I returned to their refugee files, which I had largely neglected the year before, trying to trace their steps in the months following their separation in Switzerland, searching for hints of what had come after.
Each of their files contained a badly photocopied picture of them, looking shadowy and lost. As logical as it was to find their photographs there, I still felt startled and moved when I stumbled upon them, as we all must be when we come across little flashes of the people we love preserved as anonymous figures by hands who never knew them. Mostly, I gleaned useless tidbits, half-personal details, like how much soap my grandparents were allowed each month or that their meal rations didn’t include chocolate. In the hundreds of pages that documented their sojourn to Switzerland, Anna and Armand appeared never to have been in the same place at the same time. I briefly reconsidered my twelve-year-old fancy that they’d never actually met.
The bulk of the pages consisted of entry and exit notices with dates and the innocuous-sounding names—Victoria, Bristol, Régina—of the empty resort hotels that had been converted into refugee lodgings for the duration of the war. Any list on which my grandparents had appeared was included in their dossiers. As a result, there were pages and pages of names: names of those to be sent from one camp to another, names of those given leave for a day, names of those released to attend school, to work in the fields, to participate in classes and conferences. I imagined the galaxy of memories that accompanied each name, and I hoped each one had a person like me attached to it, scrambling to remember, to stitch together a story before it was too late. I began to feel dizzy with all the remembering.
In Geneva, I tried sounding out my grandfather about life in the refugee camps.
“What is there to say? Mine was hardly an interesting case.”
When I prodded him, he admitted, “It was prison. There was hard labor. Slave labor, almost. In the fields all day …” He trailed off, shook his head.
“But you weren’t there very long, were you? Wasn’t there a program that helped you go back to school?”
“Of course, yes, there were good people,” Grandpa amended. “I remember one woman, a social worker in one of my camps, telling me that if I asked to go to church, they had to let me out.”
“Did you?”
“I’ll never forget the sermon the priest gave.”
“You actually went to church? Why didn’t—” I wanted to ask why he didn’t spend his free time elsewhere, but Grandpa cut me off.
“Of course, what else would I have done? We were prisoners. They were monitoring us.” He looked around him as if that were still the case. “But the priest—he had white hair and very big blue eyes, and he leaned over his pulpit and shook his finger at the congregation and said, ‘If you imagine that you are worth more than the others because the war has spared you, you are wrong.’ ”
My grandfather stopped. I saw he was weeping and reached across the table for his hand, something I never would have dared to do before his fading memory softened him.
“Did you ever get out to do anything else?” I persisted, when he had put away his handkerchief.
“To do what? You couldn’t just leave, you know.”
“Did you write to anyone? Did you have contact with anyone?”
He shook his head. “I had no one in Switzerland. Some very distant cousins in Zurich, but they had never been in contact with us, so I gave up on the idea of going to see them.”
For my part, I gave up on being circumspect and took the plunge. “Did you ever see my grandmother? Did you write to her?”
Instantly, my grandfather’s face darkened. “How could I?” he asked, incensed. “Where would I have gotten a pen or paper?” He stood up, and briefly I thought he was going to storm out of the room. “All of this has been written about before. I’ve already answered these questions. Just a moment.” He walked into his sitting room and returned with a stack of books about Swiss refugee policy, Swiss economic policy during the war, and Swiss collaborationism.
“Is there anything about you in these books?”
Silently, Grandpa pointed to one of them, and I opened it to a page he’d marked:
In Arisdorf, corruption reigned in the camp: the refugees realized the milk was being skimmed and that very little meat reached them. M. Ja. was charged by his comrades with protesting these dishonest acts.
“Monsieur Ja. is you?”
He nodded. This was the first indication I’d seen that my grandfather had had any kind of status or engaged in any positive action in the refugee camps; he’d only ever spoken of his experiences in vague, pessimistic terms. “So you were a rabble-rouser,” I teased, smiling.
He smiled, too. “I’m not sure you could say that. I was just better at putting things into words than the other chaps were.”
“So you did have access to pen and paper?”
He shrugged. “I suppose so, yes.”
“So did you write to my grandmother?”
The offended look returned. “How could I have? How could I possibly have known where she was?” I let it go, wondering whether he was rebuffing me because he didn’t want to talk about it or because he actually couldn’t remember.
My grandmother was as voluble as my grandfather was taciturn about her experiences in refugee camps. She’d written pages and pages about her life during that time, pages I’d once set aside because my grandfather was not mentioned in them. Returning to those essays now, I had to admit to myself that I’d also discarded them because they described something I thought of as “after,” a time she was already “safe.” I felt ashamed of how conditioned I’d been by all the Holocaust literature I’d read, slightly horrified to realize that I had, unwittingly, neglected this period of her life for the spectacular and semiapocalyptic moments closest to oblivion, memories she barely could bring herself to recall.
Despite what they now claimed, my grandparents would have been able to keep in touch through Ria’s family, who could have forwarded their letters. Reading my grandmother’s vivid essays, I wondered if she’d sent similar accounts to my grandfather. I wondered if he’d felt jealous of her status as a camp physician, or jealous of her camps, which were, on the whole, more comfortable than his.