Kitabı oku: «Uncounted Victim», sayfa 2

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During one of my recent trips to France, I went to see my elementary school along the Rhône. Nothing had changed. I could even smell the chalk! With tears in my eyes, I remembered my innocent childhood gone by. I wanted to run and tell my parents that I was home again and had seen my school … but of course, they were nowhere to be found; gone with my childhood and the best part of my life. I wanted so much to tell them all I had seen and experienced, how the streets that looked so large as a child were now so narrow. I wanted to tell them that I was back at the beautiful park where Maman used to take us three children, that I had seen our old friends who were still living in their apartment on the next street, and that they had not changed at all. They told me that Martine, my friend, was now a nurse and living in Germany. I wanted so much to share with them all this nostalgia … but of course, I could not. I felt as if I had lost them again and experienced my grief anew. I stopped at the boulangerie where we bought our bread and cakes and found it exactly as I remembered it, with the same aromas, the same variety of breads warm from the oven, but it was not the same.

It is true that one can never go back …

The games we would play as children … Some mornings, my father would call us from his bed inquiring whether we were awake. If we were, he would say, “Parlons de lit à lit” (Let’s talk from bed to bed). We would start chatting, eventually joining him in his bed, but I always waited for him to tell us stories about “l’Italie,” imaging sunny vistas, but he would correct me and remind me that we were talking “de lit à lit,” an alliteration.

And I had my dolls. A particularly beloved one had her carriage that I had furnished with pillows and blankets. One day while playing with this doll, I realized that my mother had gone out shopping and left me at home with my grandmother who was forever cursing me, and I began crying in despair at the prospect that my mother might never return. I still remember the pain I felt and the fear of never seeing her again.

My grandmother had an incomprehensible hatred toward me. She would often curse me, and my mother would not dare defend me. My father, her son, would not dare offend her by standing up to her. For example, she was very handy with her fingers, and was always doing some needlework. I asked her once to show me how to make the heel of some stockings, and she answered, “Learn by yourself as I have!” Innocently, wishing to ingratiate myself, I said, “But you are an accomplished housewife,” which was a compliment in those days. Her response was, “May you never reach the day of being an accomplished housewife!” I ran to tell my mother who was so shocked, she sent me to ask my father what this meant. He asked me where I heard that, and when I told him that Memé had said that to me, he became pale, but did nothing. She knew that she could do or say anything and no one would ever oppose her.

Another time she said, “Que te quedaras en la cuna!” (You should have died in your cradle). No wonder I was in fear of being abandoned by my mother into the hands of such a harpy!

At about that time, when I was around ten or eleven, our school distributed some kinds of shoes or clogs to children in need. The principal of the boys’ school was in charge of the program, and when I presented myself to him to receive the clogs, he touched me in an inappropriate way. I was so ashamed that I did not say a thing to anyone.

Then a grocer in the next street where my mother used to send us shopping did the same thing in broad daylight. This time I told my mother, and both she and my father went to confront him, but he denied it.

Later, I was hospitalized at Granges Blanches in Lyon, and a young intern touched me inappropriately while he was examining me. Again, I told my parents who made a big to-do, but he again denied everything.

Years later in Italy, a priest hugged me in his office and inserted his hands under my blouse. I reported him to the bishop, but the priest denied it, of course.

In those days, women’s voices did not have as much weight as they do today, although even these days, they seem to have tall fences to climb.

Throughout my life, the men over me took advantage of their rank with their remarks or behaviors, and the only thing I could do was leave if I did not wish to tolerate that treatment. I always worked for the president or senior partner of a firm, and unfortunately, there was no one above these men to whom I could complain, and they seemed to exploit that situation. The only time I reported it was to the unemployment office who called me and my boss to a hearing, but as I was new in the United States and not yet fluent in English, I was penalized by the unemployment office for having “lied.”

To be sure, the old ways of doing things shock the modern generations. Spanking children used to be common place, and for the most part, nobody died. But that is not the type of abuse I’m talking about. I refer here to taking advantage of those who cannot defend themselves for one reason or another, either because of their youthful age or their gender; their culture or physical strength.

Indeed, abuse of the weaker by the stronger has always existed, and it is only now that women and children have begun to expose it, and the media has become more sensitive to exploring such unsavory stories.

Abuse has taken many forms through the ages and across cultures, from stoning to driving spikes through wrists and ankles for presumed blasphemy, drawing and quartering for high treason or incinerating people. All such atrocities deserve their own obituary, a prayer and resolve that they should never be allowed to be repeated.

As awful as that butchery was, every bit of suffering inflicted on any helpless creature, should be considered despicable and reprehensible.

When I was nine or ten years old, I had my tonsils and adenoids out. At that time, this operation was done without anesthesia. I have never understood why the adults in charge thought it was all right to submit a child to such suffering simply because the child was helpless, either because of its age, or because it was rendered so by the application of restraints. Didn’t those adults have memories of their own childhood to think back to? Was it that the operation was presumably so quick that it would be just like tearing off a Band-Aid, and the child would soon forget about it? Here I am writing about it all these many years later, still painfully traumatized by the experience.

I was rolled into a folded sheet the length of my entire body, like a sausage, and a nurse held me on her knees and held my head back so that the surgeon could get inside my mouth. My screams didn’t matter; in fact, they helped him get the mouth gag in, and in an avalanche of incredible burning pain from which I thought I would die, the surgeon worked inside my mouth. I don’t remember how I breathed through the blood and his fingers and that damned gag and the nurse forcing my head back. Believe me, it was not a quick stripping off of a Band-Aid.

My daughter suffered a similar fate, but fortunately she was given ether. However, to hear her tell the story, the very act of being tightly restrained on the lap of the surgical attendant with her head forced back, unable to cooperate and participate in her own care, was devastating to her. She feels traumatized to this day by that experience of a procedure which to so many otherwise wise adults is nothing more than a temporary discomfort.

At another time, while at camp, my friends and I ate too many plums along with their pits which led me to have an attack of appendicitis. Our usual surgeon was away, so an old doctor operated on me and botched the operation. The following day he had to reopen the wound to clean out an infection in my stomach, but this time he went in without anesthesia. You can still hear my screams in New York City!

We grew up. René joined the Boy Scouts, and I was allowed to join the Girl Scouts.

Chapter 2
Germany Invades France

I was 12 years old and living with my family in Bourg-les-Valence when World War II began in September of 1939. I heard the adults speaking of Neville Chamberlain, then British Prime Minister, who had gone to Germany to try and convince Hitler to be less fanatical in his politics of annexation (he had already annexed Austria and the Sunderland in Czechoslovakia. We had anticipated war after Hitler’s rise in Germany, when he finally took Danzig in Poland on September 1, 1939 (now called Gdansk). There had been international appeals and conferences to avert that catastrophe, with Neville Chamberlain returning with his slogan, “Peace in our times” by which he seemed to appease Hitler and the world. In France, we sang patriotic songs before the war challenging Hitler to come to the Maginot Line, a line of defense built along the border with Germany, but leaving the Belgian border undefended and through which the German hordes eventually invaded France. But, in the span of ten months, French forces were beaten and defeated and overrun by the German army that crossed the Maginot Line.

Whatever peace had been agreed to between France and Germany lasted just a few months, and in 1940 the French army capitulated and the German armies invaded France. The very nationalistic French media kept singing popular songs, taunting Hitler and defying him to come to the Maginot Line, a fortified bunker built between France and Germany and meant to stop the invading German armies. Instead, Hitler’s armies bypassed the front and the Maginot Line, instead crossing undefended Belgium and making their way to Paris.

One day, Rene’s best friend came to our home pale and haggard, and told us that an armistice had been asked by Maréchal Pétain and that France had lost the war. The French government had left Paris and taken refuge in Vichy, and the German forces had invaded France.

The French government retired to Vichy in the center of France under the direction of old Maréchal Pétain and Prime Minister Pierre Laval. Both of them were considered collaborators by the French population because the Vichy government was very accommodating to the occupying German army that imposed all kinds of restrictions on the French. Together with the government, two military academies, St. Cyr and Le Prytanée Militaire, left the occupied zone and installed themselves in military barracks that had been vacated by the French soldiers sent to the front. All the available food had been requisitioned by the Germans and we started having butcher shops selling horse meat which, by the way, was very tasty.

The first German orders were that every Jew in the occupied zone had to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing. The Jews had a curfew and even though we lived in an unoccupied zone, we kept hearing that some of the French population helped the Germans arrest Jews during the night. These poor people were never heard from again.

We also learned from those who were successful in bypassing the Demarcation Line that thousands of Parisian Jews, including children, were rounded up and dropped at the Paris Velodrome d’Hiver and “forgotten” there. Those who survived the cold and exposure were taken to Auschwitz.

We lived in constant fear. We were bombarded by the allies’ planes that were trying to destroy the two French military barracks in our neighborhood, and we feared being awakened during the night to be deported, betrayed by our own compatriots.

We were hungry. Our rations included a single 200- gram piece of bread per day. Of course, we had no eggs, flour, butter, sugar or chocolate. Only horse meat was available, but that also soon disappeared from the shops, being diverted to the occupying troops.

One of the first orders imposed by the German army was a ban on any nationalistic expressions of patriotic songs or military parades in the city. The 14^th of July being France’s Bastille Day, everyone was in suspense anxiously anticipating what the cadets in our city would do considering the Germans’ ban. How would they celebrate France’s Independence Day?

On the 14^th of July 1940, all the cadets from St. Cyr and Le Prytanée military academies, donning their best uniforms, flaunted their disdain and paraded on the city’s boulevards where the German Commandantur had its headquarters. They sang patriotic songs, such as,

Vous avez eu l’Alsace et la Lorraine

Mais malgré tout nous resterons Français

Vous avez eu l’Alsace et la Lorraine

Mais notre coeur vous ne l’aurez jamais.

You got Alsace and Lorraine

But nevertheless we’ll remain French

You got Alsace and Lorraine

But our hearts you’ll never get.

Amazingly, there were no fearsome reprisals or punishments aside from forbidding the cadets from leaving their barracks for a month. There was great joy, as the reprisals could have been extremely severe.

Among the people who succeeded in crossing the demarcation line, one of them stands out in my mind: He was a Hungarian Jew, Mr. Spitzer, who had been living in Paris and was now trying to survive in the unoccupied zone.

He worked as a “plongeur” (dish washer) at a restaurant and used to come to our home for some companionship. In his broken French he told us that one day, as he was coming home from work, he saw his wife and children being taken away in a truck by the Germans. He knew that he was helpless and couldn’t do anything to save them. I was crying and I remember my father saying “Tu vois, tu as fait pleurer my fille.” (You see, you made my daughter cry).

His was hardly an isolated story in those days. We all feared for our lives. We all feared deportation, and worse.

Chapter 3
Hope Can Be A Traitor

By 1942, the Germans extended their occupation to the whole of France, eliminating the Demarcation Line between the two parts of the country. We lived in a part of town that was still unoccupied by the Germans, but that soon became occupied by the Italian army that were allied to Germany. It was slightly less frightening to live under the Italian occupation, but the Germans were still in charge.

We soon learned of the full impact of the Jewish laws imposed by the Germans: All Jews were required to wear a yellow star prominently sewn on their clothing; they could no longer continue in their professions; and were rounded up by the Gestapo and placed in concentration camps. We learned that thousands of Jewish children had been taken from their families and herded in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris, an open stadium, and almost all of them died of cold and exposure. That was the winter of 1940. These news were brought to us by those who had succeeded in escaping the Occupied Zones under terrible risks to their lives and those of their friends and families, as Jews were absolutely forbidden to travel outside those zones. Many of them were caught crossing the Demarcation Line in hay carts drawn by oxen, by swimming across rivers at night or hidden in coal locomotives. Some escapees wound up at our house, and told us horror stories of what was happening in Paris and elsewhere in occupied France, tales of young girls absently walking in the streets of Bordeaux, their yellow stars on their jackets, arrested and never heard of again, or whole families being arrested and deported in the night, or of Drancy, the concentration camp south of Paris where whole families were imprisoned before being deported; or of Jews who jumped from windows in Drancy, terrified at the thought of what was coming at the hands of the Gestapo.

Italy was allied with Germany and Japan, and the Italian troops’ headquarters was located in one of the best hotels on the Boulevard Bancel. Of course, all institutions, schools and universities that could escape the Occupied Zone had now settled in the part of France still free from the enemy. Among those were two Cadet Academies, La Flèche of the Prytanée Militaire and L’Ecole Militaire d’Autun. They settled in the military barracks of the city left empty by the soldiers who had been sent to the front. Every Sunday, these cadets would parade in the streets of Valence singing patriotic songs, and the sight of those young men filled everyone with pride and hope.

Suddenly, however, on November 11, 1942, in spite of the collaboration of the Vichy government of Maréchal Pétain and Prime Minister Laval, advocated allegedly to prevent further German measures against France, all the unoccupied territory of my country became occupied by the Germans, and we all came under their boots. The Jewish laws were immediately imposed and we all had to have new identity cards issued with our photographs taken in profile with the word “Juif” (“Jew”) stamped across them. The Germans had a theory that they could measure Jewish craniums and noses to detect our race. That explained the profile photographs. We all had to wear the yellow Star of David on our clothing, and while we were all frightened to death, we had to remain very unobtrusive. During one of the bombing raids conducted by the allies, while running down to a shelter in the cellar, I recall thinking, I am hungry like everyone else, afraid of the bombs like everyone else, yet I have the extra fear simply because I am Jewish. By that time, Valence was filled with Jewish refugees from the Occupied Zone, and the Germans were already rounding them up, deporting them to unknown destinations.

I am ashamed to think that so many French people betrayed the Jews that were hidden among them, but the majority of the population did not have the heart to bear such barbarism, so the rounding up of the Jews was mostly done at night. In the mornings, we would hear the areas that the Gestapo had hit during the night.

The noose was tightening, and we lived in constant fear. Some nights, my father would barricade the front door as if that would protect us. When my father learned which families were going to be rounded up, he would send messages urging them to flee.

My father made the acquaintance of an Italian officer who recommended that under the circumstances it was safer for us to take refuge in Italy where we would be under il Duce’s protection. How could my father be so naïve as to believe we would be safe under the protection of Mussolini, Hitler’s friend and ally? This officer even gave my father the name and address of his own family who lived in Lunata, a village in the Tuscan countryside of Lucca.

Eventually, my parents settled whatever business they had in Valence, closed their bank account, sold whatever they could and had a last dinner with the rest of our aunts and uncles who chose to remain in France. That sad dinner was held at a nice hotel overlooking the Parc Jouvet, but my sadness kept me from eating, and I cried.

It was the spring of 1943, and I was in high school at the time. I had to say goodbye to my friends and teachers which was heartbreaking because I loved school, loved my teachers and the Girl Scouts.

We were suddenly on a train rushing toward Italy. The train ran south along the Rhône, and after we reached Marseille, the train followed the Mediterranean coast and I saw the sea for the first time in my life. Poetry exploded in my heart at that moment, and I felt hypnotized. All the pain I had felt upon leaving my town, my friends and my school was smoothed over, sublimated in the pure joy I felt at the sight of the sea. When I took leave of my French literature professor, Mlle Bernard, she said, “You are very young but I am sure that of all my students, you will benefit greatly from all the new things you will see, and no matter what you face, your appreciation of beauty will stand you in good stead.” Looking at the sun gloriously shining upon the sea, I was filled with rapture and remembered my professor’s words. It seemed she knew me well.

We met another family of French Jews on that train. One of their sons already knew Italian and coached us on how to respond when we were addressed in Italian and could not understand. We memorized that sentence, repeating it again and again, until we sounded like what we thought were bona fide Italians. The sentence was, “I don’t understand Italian because I am a refugee from France.” We all felt well prepared for our new life in Italy.

Our group consisted of nine family members traveling on that train: my father and mother, my paternal grandmother, my two brothers, René and Jacques, my father’s brother, Uncle Raphael, his wife and son, Sami, and me. We encountered our first difficulty at the Italian border. All nine train tickets had been held by my father. The train did not stop long enough for all of us to disembark, and my father was left behind! None of us spoke Italian, of course, but thankfully the young man who had coached us in the rudiments of refugee responses soon came to our aid.

Thankfully, we were soon reunited with my father, although I do not recall the circumstances. We crossed into Italy on my sixteenth birthday, April 3, 1943. No birthday party for me, but we were all full of hope and dreams, getting into a new promised land.

Our first stop was in Rapallo, a resort town on the Italian Riviera where my father had relatives. They had left their home in Genoa fearing bombardments and attacks by the Fascists and took refuge in their summer home there. Its idyllic and serene beauty revived our hope for a peaceful future. After a few days we continued on our way to Lucca, the closest town in Tuscany, feeling somewhat giddy with hope and our mounting appreciation of the Italian people’s warmth.

We settled in Hotel Albergo Luna on Via Filungo, Lucca’s main central avenue, where its residents dressed up every afternoon around 5 o’clock and proceeded to do their ”passegiata,” a promenade where they slowly walk to see and be seen by their friends and acquaintances.

Meantime the young ones started learning to speak Italian, making many mistakes that the Lucchese people appreciated warmly.

One day, my two brothers and I, along with our cousin, Sami and this new friend we met on the train, decided to rent bicycles and go out riding in the countryside. On the way back, I got separated from the boys and returned to our hotel in Lucca on my own, Lucca being an old medieval town with its narrow streets that would only accommodate one-way traffic. Just as I was entering the main street on my bicycle, all of Lucca’s residents were out for their promenade, and I was trying to ride through the crowd in the direction of our hotel. Soon, I was surrounded by people, all of them speaking to me in Italian. An Italian policeman joined them, gesticulating and holding my bike as he was trying to explain something that I naturally could not understand. I could not see what all the fuss was about, and in desperation, I finally remembered that Italian sentence I was taught on the train, and parrot-like, I sputtered it out. I do not know how my words sounded to them, because the policeman and the crowd exploded in laughter. I cannot remember how I finally got out of my predicament and returned to our hotel.

While we were enjoying this “vacation,” my father was looking for appropriate lodging. He went to see the family of the Italian officer that he had met in France, who showed him a few places to consider. He selected a large double farmhouse in Lunata, a country village where that officer’s family lived. We uprooted once more and moved into one part of that farmhouse, and the farmer, Pasquale, his wife Gina and their son, Pasqualino, lived in the other half of the farmhouse. Our lodgings were very large and comfortable, with room for each one of us.

We slowly started learning the language making mistakes along the way. One afternoon I went with my brothers to buy some castagnaccio, a kind of thin cake made of chestnut flour that was sold in slices, like pizza. As I left the store, I said, “Arrivederci,” (good bye or so long), and everyone laughed. Seeing my surprise, they explained that I should have said, Buona sera (good evening) rather than good bye. In time, I learned the subtleties of the language, and that good byes are for friends and family, while in business, the proper salutation is good day or good evening. So many new things to learn in a new culture. Yet everyone was warm and good natured.

An interesting aside, after we befriended our new neighbors, we learned that we were the first Jews they had ever met! They knew from their church’s teachings that Jews existed, but we were a phenomenon for them. They realized that we were no different from them. They were all Fascists, following Mussolini’s “Fascio” politics, but they remained friendly toward us.

I started looking for a tutor to prepare me to start school in the fall. I was directed to a young lady, Lida, who had just graduated from Pisa University. She started teaching me Italian, literature, history and even Latin that was not taught in the French schools that I had attended.

We became fast friends.