For the better part of the next week, Hannah and her team toiled under conditions of strict operational security. Potential participants were quietly approached, arms were twisted, donors were tapped. Two of Hannah’s most reliable sources of funding demurred, for like the minister of the interior they thought it better to not jeter de l’huile sur le feu—throw oil on the fire. To make up for the shortfall, Hannah had no choice but to dip into her personal finances, which were considerable. This, too, was fodder for her enemies.
Lastly, there was the small matter of what to call Hannah’s endeavor. Rachel Lévy, head of the center’s publicity department, thought blandness and a trace of obfuscation would be the best approach, but Hannah overruled her. When synagogues were burning, she said, caution was a luxury they could not afford. It was Hannah’s wish to sound an alarm, to issue a clarion call for action. She scribbled a few words on a slip of notepaper and placed it on Rachel’s cluttered desk.
“That should get their attention.”
At that point, no one of any consequence had agreed to attend—no one but a gadfly American blogger and cable television commentator who would have accepted an invitation to his own funeral. But then Arthur Goldman, the eminent historian of anti-Semitism from Cambridge, said he might be willing to make the trip down to Paris—provided, of course, that Hannah agreed to put him up for two nights in his favorite suite at the Crillon. With Goldman’s commitment, Hannah snared Maxwell Strauss from Yale, who never passed up an opportunity to appear on the same stage as his rival. The rest of the participants quickly fell into place. The director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum signed on, as did two important memoirists of survival and an expert on the French Holocaust from Yad Vashem. A novelist was added, more for her immense popularity than her historical insight, along with a politician from the French far right who rarely had a kind word to say about anyone. Several Muslim spiritual and community leaders were invited to attend. All declined. So, too, did the interior minister. Alain Lambert broke the news to Hannah personally.
“Did you really think he would attend a conference with so provocative a title?”
“Heaven forbid your master ever do anything provocative, Alain.”
“What about security?”
“We’ve always looked after ourselves.”
“No Israelis, Hannah. It will give the entire affair a bad odor.”
Rachel Lévy issued the press release the next day. The media were invited to cover the conference; a limited number of seats were made available to the public. A few hours later, on a busy street in the Twentieth Arrondissement, a religious Jew was set upon by a man with a hatchet and gravely wounded. Before making his escape, the assailant waved the bloody weapon and shouted, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya-Yahud!” The police were said to be investigating.
For reasons of both haste and security, a period of just five busy days separated the press release from the start of the conference itself. Consequently, Hannah waited until the last minute to prepare her opening remarks. On the eve of the gathering, she sat alone in her library, a pen scratching furiously across a yellow legal pad.
It was, she thought, an appropriate place to compose such a document, for the library had once been her grandfather’s. Born in the Lublin district of Poland, he had fled to Paris in 1936, four years before the arrival of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. On the morning of July 16, 1942—the day known as Jeudi Noir, or Black Thursday—French police officers carrying stacks of blue deportation cards arrested Isaac Weinberg and his wife, along with nearly thirteen thousand other foreign-born Jews. Isaac Weinberg had managed to conceal two things before the dreaded knock at the door: his only child, a young son named Marc, and the van Gogh. Marc Weinberg survived the war in hiding, and in 1952 he managed to reclaim the apartment on the rue Pavée from the French family who had settled into it after Jeudi Noir. Miraculously, the painting was precisely where Isaac Weinberg had left it, hidden under the floorboards of the library, beneath the desk where Hannah now sat.
Three weeks after their arrest, Isaac Weinberg and his wife were deported to Auschwitz and gassed upon arrival. They were just two of the more than 75,000 Jews from France who perished in the death camps of Nazi Germany, a permanent stain on French history. But could it ever happen again? And was it time for the 475,000 Jews of France, the third-largest Jewish community in the world, to pack their bags and leave? This was the question Hannah had posed in the title of her conference. Many Jews had already abandoned France. Fifteen thousand had immigrated to Israel during the past year, and more were leaving every day. Hannah, however, had no plans to join them. Regardless of what her enemies might say, she considered herself French first and Jewish second. The idea of living somewhere other than the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris was abhorrent to her. Still, she felt duty-bound to warn her fellow French Jews of the gathering storm. The threat was not yet existential. But when a building is burning, Hannah wrote now, the best course of action is to find the nearest exit.
She finished a first draft shortly before midnight. It was too strident, she thought, and perhaps a bit too angry. She softened its roughest edges and added several depressing statistics to bolster her case. Then she typed it into her laptop, printed a copy, and managed to find her bed by two. The alarm woke her at seven; she drank a bowl of café au lait on the way to the shower. Afterward, she sat before her vanity in a toweling robe, staring at her face in the mirror. Her father, in a moment of brutal honesty, had once said of his only daughter that God had been generous when giving her brains but parsimonious with her looks. Her hair was wavy and dark and streaked with gray that she had allowed to encroach without resistance. Her nose was prominent and aquiline, her eyes were wide and brown. It had never been a particularly pretty face, but no one had ever mistaken her for a fool, either. At a moment like this, she thought, her looks were an asset.