Gone to Soldiers (14 page)

When we came back today, we found utter confusion. While we were gone, the Nazis closed off the entire XIe arrondissement, shut down the Métro stations and moved in. They arrested Jews on the streets, in cafés and restaurants, waiting in line—which is all we do from one day to the next—and even in their homes. The Balabans are gone without a trace. For two days I have been running around Paris for Maman, who has been crying and crying, trying to find out what happened to them.

24 août 1941

Today I learned the Balabans are in some sort of camp at Drancy, a railroad town just a few miles outside Paris. Maman is greatly relieved to find out where they are. We must see them and ask what they need. Their apartment is a shambles, everything thrown on the floor and ripped open. Neighbors say the police did it. If they were looking for the legendary riches those sort always seem to think Jews have, they searched in vain, because the Balabans owned hardly more than the clothes on their backs and some rickety fourth-hand furniture.

26 août 1941

Things get uglier. Just a little over a week ago there was fighting between demonstrators and police—both the gendarmes and the German police—at porte Saint-Denis and porte Saint-Martin, and they arrested a lot of people even though it was no different from a hundred other demonstrations everybody who has lived in Paris through the last ten years takes for granted! Anyhow, the Germans went ahead and executed two people they had arrested. One they are making a great fuss about because he is Jewish and they list him in big letters on all the posters as
THE JEW SAMUEL TYZELMAN
.

Henri says it is just the Nazi madness and people will begin to laugh at them and mass disobedience will result, but I find his attitude too optimistic for me these days. He brought me a beautiful present today—five kilos of potatoes and a little piece of mutton. Maman was in ecstasy although of course her second question was, Are you sleeping with him? If I were, Maman, I said, perhaps he would have given me a bigger piece of mutton! She made as if to slap me, but then she did not, because in truth she was too happy about the mutton and the potatoes too.

His mother's brother has a farm 25 kilometers north, so he bicycled out there on Saturday and back on Sunday loaded down with parcels. We had such a feast tonight and Maman is going to stretch it over the next two nights. It is so long since we have had anything except cattle fodder and herbal extractions and a few rotten vegetables cooked for soup, beans beans beans beans beans and an occasional thin slice of cheese washed down with ersatz coffee and tisanes. Every so often one egg apiece.

Last month we had used up our bread allowance by the twelfth and even trying so hard this month, we ran out by the seventeenth. We would exhaust it sooner but we all scrounge whatever we can, and my copains, the gang at the café Le Jazz Hot, treat me almost every day. Most of them have decent black market connections. Of course it is much easier if you aren't a Jew, but I can't complain, because they share with me.

I am writing this tonight on a full belly, and it is amazing how strong and alert I feel. Right after we ate I almost dozed off. We sat around the salle à manger, Maman, Renée and I, and beamed at each other. We felt peaceful as cows in a field, yet I could not be ashamed that my bliss was built on having for once a well-filled stomach, because I have learned how difficult it is to concentrate on an empty one.

It is also cheering to know we shall not be hungry tomorrow or the next day. I can face the problems of our lives less on my nerves, with a solider strength. I did not know if I enjoyed the lamb more or the potatoes. Even the rutabagas we loathe and eat every day tasted almost like food in the stew. Last week Céleste sold me a bag of carrots that must have weighed at least two kilos. Maman still had two of them left for our grand stew.

Most of our lives are spent standing in lines. Maman still has her job at the furrier's even though the firm has been taken away from M. Cariot. They are seizing all the Jewish businesses. The man who has taken it over did not fire the Jews, as expected, because he says how is he supposed to run a skilled business with no skilled workers? Maman says we are very lucky. Renée and I do most of the waiting in line, but I do better because I am bigger, while Renée gets pushed out of the way. I have learned to study standing and in fact that is where I do most of my reading.

Anyhow the Germans have announced that everybody arrested no matter for what—and at least over half the people arrested are merely people who get caught out after curfew—are going to be treated as hostages. You get involved and miss the last 11
P
.
M
. Métro, and then you are out of luck if a friend is not kind enough to let you stay over, as Céleste has let me stay several times, and Henri and Albert like gentlemen once. Henri and Albert live right up the hill from the Sorbonne, in a dirty little side street but convenient. Maman hits the ceiling when I stay out. I don't do it intentionally, but occasionally everybody misses that last Métro. This decree means that if you get caught at some minor infraction, then they may take you out and shoot you one morning because some hothead has taken a potshot at a German officer. I do not understand what the Germans expect to accomplish by this brutality. Do they think when some poor dishwasher in a restaurant who misses her train is shot for an action one of the new resistance groups takes, that the Gaullists or the Communists are going to fold up and wither away?

I almost forgot, somebody else has moved into the Balabans' already. They have thrown the Balabans' pitiful things out into the street for the neighbors to pick through, but held on to their kitchen table and chairs. When the Balabans come back, I don't know what they will do. I only hope Maman is not carried away by fellow feeling into taking them in. Without Papa's income we have let go of my room on the top floor. Renée and Maman share her double bed and I sleep on the folding bed in the salle à manger.

8 septembre 1941

I was coming from my acting class when I had to pass along the boulevard des Italiens. I was wrapped up in thinking about the character of Bérénice in Racine's great tragedy, with whom in some ways I can easily identify myself, when I saw a great crowd of people ahead lined up to enter the Palais Berlitz.

“Oh, what's that? Is there an exhibition?” I asked a middle-aged woman. I am always careful to ask information on the street from women, since I would not want to give an opening to some man who might imagine I am trying to pick him up. I still remember that idiot boy who followed me all the way to Marie Charlotte's flat just because I answered his question and told him which way the Gare du Nord was. Now I understand he perfectly well knew. Henri says I am definitely naive about men, but the truth is I have other worries and do not need more.

“It's a big exhibition, everyone's going,” she said, nodding at me. “It's ‘The Jew and France.' You ought to go too. You aren't too young to face facts.”

I thought at first she meant that as a Jew I should understand anti-Semitism, but then she went on: “You have to keep yourself pure, a young girl such as yourself, but you must understand contamination too. It's a matter of educating one's self for the New France.”

I am ashamed that I was so embarrassed for her, to be so stupid and rude, that I could not say one word. I'm afraid my manners simply automatically caused me to thank her and hasten away. She was a well-dressed lady of middle age, wearing a navy suit with the new shoulder pads they are showing and a crisp white blouse with a bow tie, an oversized hat with an entire little dead bird on it.

I wish I had struck her, but that would be absurd, and actually an evil reaction to return verbal violence with physical violence. Perhaps I did the best thing. But then I took no stand. What should I have done? If I were truly a noble soul such as Antigone in Sophocles, the words would have come to me and I would have said something clear and ringing that would have shown her how foolish she was to speak that way of an entire people.

As it was I felt humiliated and simply proceeded along the broad sidewalk toward the crowd ahead. Right on the front of the Palais Berlitz between the pillars was hung an enormous four-story-high poster of an old man with a beard and long nose supposed to be a Jew and digging claws into a globe, where France was drawn in. It was ghastly. I became very hot and I did not know where to look. I was afraid I would burst into tears right on the street. As I saw all these ordinary people, my countrymen whom yesterday I might have sat beside in the cinema or said hello to at the news vendor's kiosk all waiting to cram into this Nazi display put on by a French organization L'Institut Français des Questions Juives, I felt like a cockroach they were trying to crush under their well-shod feet.

I wanted to climb a soap box and shriek at them, How dare you imagine that the ugly picture you've drawn has anything in common with me? It's your own disgusting imagination you revel in, resembling those filthy drawings the boys used to make and then try to force us to look. Tell us what that is, tell us what that is. Your own ugly mind, I told them: one time I did think up the right thing to say.

I think one of my worst flaws is that while my mind seems to work more quickly than other people's, often I see too many sides to a question, causing me to be weak in my response. I should strive to be simpler. Sometimes I think simplicity is virtue, and when I write that, I think of Maman, who always seems to go straight to the heart of a matter.

When I came home, I thought whether I should say anything about what I had seen, and then I looked at Maman, so careworn and exhausted from working all day at the furrier's and then rushing about trying to find something to make into soup for supper, and little Renée, so subdued and quiet these days I worry about her. I thought, when Papa comes home at last, I'll talk to him about it, but in the meantime, as he said to me, I must take care of Maman and Renée, because in some ways I really am cooler headed.

3 octobre 1941

Last night six of the synagogues of Paris were blown up! I went with Renée this morning and we looked at our own where we go on High Holidays and there was nothing but a shell with glass and mortar and pieces of cloth and blowing papers. Jews of the neighborhood were milling around picking through the rubble trying to save something. It made me so indignant I burn with helplessness. What a vile idiotic act. Blowing up a building of worship. What kind of fools think this is a proper political act?

All the gross newspapers are screaming that this was a spontaneous act of the French people who want us, the so-called foreign element, thrust out. Who are rejecting us as they reject a disease or a poison. I must say, it is great to have become a microbe. I walk around Paris these days and it is just as if some lout is striking me in the face every twenty paces, when I see one of those newspapers going on about how great the recent roundup is, and how France is being cleansed and purified, or when I see some truly crude and disgusting caricature supposed to represent me or Papa or Maman, or when I try to find out what is happening in the world, and in place of the newspapers that for all their partisanship at least carried the world's news, we have nothing but these rags that shriek hatred and call for death for us.

Sometimes I cannot believe it still, that all these Frenchmen run about sucking up to the Germans and flattering them and parroting their ideas. I have silly fantasies of rushing into the offices of one or another of these rags or the magazines that pretend to literary or philosophical merit.
Les Nouveaux Temps, La Gerbe, Aujourd'hui, Nouvelle Revue Française
, they all hew to the occupiers' line and none of them defends us. They are only politer forms of
L'Appel
and
Au Pilori
which shriek their diarrhea of abuse at us daily and call openly for our death. I feel as if I live in a rabid city, where every other man froths and foams in violent insanity.

I remember how even last year when I was studying for my bac, I thought I would be so happy once I had entered the Sorbonne. I would meet other students who share my interests, I would lead a life of rich intellectual ferment and austere dedication to ideas. Mostly I keep away from the other students, as I fear the shock of discovering they too are anti-Semites. The business of survival is so demanding, I take classes for granted. Often I pass the café Dupont, which is also in the Latin Quarter, with its message,
NO JEWS OR DOGS
. As some converts are more Catholic than the pope, some of these imitation Nazis are passionate to outdo their masters.

29 novembre 1941

What a sad subdued birthday the 24th was for me. Then we received a message from Papa. Some callow youth in a Boy Scout uniform appeared with it, a most unlikely carrier of clandestine messages, but he made a point of telling me he is in the EIF, which stands for the Eclaireurs Israélites de France, the Jewish Boy Scouts. He shrugged off our thanks, saying it is not difficult for him, because he has his ways of crossing the border to Vichy.

He also brought a bottle of cassis to us as a present from Papa, which is certainly welcome because Maman and I particularly miss the warmth of a little wine with supper, and it has been months since we have tasted anything alcoholic. We trade our tiny wine ration to Mme Cohen for a little butter and some skim milk for Rivka. Cassis, Maman says, is particularly welcome because our stomachs are so often upset from eating rotten food or bread that has strange additives—we suspect everything from ground-up bones to plaster dust from demolition. Cassis we will measure out a tablespoon at a time after supper to warm us and soothe our poor suffering stomachs.

Papa is in Toulouse, the boy told us. He seems to admire Papa very much. He said Papa cannot cross back to Paris, but that he is a great force in resisting the Germans and the Vichy government. He almost got caught twice, but he escaped. He said Papa is a very brave man and we should be proud of him. Papa had told him to secure papers for us, which he hopes to deliver on his next trip, but that what was needed now were recent photographs for counterfeit identity papers. Then we will be able to rejoin Papa safely in Toulouse.