The Reiman family lived not far away in the Rue du Temple when the police came for them – mother Malka, and daughters Madeleine, eleven, and Arlette, nine. Their father had already been arrested and taken to Pithiviers. ‘“Don’t worry,” he always told us, “don’t be afraid. This is the land of freedom, of Voltaire and Rousseau.”‘ And so it had been until 1940. Abraham Reiman, born in Poland, had built up a successful furrier business and married his childhood sweetheart, Malka, in France in 1929. For ten years the Reimans had enjoyed a bourgeois existence with car, housekeeper and total freedom for the young children to run around in the area meeting friends. When Abraham was arrested in 1941, the enterprising Malka managed to get herself and the girls to Pithiviers and, thanks to the efforts of a kind and sympathetic local French policeman, who arranged for them to stay at his home, they saw Abraham and gave him a parcel of food and clothes. Notwithstanding, in June 1942 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed.
But this time, back in Paris, there was nothing Malka could do. ‘I remember my mother shouting and screaming at the police who came to our door and throwing furniture at them. They told us to prepare food and drink for three days. “How ridiculous,” my mother replied. “What can we take? As Jews we are barely allowed to buy any food.”‘ Arlette remembers every detail about that hot and humid day, especially how the concierge was watching as the four families in their apartment block left.
Once at the stadium, the situation deteriorated dramatically.
The stench was appalling, unimaginable. You could barely breathe. There was nothing to eat or drink, the few toilets that were in use were quickly blocked, some people were throwing themselves off the top of the wall to commit suicide and women who had their periods were walking around with blood pouring down their legs. I thought these women were dying and had been murdered. I clung to my mother, berating her, ‘Where is Zola now and where is Rousseau?’ I thought these were real friends of my father’s and that they would come and help us. But adults had lied to me. That is what stays in my mind.
There were other heart-wrenching testimonies of children saying a final goodbye to parents they would never see again, some who went mad and behaved violently. When condensation started dripping from the roof one mother was heard to tell her child this was God’s tears.
Irène Némirovsky was arrested on 13 July, likewise as part of the Spring Wind operation. French gendarmes came to the house the family had recently rented in the heart of Issy-l’Evêque. Everyone in the village knew that the Epsteins were Jewish long before they had seen them wearing a yellow star (only Elisabeth, the youngest daughter, was exempt), despite the fact that the Epsteins regularly attended Sunday mass and that their daughter Denise had had her first communion in the local church. The two gendarmes who came for Irène were polite, gave her enough time to pack a small suitcase with essential toiletries and offered her a chance to say another goodbye to her daughters. She declined, saying ‘one adieu is enough’, and left behind the manuscript of the great unfinished epic she was working on at the time, written in tiny, spidery handwriting on the paper that was becoming increasingly hard to come by. As she had prophetically told her publisher two days previously, ‘I have written a great deal lately. I suppose they will be posthumous works but it still makes the time go by.’ They were her last words as a writer.
The book, Suite Fran?aise, was intended as a symphony with four or five sections. The completed two, ‘Storm in June’ and ‘Dolce’, are brilliantly nuanced evocations of how the war was damaging the lives of ordinary people; they show a writer who had developed a deep understanding of humanity, not always visible in her earlier works. Irène by this time seems to have had no illusions about her own fate, the last two years having taken their toll on whatever optimism she may have had in 1940 when she wrote to Marshal Pétain ‘with respect and sometimes even with veneration’. She had asked him to grant her special status, having lived in France for more than twenty years, insisting, ‘I cannot believe, Sir, that no distinction is made between the undesirable and the honourable foreigners, those who have done everything possible to deserve the royal welcome France has given them.’