Some of the wartime schemes to save children had been ingenious and risky, but few had been without consequences, which were now unravelling. María Errázuriz, cousin of Jacques Tartière and now friend of Drue, his widow, had worked closely with Abbé Henri-Fran?ois Ménardais, the parish priest of Chalmaison just outside Paris, who was deeply involved in the effort to save Jews. He hid whole families in his presbytery, at the orphanage at Chalmaison and at the Chateau de Tachy there, where nuns from the Fondation Eugène Napoléon resided after their Paris home had been requisitioned by the Germans. Ménardais, a frequent visitor to the Rothschild Hospital, also worked closely with social worker Claire Heymann. They would meet surreptitiously at the opera, where Ménardais was, usefully, chaplain to the ballet dancers, known as les Petits Rats de l’Opéra, and there he would give Heymann dozens of signed baptism certificates that she could use to reclassify Jewish children. He even entrusted Jewish children to some Public Aid orphanages, where they would stay until the war’s end, as he believed (correctly) that no one would think of looking for Jewish children among gentile orphans. In this way Ménardais saved more than 200 Jewish children from the Nazis during the Occupation. But what was to be done with them all now? Some, like Arlette Reiman, had gone regularly to church and learned to say mass, but while profoundly grateful to their Christian saviours they nonetheless still felt Jewish. Others, mostly younger Jewish orphans who had been baptized for their safety during the war, now faced complicated futures, as some Christian institutions argued that, if the mothers had had their children baptized, this was obviously because they wanted them brought up in the Christian faith.
Baronne Edouard de Rothschild, née Germaine Halphen, not without experience in dealing with parentless children, took control of the Rothschild Orphanage immediately after the war when it was transferred to the Chateau de la Guette, a Rothschild property in Villeneuve just outside Paris, where children had been living since 1939. Some children were still being reunited with lost families even in 1947, a situation charged with trauma given the ordeals that the survivors had endured. Little professional help was available in this desperate and unprecedented state of affairs where nobody knew which was the right or wrong way to behave. Many parents maintained a stubborn silence, thinking that to repress their memories was best for the child, others made emotional demands on the child to have their sufferings recognized. Vivette Samuel had found during the Occupation that one of her most daunting tasks had often been having to ask for written consent from parents interned at one of the French camps, such as Gurs, to remove their child, believing this was the child’s only chance of survival. Now one of the most difficult problems was remembering the promises made to those parents to have their children raised in a Jewish setting, whether during the war or, if the parents did not survive, afterwards, when she knew this might involve a new separation, ‘an emotional laceration just as they had found a new serenity. Did we care enough not to traumatize the children again, especially the youngest ones, who had been placed in families that they had emotionally adopted and that hoped to keep them?’ Where possible they compromised by keeping the child in the family with the assurance that the child’s identity would be preserved. But the problem for children who had been placed in convents was more complex, as some had had themselves baptized and converted. ‘Certainly they had been saved and that was the essential thing.’ But Samuel recognized that families, however well meaning, were not always the best place for traumatized children in this tragic dilemma:
Paradoxically, it was possible for children raised in institutions to find differentiated, often beneficial, role models – thanks to their being surrounded by teachers of diverse political or religious allegiance, thanks to the friendship of their peers and also thanks to the efforts made to give them the greatest opportunity possible on the material, educational and moral planes. They shared the same past as the other children of the institution and adapted to that environment better than to families that had sheltered other children.
For some, having remnants of a family survive created its own difficulties. Rosa Liwarrak, aged thirteen in 1946 when she came back to Paris, was now an orphan and still a child in many ways. But she was also a young woman with both a mind of her own and a Catholic stepmother. She had been several times to the Lutetia looking, in vain, for her father. Now she had to continue with her schooling, paid for by OSE. But she was, by her own admission, a disruptive and aggressive child, thrown out of two schools. She recalls being taken by an aunt to a rabbi with the intention of converting her back to Judaism. ‘But when he told me all the things I could not do, like switch on a light on the Sabbath because I might offend God, I said to him: “You are telling me I lost all my family in a gas chamber and now mustn’t switch on a light in case I offend God?” I pushed my finger into his fat belly button and ran out in disgust.’ Today, while acknowledging the role both Catholicism and Judaism have played in her life, she feels ambivalent about all religion.
Rosa, having been born in France just as her parents had arrived in the country from Germany, thought of herself as French. But many of the lost children, the impoverished offspring of east European tailors, knitters, miners and tinkers who had sought sanctuary in France, had never been accepted by that country and had known only fear, exile, hunger, loss and ultimately abandonment or death. How, asked Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar in her painful post-war memoir, can you ever make these children ‘normal’? How to give them the childhood they never had? How to stop them regarding adults as enemies, for it was adults who had crushed their parents?