Hitler Made Me a Jew Read online

  My job was to set the table. Jeannette, the daughter of Maria and Emile was about one year older than I. She was like my sister and we were to share the job but she could say “No” and she never set the table. It made me mad, but no one paid attention to the injustice of it.

  In 1938, the summer when I was seven-and-one-half, I was sent to a public summer camp on the Cote d’Azur. I remember waiting on line in the sun with crowds of children and hearing muffled sounds around me. Then I woke up in a white room with nuns in immaculate white uniforms smiling down on me. I was in the hospital of Saint Raphael and they said, “Thank God, you’re alive!” I had had une angine diphterique. It was very serious, and I had been very sick for ten days.

  I was thinking I was alone and perhaps going to die when my door opened and a tall man walked in. He was wearing very short shorts and thick leather sandals, and looked like a cave man with long curly hair on his bare chest. The nuns seemed alarmed at his wild looks. He was Achilles’s husband, Charles Navel, a poet who also wrote books about his experiences as a manual laborer. Achilles and Charles were friends of the Cité and visited almost every weekend. My mother was very fond of Achilles who was also a writer. She had studied Russian and loved to practice it with my mother. They were Socialists. My parents had asked Charles to go see me in the hospital. I was very happy with his visit and pleased to show the nuns that I had not been abandoned, after all.

  Sometimes, my mother worked in Paris, selling trinkets at a street market. Then Annie, who lived in the Cité with her husband Marcelot, took over the cooking job of my mother and also took care of me and helped me with my homework. No one had asked her to take care of me, but it was customary for whoever was home to take care of the children. Annie was not as fast a cook as my mother. I sat with her in the kitchen and helped her peel vegetables, and she talked to me as if I were a grownup. I liked that. She told me the gossip, listened to my complaints, and was always on my side, even if I was wrong.

  Annie and Marcelot were newly married and they kissed all the time. Everyone teased them about it. She had just arrived from a farm in Normandy, she used to tell me about how they did things back home. She thought Dr. Carton was weird, coucou as they say in French, but it was not up to her to criticize him, she would add. She, however, craved real food and a glass of good ordinary red wine. Marcelot was a carpenter. He made me an oak desk when I was nine. He had designed the desk himself. It was modern with a cobalt blue linoleum top. It was one of his best pieces and when I had to leave the Cité, Marcelot took the desk back.

  Jean was our neighbor on the first floor landing. He was thirty and married Guida shortly after we arrived. He also had had tuberculosis. Guida was perfect for him, everyone said, because she was a nurse. She was a foreigner and talked like my parents with an accent. Jean was tall and lanky. He was a civil servant in the city hall of an adjacent locality and spent a good deal of time in his room because he needed a lot of rest. I visited him often, and I became the first member of the children’s club he was organizing. Jean had a gigantic table in his room with electric trains on it. These could be made to race and one could place bets on them. It was a very elaborate setup with miniature buildings and elevators and cars and light signals which all were operated with electricity. Its countryside was filled with tiny farms and animals, rivers, lakes, a cascade and mountains. Jean was constantly adding diminutive objects to this train table and embellishing its panorama.

  When Jean was feeling well, he went to Paris with his trains to raise money for the

  Party. His stand was always the most popular because people loved to gamble at his table. Jean wanted me to recruit young people my age about nine or ten-years-old to join the club. It was not easy, most of my friends had things to do on Sundays. The only children willing to come to the meetings of the club were the poor ones. They didn’t mind coming for the food, but they were not dependable, and they dropped out quickly when we had to work hard. They were not as loyal and devoted to Jean as I was.

  I attended all the meetings of Jean’s club. Sometimes I was the only one present. But Jean and I didn’t mind: Jean made me feel a part of something important. We collected money for the Spanish refugees from the Spanish Revolution. I thought the civil war in Spain was terrible and I felt bad for the people who had had to leave because of a dictator like Franco. Guida, his wife, was tolerant and patient but sometimes she had enough with Jean’s trains and his club members. She would tell me to go to my room because she needed to be on her own. That meant we had to stop the meeting.

  Maimaine was my best friend. Her name was short for Germaine. I was called Nana short for Nadia. We met in school the first day I arrived in Chatenay, and we were inseparable from that time on. We knew how to please grownups, how to be polite and say “Oui, Madame” but then do as we pleased. We were naughty and got away with it. We rang doorbells in the street and ran as fast as we could to hide. No one ever suspected the good little girls that we feigned to be. We were always ready to laugh hysterically at anything.

  We were both short and the best students in the class. Madeleine who was Maimaine’s sister was a teacher. She helped Maimaine with her homework. She was more qualified than Annie who helped me with mine. Maimaine and I took turns at being the first in the class, la première. Class rank was important for us in school, but we competed with good humor. I loved going to Maimaine’s big stone house. Her father was the plumber in Chatenay. He knew everybody, and he smelled of wine, grease and soap. He thought I was funny, so as soon as I saw him, I was funny, and I loved him for making me say funny things without my even thinking about saying them.

  Maimaine’s mother was a great cook. I ate my first pigeon with tiny green peas cooked with lettuce in her kitchen. There I could eat all the forbidden foods listed by Dr. Carton that we didn’t eat in our house: dry garlic sausages, small pickles in vinegar and mustard.

  Maimaine told me she liked coming to my house because she liked seeing the weird people in short pants, and she liked the grated raw carrots and sprouted wheat germ we ate—strange foods in those days when the French considered green salads food for rabbits.

  Once we played hooky and went to a movie in Sceaux. It was thrilling to be where we were not supposed to be. I was sure we would meet people who would recognize us. However, nothing happened.

  A day came when Maimaine suddenly stopped playing with me. She was hiding something, and it tortured me. Later I saw her with Monique, a girl from our class that we didn’t like, but I remembered that Maimaine had said, “Isn’t Monique’s brother cute?” She had begun to like boys before I did. I felt betrayed and forsaken.

  Around that time, I misbehaved in school and got a zero in conduct on my report card. I signed the card myself thinking that no one would know the difference, but to my astonishment it didn’t work. They made a fuss in school, and I was ashamed and ridiculed. Later Marcel teased me for many years about having signed so badly. The incident also embarrassed my parents, and I felt regretful. After that I was careful to tell the truth.

  Monsieur Richet was both our art teacher and the Mayor of Chatenay. Whatever picture I drew, he picked it and put it on the board to show the class what he was trying to have them do. I didn’t take drawing very seriously and I didn’t know why he liked my pictures that much. If I met the Mayor in the street, he always said “Hello” and introduced me to his friends as une artiste de grand talent. The art teacher who replaced him when I was promoted to the next class was also very amiable, and my good fortune in art class continued. This teacher was a very tall lady with hair the color of a lion’s mane. She asked me to make invitation cards for her, and she gave me money to buy a box of paints. I felt privileged and successful.

  Once we had to make a mural of the French Revolution for school, and I was put in charge. I loved the French Revolution. I liked the idea of the poor people rising up to liberate the Bastille. We made stick figures with round faces and detailed clothing for the crowd. And although I felt sorr
y for Marie Antoinette who was guillotined, I enjoyed drawing her fancy dress.

  I began to like and use geometry in drawings when we had to compose friezes to decorate the top of our page each school day, below an ethical saying like why we shouldn’t gossip or steal.

  In Chatenay, people scorned the way we lived in the collective. We were considered revolutionary and dangerous. I realized this only after I had a fight with the girl whose grandparents lived next door to us. We were exchanging words in the schoolyard when she screamed to me Va avec tes couche tout nus which in English meant, “Go with your people who sleep naked,” a reference to our being nudists. I was shocked. I said I dare you to repeat that and she repeated what she said with great pleasure, in a loud voice in front of everybody. “I am going to tell your grandmother,” I said outraged. And she said “Go ahead, that is what she calls you, les couche tout nus, see if I care.” I was dumbfounded. Then I dared everyone to follow me. I would go to face her grandmother myself and hear this insult. I raised my arm as if I were to assault the Bastille. I was sure the grandmother would back me up, and I was going to show this nasty girl how stupid and mean she was. Imagine my mortification when the grandmother sweetly said to me, “Listen, Nana, isn’t it true that you sleep in the nude?” I was so stupefied and humiliated I couldn’t answer. Anyway it was true, we did sleep in the nude.

  Before the war had begun around the end of 1938, the French police came to our house and arrested my father, Marcel and several other of the men. They were accused of having typed a Communist leaflet on my father’s typewriter. My father was rarely at home my mother told the police, and he was not a communist, but they didn’t want to hear it.

  The comrades who were Communist and Party members were supported by Party lawyers, but they refused to include my father in their defense because he was not a member.

  My mother was bitter about this. Ironically, it was she who managed to have my father released with the help of her own lawyer, who happened to have been a Jewish friend and who did the job for free. Consequently, the others were also freed as well. After that my father left Paris to join the Foreign Légion, since as a foreigner he couldn’t be in the regular French army. My father told me that a man who would have been heir to the throne if France had still been a monarchy, a Monsieur Henri (I guess, as a royalist, he couldn’t be in the regular army either), was with him in the Légion too. In the early thirties, the popular singers and later Edith Piaf sang great love songs about the soldiers of the Légion Étrangère.

  The war was getting closer to our small locality, and the Mayor decided that the school children should be evacuated to the country. That’s how I was separated from my mother for the second time.

  Thérèse, another of my teachers, who lived at the Cité, was chosen to accompany the children of Chatenay. Jo, her husband, a high school teacher in a different locality, was put in charge of the evacuation camp.

  I loathed my teacher Thérèse. In France, if you want to be popular with your peers, you are automatically against your teacher. As a teacher, Thérèse was very careful to be fair and not to show any favoritism. It seemed to me she went too far and picked on me. Once I urinated in her class because she wouldn’t let me go to the toilet. At first I didn’t really have to go, but as I kept up my charade and pinched my bladder and kept moving my legs tight together, I started really to need to go. In a moment of insolence and scorn toward Thérèse I took my pants off and relieved myself to the glee of my friends and the horror of the cleaning woman who was called in a hurry. “Next time you are going to lap it up,” she murmured between her teeth.

  I was dragged to the Principal’s office, and while I was being admonished, I began to wail, “I couldn’t help it...I had to.…” I went on and on, and the Principal took me in her arms to comfort me. She gave me candy to cheer me up, and at that instant I realized that I could make myself feel anything and make others believe me. It was frightening.

  My relationship with Thérèse became strained at home as well. I began a campaign of terror, hiding her toothpaste and putting other people’s property in her cubby so people would get angry with her. I didn’t put her mail under her door as I was supposed to but dropped or lost it deliberately then claimed it was an accident. Annie backed me and told lies for me.

  Annie and I couldn’t stand the way Thérèse flirted with Gilbert, who was married to Maryse, whom I loved. It was Maryse who taught me the hundreds of folk songs I knew. She taught me to enunciate clearly when I sang so people would understand the words. All the tips she gave me about singing folk songs have served me well.

  I had to rethink my hatred of Thérèse when we were evacuated because I had only her to turn to, and I was glad we were “family.” I began to love her, and in turn she loved me. I think she also needed me then. In the country, away from home, I missed my mother, but having Thérèse was a great comfort.

  Chapter 4

  Pierrefites-sur-Saulne/War 1940

  We were in the country—the real country where peasants lived and where it got freezing cold in the winter. I had never seen such thick ice on the roads—so thick you could not walk on it. Being so close to the soil made you aware of everything that sprang from it. The flowers had never looked so beautiful or smelled so sweet. I noticed all kinds of new emotions in myself as I was discovering nature for the first time by myself. It was exhilarating—like falling in love for the first time.

  I began to notice boys and wanted to make friends with them. I knew that some big-breasted girls went behind the barn to get kissed, but I was not ready for that. I became a tomboy and learned to be friendly with boys, a new experience for me because all my schools had been for girls only. The boys in camp had found a book on sex: A Thousand Positions in a Perfumed Garden. I was the only girl to see the book and to read it, and I took it all in. Dina Vierny, the model for the sculptor Maillol, who in my mind knew everything about men and women and babies at her great age of sixteen, had told me how babies were made when I was seven. It didn’t alarm me. Dina lived at the Cité for a while and she told me everything there was to know about love.

  In the Cité Nouvelle, once, we had a guest stay with us, and she was somewhat connected to sex. Everybody said things about her, but it was not clear to me what she had done. She was beautiful, with dyed platinum hair, and she wore a white sheepskin coat. She looked very pale because she had been abandoned by her lover, who was a married man. He was paying her stay at the Cité. She was suicidal and she needed to be with people. I was encouraged to stay with her and be nice to her. I could tell that the men in our house were fascinated by her and her unhappiness, but they seemed embarrassed and kept away. She spoke haltingly, and she smelled of floral scents. I was entranced. When I was in her room she wore, ever so casually, a loose garment barely covering her lace satin underclothes. She cried a lot when I kept her company, and I had the feeling it was all about sex. In some ways I felt as if nothing would ever surprise me about what goes on between men and women, on the other hand I found it incomprehensible to understand why there was all the secrecy. Why did grownups become so childlike when they talked about it? I was thinking of her when the boys in camp showed me the sex book.

  In the evacuation camp Thérèse was pregnant with her second child, Jo. Thérèse’s husband was Jean’s brother (the train man), but he was not as friendly as Jean. He was remote and haughty. People said he was an intellectual.

  One day a new teacher arrived in camp. She wore a fur coat—the first real fur coat I ever remembered having touched—high heels and silk stockings. She was black haired, short and had painted her lips very red. She was not the kind of woman we admired in the Cité. I was amazed to see Jo lose his composure in front of her. I thought he was making a fool of himself, and I resented Thérèse’s attitude too. She was too proud to show there was something unusual going on.

  I hated this diminutive lady. I felt her flirtatious behavior was a personal attack on me, and I began to daydream about terrible ac
cidents that would happen to her: she would fall in a hole, a big rock would crush her head. I could visualize a truck rolling over her, killing her on the spot. She became an obsession. I was enraged that Jo openly showed her his affection while his wife was looking more and more pregnant. In class I made her life as unbearable as I could. She didn’t retaliate. I knew she felt guilty.

  Then Thérèse left to stay with her mother in Auvergne. I was left with Jo, who, as soon as his wife was gone, continued his courtship with the silly woman in the open. I thought Jo was out of control and I felt abused. I despised both him and her so much I was eaten with rotten feelings.

  Jo told me, “I want you to stop misbehaving in class, and I want you to stop tormenting your teacher.” “I hate her. She is a Capitalist.” I said, and added, “I miss Thérèse.” Jo said, “You don’t understand. You’re too young.” He never talked to me again, and I continued to badger his lover.

  She became his second wife after he had a messy divorce. I thought it was outrageous that he never looked at his second son who was born in Auvergne. I also thought it was appalling that he wanted to go and live in the Cité with his new wife. He had the nerve to ask for his room, which had also been Thérèse’s, but he was turned down by unanimous vote. I loved Marcel for telling him, “It is not nice to drop your wife when she is having a baby whatever the reason.”

  Luckily my mother came to join me in camp because the Germans were already marching on Paris. People were clogging the roads, leaving the cities to flee to the country, carrying with them everything they couldn’t leave behind on carts, bicycles and their backs. My mother had barely arrived in Pierrefites when the Germans were there too.

  She thought we could go back to Chatenay even though there was a cataclysm on the roads. She worried because she had left the Cité empty, and the doors open. We went back on the roads to Paris walking against traffic, but the German planes were firing indiscriminately. We had to jump in ditches and hug the ground. People screamed, dropping their possessions as they ran off. It was chaos. But I was unconscious of the danger. I was with my mother and happy as long as I held her hand.