirring my stomach. I was pulling out of Inge’s crazy race. I mumbled, “I’ll wait for you outside,” and went back up to the visitor’s center. I responded to the dozing librarian who greeted me in German with a movement of my head and sat down in front of a computer.

  I tapped on the keys distractedly; I was bored.

  I opened Google Earth and typed in Bergen-Belsen, and suddenly an aerial view of the camp unfolded on the screen. I saw the roofs of Celle, the ones in the two villages of Bergen and Belsen, the fields cut in geometric forms, the stretches of woods. I saw the roof of the memorial where I found myself, and even the perimeter of the camp, which was sprinkled with dark rectangles. I zoomed in over a few yards of ground. It was the imprint left by barracks that had been taken down and where the grass had never regrown. I zoomed out; there was more. On both sides of the empty field that the camp had become, there were other slanted rectangles, not as many, but wider: the communal graves. And all around, in a wide shot, was the unmoving summit of trees. I stayed for a long time in front of the screen to look at the panoramic view. So long that I was almost sleeping with my eyes open: the image was getting blurry but I no longer even made the effort to adjust my gaze to make it clear again. I let the spots move before my eyes and envelop me like a colored haze. My mother wasn’t coming back. Walking like a robot, I passed by the librarian again and climbed back up the steps.