One Hundred Twenty-One Days (12 page)

5/3/2005  KÜRZ COLLECTION

• Kürz saved everything. His journal (Paris, 1942). Photographs, notebooks, log books, mathematical manuscripts, articles written by others that he annotated, letters he received and copies (carbon) of his own letters. An enormous collection.

5/4/2005  • Correspondence between Kürz and M. No (or very little) math in these letters. Letters twelve pages long. Their common love of Greater Germany. Written in French! A bit boring and then, all of a sudden, a surge
of lyricism, to express the love of the French lark, or “alouette,” (M.) who flies under the protection of the German eagle (Kürz). The eagle and the lark…

• Other letters, notably from:

-  Silberberg, in 1939, from Strasbourg. He sent a lemma.

-  Slawek, a Polish mathematician, employed as a feeder of lice (serving as a blood source for lice in order to create a serum to combat typhus). A letter of appeal for help (1943). No carbon copy of a response.

-  Ernst von Apfeldorf, thanking him for a dinner invitation, 1950.

-  Yersin (senior), Paris, 1942, thanking him for food tickets.

• In Kürz’s archives, articles by Silberberg, but also separate copies of his two notes published by the Academy of Sciences. Lots of annotations and writing crossed out in pencil. He really worked on these papers!

Must go see the archives of Harold Smith, in Oxford: he worked with Kürz’s son-in-law after the war.

5/5/2005  TIEDEMANN COLLECTION

• Letters, photos. He lived on Humboldtstrasse.

He was a cellist. His wife, a pianist. Lots of chamber music. A trio with Schreiber, a student of Tiedemann’s who played violin.

A photograph shows them in action. The violinist’s bright blue eyes. Became a more famous biologist than his mentor. Emigrated in 1938 (his stepfather was Jewish). Found a job at a small university in the American Midwest.

• Another photograph: an evening in his garden on Humboldt Street, in 1943.

This picture leads to a few questions.

-  In 1943, no one could have known that the little town of N. would be spared from the bombings. The threat must have made dinner invitations and receptions risky. Even in pretty houses with gardens, festive gatherings must have been rare.

-  What products were available to make a tart, for example? Butter, etc.? What if you were an individual (Frau Tiedemann)? A pastry shop (Korb & Schlag)?

-  Who is the doctor in the photo? Haven’t found any mention of this Friedrich elsewhere, in any of the university archives. Was he there as a doctor? Called to come treat one of the guests? M.’s neuralgia?

• M.’s presence in the photo, his presence in N., raises more questions.

-  Official forms to fill out in order to enter Germany in 1943, both before traveling and at the border: the usual bureaucratic details, but also a declaration of religion, certifying that one was not Jewish (for French citizens, this was noted on passports).

• Coincidences: the young and brilliant mathematician Otto Zach was reported missing from the Eastern Front (battle of Kursk) the very day M. gave his talk in N.

5/6/2005  On the train (back to Paris), questions:

• Concerning another one of the people present in the photo of the charming summer evening in 1943, Ernst von Apfeldorf. This fact doesn’t appear in the university’s biographical dictionary, but he was among those addressed in the letter of appeal that Marcel Schmitt sent to several German historians asking them to intervene in favor of Daniel Roth, a historian who specialized in the historical events referenced in Dante’s
Inferno.
Evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand with the University of Strasbourg, he was arrested in June 1943 as a member of the Resistance and sent to Germany. He was beheaded in Wölfersheim on December 5, 1943. Impossible to know whether the letters Schmitt wrote actually reached their destinations. Ernst von Apfeldorf, who was well placed and very influential, didn’t come forward, according to Schmitt.

• Also in summer 1943: the bombing of Hamburg. 40,000 civilian deaths? Flames 8,000 meters high? Corresponding exactly with the dates of Kürz’s visit to Paris (June 1942): the filming of
Les visiteurs du soir
in Paris. The flames coming up to lick the hands of Jules Berry (the devil). How high? A girl’s love being stronger than the devil (this is a film!).

• “History is the science of man’s misfortunes” (Queneau,
Une histoire modèl
e). Mathematical modelling? A truly complex predator-prey system—certain sardines can become sharks, for example.

• Testimonials from those who survived the Nazi camps. During the transportation in uncovered freight cars following the evacuation of Auschwitz (march of death), survivors saw the corners of these cars as relative shelters.

• A circle has no corners. Neither does a cylinder. Hence, perhaps, the descriptions of hell: circles (Dante), a cylinder (Beckett’s little book
The Lost Ones
).

• List of hells: Homer (steersmen, the dog of hell), Christian (pain and a black pit), Dante (wretched hearts), Brueghel (succubus, lemures), Goethe (cloven-hoofed demon).

Plus musicians, Liszt (
After a Reading of Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata
).

And now.

Beckett.

• Thinking of other books. For example:
Painting at Dora
(Dora was the camp where they developed the V-2 rockets). Le Lionnais was deported to Dora. During the roll call, he mentally recreates a museum of paintings (Brueghel at Dora). Painting numbers, which he speaks about with another deportee, beautiful numbers, π, the square root of 2. The finer points of number theory. His book
Les nombres remarquables
, dedicated “to my lifelong friends, delicious and terrifying, numbers.” Terrifying? Why terrifying? See, for example, what he says on the 7th positive integer. Or on the 24th?

CHAPTER VIII

One Hundred Twenty-One Days

On the 24th of August, 1944 at 8:45 p.m., the first tanks of General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division made their entry into Paris via the Porte d’Orléans. The uprising had started on the 13th, the French flag was fluttering over the Sorbonne on the 19th, the Hôtel de Ville and the ministers were free on the 20th, but the fighting wasn’t over and Paris was covered in six hundred barricades. On August 25th, at the Montparnasse train station, Colonel Rol-Tanguy and General Leclerc accepted the surrender of the German troops. The most beautiful day of our lives, some said. That’s it, it’s over! We’re going to live again! everyone thought. The black vehicles were covered in a rainbow of summer dresses and flags. People were singing “La Marseillaise,” girls were dancing in the streets and boys were kissing them.

This glorious and symbolic liberation was soon joined by the liberation of Troyes, in the east, and those of several cities in the Paris Basin and the middle of France.

On August 27th, Clermont-Ferrand was liberated as well. This, too, was a collective outpouring of jubilation. The female Alsatian students who had been taking refuge in the town along with the University of Strasbourg for almost five years made traditional costumes with big black headdresses and danced in the Place de Jaude.
It’s over, thought Mireille and her mother, we can go back home.

Since the end of June 1942, the two women, both Parisians, had been living (or, in any case, surviving) in a hamlet near the town, more or less hidden away with the villagers’ discreet complicity. The two of them had left Paris and crossed the Demarcation Line a few days after it had become mandatory to wear the star, just before the big roundups in July. Only Mireille and her mother were mentioned in the previous sentences because Mireille’s father died “
pour la France
” during the fighting that took place in May 1940. As for the star, it came up because French law had decided that Mireille’s mother Nicole, with a maiden name of Gorenstein, was Jewish, and therefore so was Mireille. This imposed Jewishness was a novelty for the two women. It did not accompany any religious beliefs, any rituals, any family traditions—in fact, not one specific thing Nicole and Mireille could have possibly shared with other “Jews” or “half-Jews.” What’s more, the women had thought for a few weeks afterwards that because Mireille’s father, a Parisian lawyer from a family of practicing Catholics (though he himself was an atheist and a free thinker), had been killed in action, they would be protected from the anti-Semitic decrees of October 1940. They had quickly understood that that wouldn’t be the case. But now it was over, France was going to be free, they were going to live again.

In September, when there was fighting around Metz (because the war wasn’t actually over), Mireille and her mother arrived in Paris, the same day the leaders of what had been previously known as the French State were taking refuge in Sigmaringen, Germany.
On Rue de Médicis, the women’s apartment had been emptied of all its furniture. They found the dining room table and chairs with a neighbor, who had kept them in expectation of the women’s return (so she said). But they would never know what became of the rosewood desk and bookcase from the law office, or the bathtub. The fact that all the books had disappeared upset them more than the loss of their armchairs, beds, linens, or dishes. Living again… Yes. To start, one had to find mattresses to sleep on. Eating again… not quite yet. So much energy was needed to procure something to eat. Something to cover up with, as well, because autumn, cool and wet, had arrived. So much time was lost in the displacements. The price of a bicycle was unimaginable. Fortunately, certain sections of the metro were starting to work again, when there was electricity.

It was over. People were reconnecting, writing to friends with whom they’d been out of touch, for years in most cases. Some wrote back, others didn’t. People were visiting each other. Information was spreading. Letters arrived from a cousin who was being detained as a prisoner of war. One of Mireille’s neighbors and classmates was beaten and her head was shaved in public, all because someone claimed to have seen her walking with a German soldier in the Jardin du Luxembourg. One of Nicole’s cousins, a brilliant young professor and the head of a Resistance network, had been denounced as a Jew by a fellow Frenchman and hanged. Another was said to have been killed along with his wife by the French Militia; both were supposedly found later with insulting words written on their bodies. Yet another had been shot for acts of resistance. Or deported to Germany.