So I swept the house, covered the furniture, and turned off the electricity and the water at the mains. Then I shut the door, wondering if I’d ever come back to live there again. I picked up my bags and called for Minus the cat, whom I had adopted, and, just as Julien had predicted several months before, was moving back in with him.
The house wasn’t entirely secure yet. I was still waiting for a new terrace door to replace the one that had rotted away. So every couple of days I’d walk down to La Roche to check that everything was all right. Every time, I’d stare up at the dark walls and feel a strange mix of guilt, surprise, and defeat. Why hadn’t I managed to stay? Why had I ever wanted to? Now that I had left it, the house would retreat right back into bleakness.
I watched my grandparents slip away from me, my grandfather before my very eyes and my grandmother on paper. “I am too tired to write more than a few lines,” she’d tell me. “My hands are shaky—can you read this?” I should have felt a greater sense of urgency. But it was still too much a fairy tale to me, a blend of truth and magic, and though I’d given up on the house in La Roche, I kept sifting through the information I had, convinced that if I brought their stories to life in writing, I would be able to locate the secret password, the magic formula, the right question to unlock their silence.
In my grandmother’s account, the days in December 1942, between her, Armand, and Erna’s departure from St. Paul de Fenouillet and their arrival in Switzerland, were like the dayenus our family said at the Passover seder every year: “It would have been enough for us.” Just like the miracles of the Exodus from Egypt, my grandmother recounted each of the miracles that had enabled them to cross the border as amazing in its own right: the miracle in which my grandmother was helping an old peasant lady in a train station and was passed over during an identity check because the gendarme thought she was the old lady’s daughter; the miracle in which my grandmother recognized the same gendarme checking papers as she was leaving St. Paul with Armand and Erna and got them to run away in time; the miracle in which she and Erna dressed up as prostitutes to get to the convent in Lyon where the nuns were giving out the address of a group of passeurs on the Swiss border; the miracle in which they weren’t arrested in the train because they were sharing a compartment with a Catholic priest; the miracle in which they weren’t arrested on the bus because the police chief was moving that day and had corralled all his men to help him—on and on, over the mountain.
Now I wanted specifics, as if pinpointing their geographical coordinates would help me decipher their feelings.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t say,” my grandfather responded when I asked how exactly he had traveled from St. Paul de Fenouillet to the place where they had crossed into Switzerland.
“You took the train from Lyon.”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“And Gran—weren’t you riding in a train compartment with a priest, so the milice man didn’t check your papers, because he thought you were together?”
He smiled. “Who told you that?”
“My grandmother.”
“Well, we did ride with a priest, yes. But I don’t know whether it did us any good.”
“And where did you take the train to?”
“I couldn’t be certain.”
“And then where did you go?”
He looked vague. “I’m afraid it has escaped my memory.”
“Near the Col de Coux?” I asked hopefully. That was all my grandmother could remember. “The name of the village escapes me now,” she had written me, “but it was near the Col de Coux.”
“Perhaps.” He looked thoughtful. “It’s in a book. I told it to a woman who was writing a book.” He pulled a slim red paperback off the shelf in the dining room and held it up for me to see. It was called Passer en Suisse: Les passages clandestins entre la Haute-Savoie et la Suisse, 1940–44 and featured a pencil drawing of a round-faced and ragged refugee tramping through a barbed-wire fence. Grandpa opened to a chapter called “Les points de passage,” skimmed through it, and then handed the book to me.
The journey, though long, was relatively safe. But it was reserved for the hardy.… Most of the time [refugees], having resorted to taking this route,… found a passeur or “safe” person whose address they knew, without really realizing how difficult the trip would be, or perhaps convinced they’d be able to make it through anyway. Once they had started out, when fatigue began turning to discouragement, they repeated to themselves that it would be foolish to stop now, that the goal was in sight, that their life depended on it. Armand Jacoubovitch told me of his journey. Father Philippe of Les Gets, whose address he had been given in Lyon, took him, his companion, and an Austrian refugee into his care. With the help of two young men from Morzine, they started off toward the Col de Coux:
“We left very early, around six in the morning. The young men hiked an hour or two with us. They explained that we had to hike in a big curve—instead of walking due north, we had to make a big detour to the east, to avoid the patrols. After we had doubled back, we would arrive at the passage. This was in December 1942.”
My grandfather had underlined in pencil the words “young men from Morzine” and put an asterisk beside them. At the bottom of the page, he’d added a footnote of his own: “Constant and Albert BAUD, woodworkers from Morzine.”