A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  The Romanian, however, fought until he got back his bakery. But at the end of 1945 he decided to sell it to a Jew from the Pletzl. He liked Icchok, but the amount Icchok and Dwojra had saved was not even close to the price he wanted. The Romanian agreed to hold the bakery for Icchok and gave him a deadline for raising the rest of the money. Their fundraising became a Pletzl-wide project. Most of the merchants on Rue des Rosiers donated, and soon the Finkelsztajns had their own new bakery.

  If Icchok had to be a baker and spend his life working alone and indoors, at least he would do it the right way in his own shop. He was not going to spend his days laboring in a dark basement. After moving the ovens to the back of the ground floor, he permanently sealed up the basement, proclaiming that working in a basement was slavery.

  Their first customer was the diamond merchant who had taken them to the club on Rue Cadet.

  IT WAS NOT ONLY small businesses that “Aryans” had taken. Rene Levy lost a huge enterprise. At the outbreak of the war, he had been the sixty-two-year-old retiring president of the textile association. He had foreseen that he would lose his extremely profitable factory, which produced men's handkerchiefs, those huge rectangles of fine material that were a stylish accessory in the 1930s. Smart “Aryan” businessmen knew that they didn't have to offer Jews good prices for their businesses, since the Jews were going to have to sell anyway. Levy, with little choice, sold to the association secretary, a man named Boussac.

  The Levy family's fortunes had risen and fallen with a half-century of French history. In 1895 the Levys had been an established French textile family, part of the solid upper-middle class of eastern France. In January of that year, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was publicly degraded, his buttons removed, and his sword broken, as an angry crowd shouted “Death to Jews!” Dreyfus was of a background similar to the Levys’, and, like them, he made the mistake of thinking that he totally blended into French society. Now suddenly he was being convicted of passing information to the Germans, based on erroneous evidence and supported by the notion that “Jews are like that.” Anti-Semitism became so virulent at workplaces, in schools, and on streets, that the Levys were forced to leave France, where their family had lived since before the Revolution, and relocate their textile business to Belgium.

  After a decade had passed, the anti-Semites became quiet again, except for a few radical-right newspapers. The Levys moved back to France. Their son Rene married a woman who, also like Dreyfus, was from an affluent Alsatian Jewish industrial family. Her family had built a textile factory in northern France. In 1912, Rene Levy and his wife settled into the grand bourgeois life of western Paris. He became the president of the textile association and was well-known to important politicians between the wars. Religion was of little concern to him. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, he would eat an apple. On Passover, always known in France as “Jewish Easter,” he would eat matzoh, not because of any religious belief but because matzoh was the holiday food. More basic to the Levys’ lives were the rounds of opera once a week and dinner parties in their elegant apartment, where they brought in musicians for small performances.

  In 1940 the Levys once again had to leave Paris. This time they went south and became non-Jews. In Klaus Barbie's Lyons, the Levys—now the Picards—lived a quiet life. They bought a nearby plot of land and hired a peasant to work it, assuring themselves of a good food supply throughout the war. In the summers they vacationed in Argenton-sur-Creuse, a short drive away from Oradour-sur-Gland, where 642 Jews were massacred by the SS.

  One of Rene's daughters lost her husband, Georges Caen. Caen was not from the Norman city of the same name; he was a Kohen, a name that implied he was descended from the priestly line of Aaron. Georges Kohen was now trying to survive in Lyons as Caen, the name that his father had chosen years earlier to better blend into French society. The Germans never found out that this bourgeois Caen was no Norman. But someone informed on him for possessing a revolver, and so the Germans came to the Caens’ comfortable home and demanded Georges. The family, instead of hiding him or denying that he was there, ushered the Germans in, like confident Frenchmen who knew their rights. Georges Caen was taken away, never to be seen again.

  Another of Rent's daughters was attending art school in 1944, and there she met Robert Altmann, the brother of a fellow student. Altmann had been born in Dusseldorf in 1922. His father came from a religious family but had moved away from religion as he became a successful businessman. He bought and sold steel, and after the Russian Revolution he did a lucrative business with the new struggling Soviet nation. The Russians had no cash, but they had a wealth of lumber that, as the Ewenczyks had also found, was in great demand in Western Europe. Altmann was able to work out barter arrangements with them—trading steel for wood.

  After Liberation, Rene Levy and his family went back to Paris. He was unable to get back his business, which under Boussac went on to become one of the textile giants of postwar France. The Altmanns settled in Lyons, but Robert, who spoke flawless French, German, and English, went north and served as a translator for the U.S. Army until the end of the war. In 1947 he married Rene Levy's daughter, resumed his family's steel trading business, and started raising a family. Once again, they were simply affluent, assimilated Parisians living in an expensive neighborhood, eating an apple for Rosh Hashanah and matzoh for Passover so their three children would know that they were Jewish. Otherwise, they could live like other Frenchmen. The Germans were gone, and France was once again a liberal country where Jews did not have to mark themselves.

  THE eAGERNESS OF ROBERT ALTMANN to pick up the old life he had left off was not characteristic of all French Jewry. Perhaps they would have felt differently if it had been only the Germans who had tried to destroy them. But it had also been the French. Many French Jews remembered that French police had rounded up French Jews for deportation. A widely reported Nazi expression attributed to number-two Nazi Hermann Goering was, “Wer jude ist, bestimme Ich, — I decide who is a Jew.” Assimilation had meant nothing to Goering and other Nazis. After the war, to many French Jews, the French ideal of assimilation seemed a fantasy of the foolish.

  Most people do not have neighbors whose humanity has been tested. But in France, Jews now had such neighbors. The Nazis had proven throughout Europe that most people, when threatened, act badly. It is difficult to live in a society in which it has already been proven to you that your neighbors will pretend not to notice that your children have been murdered. Many French Jews preferred to go to an untested society and hope that Israeli or American neighbors would not be like this. In any case it would be better not to know for certain, as it now was known of European neighbors.

  Zionism, the longing for a Jewish state, was first popularized by Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist who had covered the Dreyfus case. He had principally argued for Zionism in London, where the colonial administration of Palestine was controlled. But Zionism had found some of its strongest adherents in Poland. Even in the 1920s, Jewish communities in Poland had already been preparing for the aliyahy the historical return to Israel. Both Fania Elbinger and Emmanuel Ewenczyk had been raised in Polish Zionism.

  Now, after the Nazi butchery, many Jews felt that surely no one could refuse them their state. The wartime Jewish Resistance was falling apart—at least half of Fania and Emmanuel's group from Grenoble were going to Palestine. Even before the war ended, some Jews had made it to neutral Spain and from there to the Middle East. At the end of the war the Jewish neighborhoods of Paris were filled with Jewish refugees from throughout Europe looking for contacts to help them get to Palestine.

  Fania, too, wanted to go, and she told her mother so. Her mother looked at Fania with moist eyes and said, “So you are going to leave us all alone —just the two of us.”

  It was true. Fania's mother had only her two daughters. Fania's father had died before the war, and there had been no word from any surviving relative back in Poland. Fania Elbinger's aliyah ended when she looked into her mot
her's eyes.

  Yankel and Syma Ewenczyk stayed in Grenoble with their oldest son, Sam, who could at last finish his studies, after which he would remain at the university and work in nuclear energy research. Emmanuel's brother Oscar returned to Paris from Germany, where he had torn up his identity papers, concealed his Jewish identity, and spent the war in forced labor as a prisoner of war on a farm. At least on a farm he had had enough food to eat.

  Oscar and Emmanuel kept the sweater business in Paris, and as Emmanuel had predicted, it was an instant success. As soon as they secured the supplies and their designers came out with a new line, the wholesalers started selling sweaters at top prices, as fast as they could produce them. France was hungry for consumer goods.

  Fania and Emmanuel were married on December 30, 1945, in a just-restored synagogue on Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, one of several synagogues the Germans had blown up in October 1941. Two years later, Oscar married Fania's sister Georgette.

  It took a long time to sort out the missing people. Many of them were never found. For some, like Fania's mother, it took time just to comprehend what had happened. Back in Grenoble during the war, Fania had shown her mother a flyer from the Jewish Resistance saying that hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been taken to camps in Poland were being gassed to death. Her mother had left parents, a brother, a sister, and a niece in Baronovitchi, in eastern Poland. Tossing the flyer down, her mother told Fania, “Don't believe that. It can't be true. It's not possible.” In fact, most of the Jews Fania talked to in the Grenoble area had not believed the flyer. How could you take hundreds of thousands of people and gas them to death? Perhaps some had been gassed, maybe even a few hundred, but more likely they had been shot. Rumors run wild in time of war.

  After the Liberation, Fania tried without success to find a trace of her mother's family in Baronovitchi. She wrote letters. She went to special offices. She discovered that huge extended Jewish families had entirely vanished without a trace. Whole communities were gone, with no precise explanation. Europe was full of individuals who did not have a single friend or relative in the world. Some of them found each other and married quickly. Many went to Israel, at least to be with other Jews.

  In early 1945 the elegant turn-of-the-century Hotel Lutetia, located at an expensive Left Bank Parisian intersection, was set up to receive concentration camp survivors. The original idea was to establish a reception center at the train station, the Gare d'Orsay. Liberated prisoners of war and labor camp inmates had already been coming in, a little thinner but happy to be home, and the staff at the center imagined that the liberated concentration camp inmates would be similar. But in April, when the first of them started returning—skeletal ghosts with glazed, sunken eyes—Parisians could see that something very different had happened to them. Some of the staff who worked in the Hotel Lutetia center openly expressed distaste for their work. The people were frightening to look at and terrible to listen to, with their tales of horror or, as one staff member put it, their “complaining.” This did not fit well with the myth that General De Gaulle was carefully constructing, of a military victory over the Germans, a repeat of 1918. Although survivors marched in their striped uniforms in victory celebrations in 1945, that practice was soon barred.

  The hotel functioned as a missing-persons center. A list was established where returning survivors put their names. Most people who went to the hotel searching for survivors did not find the names they were looking for and anxiously canvassed the hotel with photographs and wedding portraits, hoping to find someone who had seen their loved ones alive. Walls became bulletin boards, layered with snapshots and notes. Every day, people came and waited. It was becoming clear that the flyers that the Resistance had circulated during the war had been true. In fact, it was even worse than the flyers had said — not hundreds of thousands, but millions had been murdered. Long after the Hotel Lutetia ran out of survivors to process, relatives still turned up there every day, hoping for news. Since displaced Jews were moving all over the world, they clung to the hope that the ones they were seeking would turn up somewhere. They clung to that hope for years.

  When Dwojra Finkelsztajn got back to the Pletzl, she learned that her sister Bella, who had moved to Paris before the war, had been deported to Auschwitz. Bella was not among the few who passed through the Hotel Lutetia. Nor was there any trace of Dwojra's parents, another sister, or a little brother, Sacha, who had stayed in the village outside Kielce. Unlike Bella, these family members had simply vanished without explanation. They could still be alive. It was only after years of looking for relatives that Dwojra finally located a cousin in Canada. He provided the ending of the Zylbersztajn story. He had seen the Germans march the entire Jewish population of their village down a road. Then they shot them all.

  The ninety thousand Jews of France who had been murdered represented a quarter of France's Jewish population, but the percentage of people missing from the Pletzl was much higher. The Nazis had started with foreign-born Jews, and the Pletzl had been one of the places to find them.

  But although so many familiar faces were missing, the Pletzl was now crowded with gaunt survivors, most of them young, many from Eastern Europe. The neighborhood itself became a transit center. The young people who had lost everyone they knew and who wanted to restart their lives would come for a few months and mill around the neighborhood, until they made the connections to arrange passage to Palestine. A few went to the United States, Canada, and Australia, but most wanted to go to Palestine. Only a few stayed in Paris. The ones who stayed were called “les griners” from the Yiddish word for green—young men and women who had seen the unimaginable depths but were nevertheless considered green, because they didn't know the neighborhood.

  3

  Liberated

  Antwerp

  “YOU HAVE TO LAUGH AT THIS,” THOUGHT SAM PERL AS pain tightened his face and forced up the corners of his mouth. Antwerp's monumental Central Station was still there, with its lacy ironworks. All the little stone turrets were still sticking up from the elevated tracks that ran through the Jewish section of Antwerp, a neighborhood that seemed to cling to rail lines as though it were contemplating a fast exit. The dark tunnels where streets passed under the raised tracks were still there, with the curly ironwork around and even under the bridges. And all the fine high-ceilinged, tall-windowed homes were still there. As he came through the underpass from the broad Belgielei, Perl could see that the Van Den Nestlei Synagogue was still a charred shell, as it had been since that day in 1941. But the other synagogues—though torn up, burned, and vandalized—still stood. In the fall of 1945, when Perl came back to Antwerp, the only thing missing was most of the people he knew. His parents and his brother and wife and two children and a sister and friends were all gone. There were only a few hundred Jews left.

  But look who had survived! Sam Perl could not help but be amazed. So many of the strong young people were gone. There seemed to be almost no teenagers at all. But there were old people, even elderly people who had seemed weak even before the war. Great leaders, like the Chief Rabbi, Mordechai Rottenberg, were gone. And yet people Perl had always thought of as “complete shlimazels,” the kind of people to whom everything always happened, had survived. “Who in a million years would have thought it?” he asked himself.

  He would always remember this moment when Darwin's theory of natural selection did not apply, when survival had its own random force. “Life is selfish. It can't end. It's not a matter of what is driving you,” he thought. “There have to be some people who survive.” There was also the remarkable fact that he was one of them. A few people he knew had come back, like Rabbi Rotten-berg's sons, Chaim and Jozef, whom he had not seen since the transit camp, when their sister got them South American papers. Sam Perl was put on a train to Auschwitz. He jumped off, but it took the Germans only a few months to find him again. Before they put him on a second train to Auschwitz, the chief of the Gestapo had had him brought to an office where they spent several hou
rs applying the lit end of cigarettes and cigars to the sensitive areas of his body. The second time Sam Perl was deported, he jumped off the train again, and this time he had been able to find a network of Flemish Catholics in the town of Namur, who hid him until the Liberation.

  Slowly, more Jews returned. It was not going to be like before the war, but a few hundred were turning up from the safe corners they had found in France and Switzerland and New York, where in the intervening years they had built up the diamond business on Forty-seventh Street.

  ANTWERP BECAME an important Jewish center in the late nineteenth century, when pogroms had driven Jews out of Eastern Europe. As major diamond deposits were discovered in the Belgian Congo, the diamond trade flourished in Antwerp, predominantly in the hands of Jews from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, and Romania. During the First World War most of the trade had been lost to Amsterdam, since Belgium was at war while Holland was neutral. But in the 1920s and 1930s Antwerp, the Belgian port on the Dutch border, started getting back its diamond trade, fed by a steady Jewish immigration from the east.

  Jews were coming to Belgium not only because of its liberal immigration laws, but also because Antwerp had a port with ships bound for America and Palestine. Mia Lehmann had gone there to leave for Palestine. But once they arrived, many Jews in transit decided to stay, because there was work available in diamonds. You could become a sawer, someone who cut rough diamonds in two. Or you could become a cleaver, who cut the basic facets that determine a diamond's shape. Or if you were not good with your hands but gifted at commerce, you could become a broker, buying and selling rough stones. None of these jobs required a great deal of knowledge or education. A cleaver, one of the standard entry jobs in the diamond business, apprenticed for one year, then earned more money than many doctors.