This realization made me think differently about my grandparents’ time in Caudiès and St. Paul. I had always used the words hiding out to describe their time in the Pyrenees, had always, in my childhood nightmares, searched for a place to hide. But now it occurred to me how extremely visible and exposed they—and particularly my grandmother, with her cures for the sick and her unsolicited advice—had been. Now I understood: my grandparents had not survived because they were hidden. They had survived—miraculously—because they were known.
In St. Paul de Fenouillet … I knew the doctor and had made friends with some of the upper-crust citizens. One of them—an elderly lady living in a substantial house on a square surrounded by the important shops; i.e., the center and not too far from the side street where we lived—held sort of a “salon” in her very large front room.… Whoever came for anything to the center [of town] stopped by and in to dispense news, comments, sit down, had a drink, tea or else. I was there almost daily and apparently popular—I believe … her name was a typical one for the region, “Peyralade.” She was important, respected, valuable for advice and help.… It was she who ordered a pair of wool gloves for the gendarme, gave me the wool, afterward said they fitted and were appreciated. When Erna and her roommate at four a.m. were woken up and me to interpret, one new gendarme (apparently) asked about me. I froze, when the other gendarme—I thought later had the gloves I knitted—turned to the questioner and asked: “Is she on the list?” whereupon I was asked my name, not being on the list he was told that they had yet to get elsewhere, and they left with Tante Erna and her roommate.
I had been in Alba just a few weeks, and already the baker knew what kind of bread I bought, the grocer knew the brand of dish soap I preferred, and the man at the newspaper shop knew I read Le Monde and the International Herald Tribune. There were no house numbers in the village, but the postman delivered my letters to me all the same, from the very first day. People in villages are masters of discreet prying. Several times a week I found myself explaining who I was to a total stranger—only to realize halfway through the telling that they knew already and were just seeking confirmation. “Jacoubovitch,” they’d muse, when I mentioned my grandfather’s family name. “Ah, yes, that house by the river. I remember.”
I thought of my own arrival in Alba: Youssef bringing plastic sheeting for my windows; the innkeepers offering me work when they learned I needed money to fix up the house; my neighbors bringing me vegetables from their garden. Perhaps Grandma had wanted a house in a village in the South of France as a kind of insurance policy. If she was capable of sending a jug of kerosene to my mother through the U.S. Postal Service “just in case,” then why not hang on to the house in La Roche for the same reason? Maybe this was the place she’d always intended me to be, so that I, too, could learn to sourrwvive.
It was the summer of 1942.… Under the Vichy Government [the] foreigners [had been] assigned to “forced residencies” under surveillance of the gendarmerie. In [St. Paul,] this small town of 2,000 inhabitants, the largest group resided in its only hotel. Many were old, feeble, and sick.
After the roundup, all were taken to the gendarmerie to await a truck, which would transport them to a destination unknown to the locals. Clever tactic! as many French, though looking benevolently on German rules, nevertheless would shy away from a “final solution,” meaning pure and simple, unadulterated murder. Only the victims knew.
By eight a.m. the collected group was still crowded in the narrow entrance hall of the gendarmerie, sitting on benches, on the floor, or their scanty luggage containing the few essentials they were allowed to take with them. They hadn’t eaten since the day before and were full of apprehension and foreboding. So was I. To allay anxiety and fear I started going from shop to shop begging for food. Most, so approached, gave, some generously. Guilt, pity, powerlessness, shame? Who knows? Some food items we hadn’t seen in ages, traded on the black market and not given out, even when we had rare coupons for them.
To convince a French inhabitant to bring food to the gendarmerie was hopeless, and their warnings that I risked to be equally retained and shipped off if I went were not encouraging. But I did go, ashamed of my fear and heart beating into my throat. The gendarmes, when I arrived, ignored me, looked away, some scanning the road for the expected truck. The misery I saw was difficult to bear, and what could one say? Some women weak and sickish had collapsed or fallen asleep wherever they were, and the air was filled with gloom. At noon the truck had still not arrived. I made a second trip. The atmosphere had become more unbearable.
I learned later that the truck hadn’t come but close to five p.m., when I was on my way for a third visit and had been retained by a gossipy neighbor, which might have saved me. The memory of this day never faded. For a long time during and after the war, I had to deal with “survivor guilt,” and this brief, evanescent, modest act did not count.
On that day in 1942, when the gendarmes arrested Erna and her Polish roommate, they were sent south toward the sea, to the camps France had originally set up to house refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Now they were overcrowded with luckless people for whom both visibility and invisibility had failed: refugees from the north and the east, Jews, Communists, political dissidents, gypsies, homosexuals, and foreigners. The camps had harsh names: Gurs, Argelès, Rivesaltes, Le Barcarès.
When my grandmother delivered food to those awaiting deportation, Erna’s roommate gave her a pale pink damask napkin as thanks, to remember her. At five p.m. she was taken away, most likely to Rivesaltes, where she would have waited no more than a week before being deported to Drancy. Two or three days at most in Drancy, and then to Auschwitz. Of the 41,951 people France deported to Auschwitz in 1942, 784 men survived to the end of the war. And only 21 women.
My mother used the damask napkin every Passover as our matzo cover, doing her sad best to adopt its owner into our family and our memories. I have spent many an hour searching for traces or hints, a way to dredge Erna’s roommate out of the silence, but the French were not assiduous record-keepers. Someday perhaps I will come across a table or a list. In the meantime, she and I will have to make do with this ghost of an echo and the unsatisfactory mantra I remember.
Erna fared better than her roommate, the Polish seamstress. She was not Jewish; she was an Austrian ex-baroness, and a Catholic, and she was not deported as quickly as the other inmates. She was sent to a camp by the sea. Its big rolls of barbed wire looped all the way down to the beach, and conditions were so disorganized that it was easy enough to slip away for a walk. One day Erna was walking near the water when she saw someone on the other side of the fence. He beckoned to her.
When Erna approached, he asked, “Would you like to leave?”
“Yes,” she replied.