Her plea for cultural superiority to save her family strikes an awkward note today, but when she was arrested two years later Michel Epstein clearly thought that, thanks to their influential friends, his wife would be swiftly freed. They managed to exchange a few letters suggesting names of people they hoped would help. But after two days in the local prison Irène was taken to the Pithiviers camp, which by the time she arrived was swollen with arrivals from the Paris round-up. Theodor Dannecker, head of the Jewish section of the SiPo-SD, having promised to deliver a deportation of 40,000 Jews in three weeks, was tightening his grip: no more visits, parcels or releases on health grounds. On Friday 17 July Irène was taken on a dawn convoy to Auschwitz, where, as her biographers put it, ‘she was no longer a novelist, mother, wife, Russian or Frenchwoman: she was just a Jewess’. The journey took two days and on arrival she was marked with a tattoo but not gassed immediately because she was young enough to work. She survived until 19 August when an epidemic of deadly typhus swept through the camp and killed her. She was thirty-nine. Her daughters clung on to the manuscript, not realizing the value of what they had in their possession.
The then three-year-old Renée Wartski, by her own admission ‘an extremely difficult child’, has always known how lucky she was to have survived the round-up. ‘I can still remember the look on my mother’s face when she heard the Paris policeman knock on the door of the concierge and ask for the Jews on the second floor. Normally I would have screamed.’ Renée’s father, a naturalized Frenchman who worked in the leather trade, had emigrated from Poland during the First World War when France encouraged such movement, and was now a prisoner of war in Germany. Her mother Fanny was alone with Renée, her nine-year-old brother Louis and her parents, all squashed into a small apartment in a four-storey building down an alleyway off the Rue de Crimée, an old cobblestoned street with cafés on each corner in the 19th arrondissement. ‘The quick-thinking concierge told the policeman: “They’ve left, sorry, gone out of town.”
“But why are the shutters open then?”
“Oh,” she shrugged convincingly, “you know Jews – strange people – when they leave in a hurry, like that, they don’t think.” But Renée, aware that she owes her life to the loyal concierge, insists on telling me ‘a parallel story, about her mother’s sister Sara, a dressmaker who lived in the north of the city and who was denounced by her concierge and deported ‘even though she had often made clothes for this concierge’s child. Why? I always believed it was just a matter of luck that I was saved and they were not. After my aunt and cousins were taken away the concierge helped herself to all the silver in the flat.’*
In fact, Fanny Wartski had been warned about the upcoming rafle, or round-up, as her younger brother, a violinist, had heard rumours thanks to his best friend in the orchestra, a Catholic. But the family had not acted in time. Now she wasted not a moment and the next day courageously paid a passeur to whom she had been recommended to take her two young children out of Paris as quickly as possible. They were going to live on a farm in the Alps in the free zone. She would follow when she could. Some weeks later Fanny arranged to hide herself in the back of a goods train transporting coal. She heard dogs sniffing for would-be escapers but she survived and, when the family was finally reunited in Grenoble, her face was covered in so much coal dust that relatives teased her: how could she think to put on mascara at a time like this?
It was brave of my mother to trust the passeur as such people sometimes took the money and did not deliver, selling the children on to the Nazis. We could never discuss this at first. Then, when she did manage to talk about it, she would always laugh when she told the story of how we got out. She tried to make light of it by joking about the coal-dust mascara. It was her way of coping.
After the Vél’ d’Hiv round-up, few French people – whether Jews or non-Jews – were left with any illusions about the future. Even Gerhard Heller, after seeing hordes of Jewish children being herded towards cattle trucks at the Gare d’Austerlitz, declared: ‘That day my eyes were definitely opened by the horrors.’ A handful of young French girls training to be nurses were taken to the stadium and witnessed a corner of the human drama but could not begin to comprehend the epic scale of the tragedy. What could they do beyond ladling out soup? Denise Tavernier, a twenty-three-year-old probationer social worker who had just gained her first degree, was so horrified by what she saw that she protested to the chief of police, telling him he should be ashamed to be French. ‘I was threatened with being arrested myself and since no one at the time wanted to hear I kept quiet. But, encouraged by my priest, who told me future generations must know about this, I did write down details of what I saw.’ Eventually, when police archives were opened in the 1980s, Serge Klarsfeld read her comments and, in 2013, Denise Tavernier, aged ninety-four and in poor health, was awarded the Légion d’honneur. Another student nurse, present that day, still cannot talk about it.