Some survivors managed to continue living, often responding by creating a family, writing books or teaching. Although for decades there seemed to be no appetite for hearing their stories, by the 1980s that had changed markedly. There was a hunger to hear them before the generation that had lived through such evil and terror died out. One of the last films made by the celebrated French film director Fran?ois Truffaut – and one of his most successful financially and critically – was Le Dernier Métro (1980), based on the story of Marcel Leibovici and Margaret Kelly, whose Bluebell dance troupe had enjoyed great success in postwar Paris. One of the screenwriters was Jean-Claude Grumberg who, as a child, had also known the fear of being hidden because he owed his own survival to his mother’s brave decision to hand him and his small brother to a passeuse for an unknown destination.
In the attenuated legacy of the Second World War, many reputations were created and destroyed, but occasionally fame came too late for those being celebrated. In 1942, when the novelist Irène Némirovsky was deported, she was a successful and moderately well-known writer in France but little known outside. Two months later, after her husband, Michel Epstein, had also been arrested, the family’s two daughters, thirteen-year-old Denise and five-year-old Elisabeth, were briefly picked up but released again, thanks to a German officer who noticed a resemblance to his own daughter. ‘He told Julie, our governess: “we’re not going to take the children this evening. Go home. We’ll come for them tomorrow morning.” The governess took the hint. She got in touch with her brother, who was in the resistance, and we were hidden.’
Miraculously, they took with them a small suitcase with clothes and personal mementoes, including some manuscripts filled with minuscule handwriting. ‘I did not know what it was, but I knew it was precious to mother,’ Denise said later. But the girls put the case away and did not read the contents. They survived the next few years thanks to the courageous actions of a teacher, friends and Julie, who arranged for the girls to be hidden in convents and safe houses until after the war, when they realized that both their parents had been killed. Like many others, they got on with their lives and raised families until, in 1992, the younger daughter, Elisabeth Gille, published an imagined biography of her mother entitled Le Mirador, for which she used some of the letters found in the suitcase. There are differing accounts and dates as to precisely when the daughters realized the manuscript existed. But the writer Myriam Anissimov, approached by Denise because she knew Romain Gary who had known Némirovsky, was one of the first in the French literary world who saw the hidden notebooks and, realizing they contained an incomplete novel, suggested publication. The reception was ecstatic. Némirovsky’s harrowing and tragic fate, and the story of how the unfinished work had remained hidden for years in the suitcase, may have contributed to the publicity, but the book, Suite Fran?aise, was hailed as a masterpiece and has since been translated into dozens of languages. Suddenly, Irène Némirovsky was described as a literary genius and compared to Balzac and Tolstoy, her success crowned by the 2004 award of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, never before awarded posthumously.
In 2014 a film was made of Suite Fran?aise, bringing her work to a still wider public and helping to show the complex web of what had had to be done to survive. But it also revived arguments about Némirovsky’s own blindness to anti-Semitism in France until it was too late; and discussions around whether or not the old-established Jews of Paris had sacrificed the interests and lives of immigrant (or so-called ‘foreign’) Jews in order to safeguard those of native-born French citizens – a discomfiting argument which risks overlooking who the real enemy was.
Walking around Paris today, one is assailed not only by memorials honouring the role of brave resisters, but also by a number of plaques which finally admit that the French state itself was responsible for taking some Jewish children to their deaths. One of the first in this vein was unveiled on 16 July 1995 at the Gare d’Austerlitz, for the Jews arrested in the Vél’ d’Hiv round-up, the same day that President Chirac made his important speech accepting state responsibility for the Vél’ d’Hiv tragedy. There are street names that honour those who gave their lives in the fight against the Nazis: Avenue Georges Mandel and Place Hélène Berr are just two among myriad others.