Alex's Wake

by Martin Goldsmith

  The single boxcar that stands at the railway siding at the museum, representing the trains that transported roughly two thousand prisoners to Drancy in the summer and fall of 1942.

  Katell swings open the door to the boxcar and we step inside. It’s a bright warm day, but probably no more than seventy-five degrees. Even so, it is stiflingly hot within the car, and we are only three. I try to imagine what it would feel like to be among more than a hundred people jammed together with the door sealed shut, the boxcar standing still all night before beginning its journey northward. And my grandfather and uncle among the damned.

  Fearing that I might sink to my knees and start to weep, I stumble out the door and back onto the safety of the siding. My mind suddenly rings with those words of warning and remonstrance sent by Alex and Helmut to my father in the New World: “I think the worst of the horror is still to come.” “It is almost unnatural that you found no time to write us.” “Do everything you can to get us out.” “I can’t understand why you spent two days in Philadelphia but couldn’t spend two hours in Washington.” “If you don’t move heaven and earth to help us, that’s up to you, but it will be on your conscience.”

  Those words resound like curses, and I clasp my head in my hands and stagger down the siding to a low iron fence, trying to squeeze them from my memory. I am suddenly furious with my father for his inattention and neglect, and then a moment later, awash in pity for the unbearable guilt he must have carried to his dying breath. Trying to think of anything else, I recall Helmut’s repeated requests for stamps . . . and then remember how my father helped me start my own stamp collection when I was a boy, how he would often come home from work with little clear plastic packages of commemorative stamps from faraway lands like New Zealand, Egypt, or Togo. Was he trying, in a feeble way, to redeem himself?

  At that moment, in that terrible place, I feel my father’s guilt bore into me. It hurts like a shard of jagged glass rasped against my flesh. But excruciating as it is, I realize to my shock that it is also painfully familiar. I know this feeling, I tell myself, as well as I know my reflection in any mirror. And I have known this feeling for as long as I can remember. It has brought me here, far too late for me to do any good. My father failed to save his father and his brother. I have failed to save my grandfather and my uncle. This is my inheritance: failure, sorrow, and guilt.

  Amy is once more at my side, and hand in hand we begin a measured walk back to the old brick factory. But our steps only heighten my grief, as I reflect that Alex and Helmut were not afforded the choice of walking this path away from the boxcar. I am reminded of the passage in Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield recalls his brother Allie’s funeral and then savagely says that it began to rain and all the mourners hurried off “someplace swanky for lunch,” leaving Allie alone in his grave. I tell myself that there is nothing I can do to alter this unspeakable history and that it will do no one any good if I rend my garments or sleep every night on a bed of nails out in the rain. But I feel such helplessness and exhaustion in the face of so much cruelty, ugliness, and depravity. All I can do, I conclude, is to resume the journey, to keep on following my relatives until the end. And then to tell their story.

  We bid farewell to Katell and wish her well, along with her colleagues, and return to the Meriva. I avert my eyes from those of Alex and Helmut as they gaze accusingly at me from their place above the rearview mirror, and we drive slowly away.

  On September 10, 2012, exactly seventy years after the last train left Les Milles bound for Drancy, the memorial museum was dedicated and officially opened by French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault.

  12

  Drancy

  TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2011. There is something about a long drive in an automobile that comforts the spirit. Long before the internal combustion engine, Herman Melville’s Ishmael warmed the damp, drizzly November in his soul by taking to the sea. In our day, Jack Kerouac understood that all he really needed for solace was “a wheel in his hand and four on the road.” This morning, we back Jack. As I steer our little Meriva northward along the French autoroute system, my blues of yesterday seem to recede further with each passing mile. The hum of the tires, the pleasant vibration of the steering wheel, the unfamiliar landscape unfolding before us, and the mellifluous names on the road signs as they flash past all contribute to a sense of adventure and possibility, the best rebuke to the feelings of futility and dread that enshrouded us in the shadow of the brick factory. Although the next stop on our itinerary is the sad suburb of Drancy, we will get there by way of one of the jewels of our civilization, the sparkling city of Paris. On this bright morning, on the move, we are happy once more.

  Having learned from the letter Alex wrote in Agde about his stay in the Central Hospital in Contrexéville, I have decided to pay a return visit to that charming little city on our way to Paris. Under sunny skies, we speed north as far as Lyon and then bear to the northeast. By late afternoon, we reach Contrexéville and decide to spend another night at the Inn of the Twelve Apostles. Its proprietor, a garrulous native of Italy who has called Contrexéville home for decades, is surprised and pleased to see us again. After a long day on the road, we are more than happy to avail ourselves of his hospitality.

  Early the next morning, we pay a call on the town’s Mairie, or city hall, where we make inquiries regarding the existence of a Central Hospital in the winter of 1939–1940, the months Alex mentioned in his letter. A helpful young woman named Audrey Hestin tells us that there was no community hospital in Contrexéville during that period, but that one of the town’s hotels had been temporarily converted into a military hospital in the months following the start of the war. She suggests we visit the national military archives, which are located in Vincennes, just outside Paris, to see if theyt have any record of Alex’s convalescence. Before we leave town, we pay a call on the building that once housed the hotel in question. Now a professional school that instructs its students in hair design and restaurant and hotel management, the four-story structure looks across the main thoroughfare to the trees and fountains of the thermal park. We spend a few minutes walking through the halls, as I wonder which of the rooms might have sheltered Alex with a mattress and warm blankets, the last actual bed he would ever enjoy.

  We then return to the road, making our unhurried way along a pastoral byway through the town of Chaumont, where we again buy some crusty bread and flavorful fromage for a pastoral lunch in a green field. Soon after, we say our farewells to the leisurely pace of the countryside, as we merge into the steady stream of traffic on an autoroute bound for Paris. We spend that night in a forgettable motel in what amounts to a truck stop on the distant outskirts of the capital city and arise on Thursday morning filled with the excitement of knowing that this very day we will see the legendary City of Light.

  Thanks to more extraordinary navigating by Amy, we drive safely through the traffic-choked Parisian bypass to the remarkable Château de Vincennes, just east of the metropolis. Dating back to the fourteenth century and built largely by King Charles V, the castle featured the tallest fortified tower in all of medieval Europe. It was a lavish residence for French royalty for centuries, until Versailles became the favored location in the years leading up to the Revolution. The château was later converted to a state prison, whose most famous inmate was the Marquis de Sade. In recent years, it has housed the archives of the French military. After walking slowly through the cobblestoned courtyard, admiring the architectural glories of the old castle, we present ourselves at the Service historique de la défense and pose our question. Once again, we are disappointed. The French armed forces have no record of a military hospital in Contrexéville and no record of coming into contact with Alex Goldschmidt in the winter of 1940. I resign myself, for now, to never learning the details of how my grandfather spent the winter after being expelled from his relatively Edenic existence in Martigny-les-Bains.

  Fortunately, the Château de Vincennes is a relatively short drive, even in mi
dday Parisian traffic, from our hotel, located on the Rue de Faubourg Saint-Antoine in the 11th arrondissement. We squeeze the Meriva down an impossibly narrow passageway to a spot in an underground garage, check in, and immediately make arrangements to meet my cousin Deborah Philips and her partner, Garry Whannel. Actually, to be absolutely genealogically correct, Deborah and I are second cousins once removed, on my mother’s side. Both my mother, Rosemary, and Deborah’s father, Klaus, grew up in the German city of Düsseldorf. They were close to the same age, but the generations were somehow scrambled and it was Klaus’s mother who was Rosemary’s first cousin. Since my family is so small—and because I like Deborah and her sister, Claudia, so much—I’ve always operated on the shorthand assumption that we’re simply cousins and left it at that.

  Deborah grew up in London, but her father often traveled to Paris on business and frequently took Deborah along, resulting in Deborah’s long-standing love affair with Paris and her near fluency in French. A few years ago, Deborah, a professor of literature and cultural history at the University of Brighton, purchased a small pied-à-terre in Paris, and she and Garry spend several weeks every year in France. They have offered to show Amy and me the town. We are delighted.

  For four days, they squire us around the city of which Victor Hugo wrote, “Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.” We discover that nothing can compare to seeing Paris by foot and Métro, as Deborah and Garry lead us on a walking tour that encompasses the Champs Elysées and the Place de la Concorde, the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls where Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron danced in An American in Paris, the Pompidou Center, the Opera, the Musée d’Orsay, the Jardin des Tuileries, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and the cathedral of books and ideas that is Shakespeare and Company. One afternoon when Amy and Deborah go shopping, I make my solitary way to the Père Lachaise Cemetery and visit the graves of Chopin and Bizet, Poulenc and Cherubini, Balzac and Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix and Molière, Edith Piaf and Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. At night, Deborah and Garry introduce us to the finest out-of-the-way restaurants they have discovered on their personal culinary journey and also, at my request, join us for a meal at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, that hangout of artists and their hangers-on during the dancing decade of the 1920s. We agree wholeheartedly with Thomas Jefferson, who declared that “a walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and the very point of life.”

  We also stop at the Shoah Museum to see its Wall of Names, erected in tribute to the Jews who were sent to the East, a wall that includes the engraved names of Alex and Helmut Goldschmidt. We break away from the crowds surrounding Notre Dame to visit a sheltered spot on the eastern tip of the Île de la Cité, the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. A guard allows us to descend a steep flight of concrete steps that leads us nearly to the level of the Seine, although vertical bars of concrete impede our view of the water flowing gently by. The focal point of the memorial is a crypt illuminated by two hundred thousand little pieces of glass—one for each of the deported souls—that somehow sparkle in the gloom. So close to the life-giving river and to the soaring majesty of the cathedral, we are nonetheless isolated and cut off from the city’s bustling humanity. So, too, were the victims this somber place remembers so tenderly.

  By Saturday, we are ready to fulfill the purpose of this pleasure tour of Paris, the decidedly unpleasant side trip to the suburb of Drancy. We are to be joined on this journey by a recent acquaintance I made at the beginning of the year due to an unexpected e-mail.

  Over the Christmas holidays of 2010, I heard from the publisher of The Inextinguishable Symphony that an Ingrid Janssen had written to me from an address in Paris. In January, we began a correspondence and I learned that she is a few years younger than me, that she was born in Oldenburg, and that her father, like mine, was born in 1913. She wrote that she had discovered my book and learned some things about her hometown that both fascinated and dismayed her. Now she lives in Paris with her husband, working as a television and documentary film producer. When I told her about our visit to Paris and its grim purpose, she and her husband Jacques offered to drive us to Drancy.

  So on Saturday morning, we meet Ingrid and Jacques in the lobby of our hotel. They are a striking couple, both tall and trim, she with shaggy blond hair, he with receding grey hair and a close-cropped beard. Both wear fashionable leather jackets. We climb into their Saab and off we go, Jacques at the wheel, winding our way along wide boulevards and increasingly narrow streets as we approach the northeastern suburbs. The shops are now less chic, the cafés and small electronics outlets we pass often identify themselves with signs in Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish. Our conversation, sparse to begin with, falls nearly silent.

  Jacques pulls the car to the curb and announces solemnly, “Here we are.” We emerge and walk slowly across the busy street to stare up at a deeply moving memorial sculpture created by Shelomo Selinger in 1976. Made of weathered pink granite, the sculpture comprises ten anguished human figures flanked by two curved surfaces on which are carved passages in Hebrew and French. On the left is a brief description of the murderous legacy of the Drancy camp. On the right is a quotation from the Book of Lamentations: “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”

  IT WAS DESIGNED TO BE A QUIET REFUGE from the hurly-burly of urban life. Architects Marcel Lods and Eugène Beaudouin conceived a modernist plan that featured some of the first high-rise apartments in all of France, embracing a tree-lined courtyard of grass and ample flower beds. According to its architects, peace would reign within this horseshoe design of gentle residential living, and to prove it they bestowed upon their creation the name La Cité de la Muette, or “The Silent City.”

  Shortly after the armistice of June 1940, the German invaders confiscated the entire complex and, surrounding the Silent City with barbed wire, converted it first into a police barracks and then into a detention center for holding Jews and other undesirables. But it was the French police who marked the most notorious use of the Drancy camp by conducting a series of raids throughout Paris in late August 1941 and incarcerating more than four thousand Jews within the apartment complex that had been designed to accommodate about seven hundred people. For nearly two years, the Drancy camp was guarded entirely by French gendarmes, who exhibited an appalling disregard for the abject suffering of the inmates. Food was scarce, hygiene was nonexistent, and there was no defense against the onset of cold weather. A prisoner who managed to scribble a note to relatives described the conditions at the camp in three short, brutal phrases: “Filth of a coal mine. Straw mattress full of lice and bedbugs. Horrid overcrowding.” By early November 1941, more than thirty inmates had died, and even the German military authorities were moved to order about eight hundred prisoners released for health reasons. Following the Vél d’Hiv roundup the following summer, more than seven thousand souls—men, women, and children—were crowded into the seven high-rise apartment buildings. From the top floors, it was possible to see the skyline of Paris a few miles to the south, a view dominated by La Basilique du Sacré Coeur in Montmartre. But true civilization was miles and miles away.

  Beginning on June 22, 1942, convoys of trains began departing from Le Bourget station, about a five-minute bus ride from the Drancy camp, heading for the extermination centers of Eastern Europe. At first, the orders from Berlin prohibited the deportation of children under fourteen, so mothers, fathers, and older siblings were frequently separated from their younger family members. Bewildered and terrified, children as young as five or six years old were forced to wave goodbye to their parents and then try to survive the horrors of Drancy on their own. A story began circulating that soon the children would be joyfully reunited with their families at a mysterious place called Pitchipoi. In early August, orders from Berlin allowing deportations of young children having now arrived, the journeys to Pitchipoi could commence.

  “Behold, and see if there be any s
orrow like unto my sorrow.” The memorial sculpture by Shelomo Selinger that stands at the entrance to The Silent City.

  By the time the last convoy left for the East, on July 31, 1944, nearly sixty-five thousand Jews had been deported from Drancy. Approximately sixty-one thousand were shipped to Auschwitz, another thirty-seven hundred to the Sobibor extermination camp. Fewer than two thousand survived.

  Alex and Helmut Goldschmidt arrived at Drancy on Thursday, August 13, 1942. They did not stay long. Almost immediately after their arrival in the apartment complex, on the morning of Friday, August 14, they were ordered onto a bus for the brief ride to Le Bourget. Once there, they were again loaded onto cattle cars along with nine hundred eighty-nine other Jewish prisoners, of whom about one hundred were children under fourteen. It was Convoy Nineteen, the first of the transports from Drancy that included young children bound for the happy land of Pitchipoi.

  SATURDAY, JUNE 11, 2011. Behind the Selinger sculpture, a railroad track intersects with a second track, on which a single boxcar stands, representing the thousands of cars that departed from this place during those two hellish years, each car filled to capacity with human beings, their journey made all the more unspeakable, if such a thing is possible, by the fact that some of the passengers on those trains were little children who were eagerly looking forward to a reunion with the parents who had been torn from their grasp a few weeks earlier and who by now had probably disappeared up the chimneys of the smoking crematoria hundreds of miles to the East. I scan the ground for a stone to hurl at the boxcar in front of me, but on either side of the pathway is only a well-tended lawn, and on the edge of the lawn a trimmed hedge, and, overhead, a French flag that flaps softly in a gentle breeze. There are no weapons at my disposal. And what good would it do, anyhow?