“I learned to use a shovel. I dug ditches. I mixed mortar.” He held out his hands, which were still, even in old age, thick and strong. “I got calluses.” We inspected his hands. “But they gave us special titles as compensation: I got to be a technicien des ponts et chaussées.” He pointed his nose in the air as he said it, and the whole room pulled itself up around us in mock pomposity. “Bridge and roadway technician, if you please.
“And one day I was working on the road,” Grandpa made a shoveling motion, “and I saw a very tall man coming toward me, with white hair, very striking. There was something so striking about him that I dropped my shovel and walked up to him, holding my hand out like this.” My grandfather reached out and shook my hand, conveying a young man’s shy admiration.
“Then what happened?”
“Well, I introduced myself, and he introduced himself. He said his name was Otto Freundlich, and he was a painter. We got to be friends. We—I would go and see them quite often, him and his wife, and sometimes they would reciprocate. He gave me the painting—they had destroyed all his paintings, and he was trying to repaint them all.”
“They had destroyed his paintings?”
“They said he was a degenerate artist.”
“What happened to him?”
“Someone denounced him. And they sent him to Maidanek.”
Silence. We went back to the dining room, away from the silence, away from the book and its hidden memory.
“From Caudiès we went to St. Paul de Fenouillet,” my grandmother wrote. “A market town with shops, a doctor, and some nice houses as well as a hotel from where the refugees were lined up for the extermination camps later, and rentals.” They lived in two locations in St. Paul: first, in the winter of 1940, a small room with an open hearth and an iron tripod for cooking, and then, by spring of 1941, a second-floor apartment in a house with a garden for raising food and rabbits, cold running water, a woodstove for heating and cooking, and two upstairs neighbors: “Tante Erna [and] an awfully nice and (Polish) excellent seamstress-tailor. Armand worked at the Cooperative, which allotted agronomic and viticultural products … for the region.”
Erna, circa 1947.
I knew Erna as my grandmother’s best friend and my mother’s godmother, whom we used to visit in St. Gallen, Switzerland, before she died of kidney cancer when I was twelve. When my mother and her brother spent time with their father in Geneva as children, Armand would put them on the train to St. Gallen to visit Erna, and then she would put them on the train back to Geneva. That was about all the contact he could bear with Erna, who was too close to my grandmother for his taste. Once Erna had asked him why he refused to speak to my grandmother. “She talks too much,” he’d declared, and stormed off.
On my next visit to Geneva, I asked, “What other work did you do during the war, after you were demobilized? Did you spend the whole time working on the roads?”
“No—only that first spring in St. Paul de Fenouillet.”
“Grandma—my grandmother—said you worked in an agricultural cooperative,” I ventured.
“Did she?” Grandpa’s face took on its dangerous look, and I regretted having mentioned her. “I did. I was even the nominal head of the cooperative. But do you know the thing about the agricultural cooperative?”
I shook my head, no.
“I was its only member. Its only employee.” His tone had become supercilious, aggressive. “So you see it couldn’t last.”
This didn’t make sense to me, but I was afraid to pursue the subject further. “What else did you do?”
“This and that. Whatever I could. I worked in a workshop that made nuts and bolts. I made brooms, for a traveling broom salesman. He was supposed to bring us the materials, which we paid a small price for, and then come back and collect the brooms, to sell them, and then bring us the money.” He smiled ruefully. “But as you can imagine, he didn’t. Then for a while I had work as an accountant with a merchant who sold a lot of things on the black market—ham, and chocolate, and so on—which he never shared with us, of course. But times were very hard, you know. He couldn’t keep me on. Or so he said.”
“Did my grandmother work?”
“No. She didn’t have a job. She stayed home,” he said dismissively, standing up. “She went looking for food, she worked in the garden, took care of the rabbits, she kept the house. I don’t know. I’m going to make some tea. Would you like some?”
“Yes please.” My grandmother had described that second apartment to me:
Our furniture consisted of a kitchen table, two chairs, and a small chest for the very few cooking utensils, cutlery, and dishes we possessed. Much was kept in boxes. In our bedroom, we had a somewhat larger than a single bed and the second room held our clothes suspended on strings or kept in suitcases. We also stored supplies there of whatever we could get as food shortages grew daily.
Grandma spent endless hours looking for food, sometimes biking a whole day’s journey into the mountains, only to return with a single egg for dinner. Her new place had a garden and room for rabbit cages, which eased their hunger a little. Just as important, it offered companionship in the form of those upstairs neighbors. My grandmother’s friendship with Erna ultimately would save my grandparents’ lives, but in the spring of 1941 in St. Paul, Grandma already felt it was a godsend. Despite (or perhaps because of) the presence of my grandfather, her loneliness must have been colossal, having fled her position in Hauteville and been stripped of the legal right to practice medicine, her one great calling.
Then their landlord found a wild baby rabbit and brought it home.
I sort of fell in love with this tiny creature and proposed to take it in and [see] if it could be tamed. I found a feeding bottle and rubber nipple and fed it first milk, which it sucked well, adding gradually grasses and twigs for its growing teeth. It grew and got fat. We named it Zigomar. I invented the name because the sounds pleased me.… Zigomar became tame, following, looking at us, as if he knew who we were and playful. We kept him strictly in the kitchen …[which] became too restricted, and he tried to escape each time the … door was opened. Thus he met a premature and accidental death when he somehow slipped under a moving foot and was crushed. We truly mourned him.
My grandfather called me from the kitchen.
“Would you mind coming in here?”
“Of course not.” An acrid smell of burnt plastic hung in the air, and I went to open the window. Grandpa held up his electric teakettle. “Something happened to it—it doesn’t work anymore.” The bottom of the kettle had melted into a ghoulish smile. “See,” he put it on the little three-burner gas stovetop in his kitchen, “when I put it on the stove, there’s the strangest smell—”
“Grandpa, don’t!” I exclaimed. I pulled the kettle off the flame.
“What’s wrong?”
“It—it doesn’t work anymore. Why don’t we go out and get you a new one?” I placed the metal cover on the stovetop and switched off the gas, and then we put on our jackets and took the elevator down to the lobby. “Shall we walk or take the bus?” I queried as we stepped outside.