Such Good Girls (13 page)

Unlike Sophie, who seemed armored against the past despite admitting to me that our interview sessions had left her depressed, Flora from the beginning was agitated about talking to me. I tried to assure her that her story might actually help bring a relatively neglected aspect of the Holocaust to the attention of a larger public, but her tension remained palpable. And her smile failed to mask her wariness.

She seemed especially concerned that I wouldn’t get her story right. Not that I blamed her. The whole enterprise of trying to capture another person’s life, regardless of the circumstances, is full of pitfalls, to say nothing of the chasm between any writer’s ambition and the subject’s felt experience and spotty recall. My endless questions frustrated her. Flora lamented the loss of her memory as if it were another person whose disappearance she mourned. Her story sometimes seemed to come out of her in a chronological jumble, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle emptied onto a table. After a couple of long interviews, I sent her a first draft of what I had written, and heard nothing for a few weeks. Then this:

Hi Richard,

I have started to read the manuscript over and over again. I hesitated to answer as I am in many regards somewhat dismayed by the writing. There are parts of it which are fine, but others are quite troubling and make it difficult for me to feel that you really concentrated on understanding the person you are talking about and about what happened to her and within her rather than in details which are often wrong.

It ended:

Sorry, but I must be honest. It is very important to make come across the power of forgetting and silence, it is not so easy. I hope you feel up to it.

All the best, Flora

The next time we met, I reminded Flora that we were in this together, that without her help I would never get it right, and I asked for patience. Fortunately, since we’d last met, it seemed to me that Flora’s memory had stirred and stretched; her recall was sharper, the story more coherent than before. I had experienced this with Sophie too.

But getting one’s hands on a vanished reality is no easy matter, especially when there’s just one living witness. At times our sessions felt a little like hand-to-hand combat—with memory itself.

The fates of millions of Eastern European Jews were decided by a hand. The one holding the gun aimed at the base of the skull. The one gripping the flashlight that panned the hiding place, looking for the sets of terrified eyes in the dark. The hand that had the power, with the stroke of a fountain pen, to condemn or reprieve. The one that separated death camp arrivals to the left or to the right.

Flora Hillel’s fate was decided by her own six-year-old hand, and what she didn’t do with it. Seventy years later, she would still not understand what play of unrecognized forces in her young mind had prompted her to keep her hands on her desk.

An only child, she was born in 1935 to opera-loving, Czechoslovakian Jewish parents, the granddaughter of the famous Rabbi Dr. Friedrich Hillel, who served in Leipnik, Czechoslovakia, and was himself descended from the great Jewish sage and scholar Hillel the Elder, who led the Jewish people around the time of Jesus Christ. Flora spent her first two years in San Remo, Italy, where her father, a maker of false teeth, had decided to go because of his tuberculosis. After he died from a recurrence of TB in November 1936, her mother, Stefanie—a pianist and writer—kept Flora in San Remo with her until she decided to join friends who lived across the border in Nice, then part of the Unoccupied Zone administered by the Vichy government.

In June 1942, Stefanie moved the two of them thirty miles west to Nice to a small apartment on Avenue Monplaisir, a mile inland from the Mediterranean, where they started their new life together. Flora did not have to share her mother’s love with anyone and grew so accustomed to maternal adoration that she would never forget the few times she provoked disapproval instead. On one such occasion, Flora’s mother chastised her for making fun of an amputee on the street, and she reprimanded Flora when she caught her and some friends singing popular ditties mocking Hitler and Mussolini.

Desperate to make ends meet, Stefanie Hillel took in sewing. She expertly embroidered Flora’s name on the clothes she wore to her new school, which was a short distance away. Each morning her mother tied a ribbon into a bow near the part in Flora’s hair and sent her off to school with her friend Rachel, who lived nearby. There wasn’t much food—not in the markets near them, anyway, or at least not much that her mother could afford, and Flora worried about her mother’s weight, since she gave most of what she had to Flora.

The taunts of the children who made fun of her for being fatherless brought her to tears. She was helpless to defend herself, since she was not exactly sure how he had died, or why, or even, at times, whether he had died at all. Her mother would often tell her that he was “traveling,” which fueled her fantasies that he would return.

When the French police began arresting Jews by the thousands in August 1942, mother and daughter boarded a bus to Vence, a walled medieval village west of Nice known for its natural spring water and—more recently—for a children’s home and boarding school run by a Protestant relief organization, Maison d’Accueil Chrétienne pour Enfants, that was taking Jewish children.

The bus lumbered up Avenue Colonel Meyere toward Vence’s crested cluster of terra-cotta-roofed buildings and stopped in front of a stucco building with shutters. Holding her mother’s hand, Flora watched an assortment of girls around her age wandering around a dirt yard, one of them clutching a soiled doll.

Her mother assured her she wouldn’t be there long.

Flora turned to her mother in panic. It hadn’t really occurred to her that her mother meant to leave her in Vence. She had never been away from her before.

Her mother straightened her hair ribbon and crushed her in a hug, whispered that it would only be for a while, and was gone.

The days without her mother dragged on among strange children, all of them little refugees from some threat beyond their comprehension. Flora was too numb to concentrate on the games or the songs or the prayers. She wet her bed constantly.

My dear little Flory! her mother wrote just before Christmas, I hope to kiss you soon. Take care of yourself and don’t forget to wear your pants! Lots of kisses… .

Chère Maman, she wrote back in January 1943, I hug you very hard. I’m sending you this little letter to make you happy… . When the letter comes to you I want you to come… . I’m eating well and I hope you’re eating well also… . I’m ending this little letter. Your little girl, Florine Hillel.

At least there was food—milk, days-old baguettes, a little cheese, a spoonful of preserves.

And then, miraculously, there was her mother. She reappeared toward spring, thinner than ever, to take her home. Flora ran to her, happier than she had ever been in her life. Back in Nice, Flora returned to school and to her best friend Rachel. All was well, or so it seemed to Flora, for many months. Then came September 1943. On the way home from the food market one day, Flora and Stefanie found themselves in the midst of an excited, expanding crowd, and were soon trapped on the sidewalk, pressed against a store window. Frightened, Flora clutched her mother’s hand and tried to see what the fuss was about, but at first she could only hear the sound of a clacking drumbeat getting louder and louder. She peered between the bodies in front of her to catch a glimpse of the German army’s grand entrance into the city. Flora had never seen anything like it. Helmeted soldiers filed past in perfect formation, the rows bristling with rifles. The clacking sound turned out to be the staccato gun-burst sound of thousands of jackboots striking the pavement in unison. The soldiers were followed by rumbling tanks and armored vehicles—metal monsters out of a nightmare—then more dense rows of goose-stepping soldiers. Then open touring cars filled with unsmiling men, followed by more soldiers.

Flora was terrified, clutching her mother’s hand in that forest of silent adults. But what was worse was that she could feel that her mother was terrified too. The parade seemed to go on for hours before the people on the sidewalk began to disperse and they could make their way home.

By the following day, Nice sprouted Nazi flags everywhere, and soldiers on every corner, even near her school.

The victims of history are the last to know what hit them. Only as an adult would Flora learn what had brought the massive Wehrmacht to Nice. Following the Allied invasion of North Africa and then Italy, the Italian army had capitulated and the Germans had arrived. Had her mother known by then what had happened in Paris the past July? That the French police themselves, under German orders, had rounded up thousands of Jews and sent them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver near the Eiffel Tower, then on to the transit camp at Drancy, and on their way to Auschwitz?

Flora walked to school with Rachel that day, as usual, and they took their adjacent seats in the classroom and waited for their teacher to begin. This time, however, she departed from her usual routine.

“Qui est juif?” she asked, quite suddenly. “Levez vos mains.”

Would the Jewish children raise their hands? Flora’s stomach fluttered. Next to her, Rachel raised her arm, but Flora hesitated. Had her mother told her not to mention to anyone that she was Jewish? Flora didn’t really think about being Jewish, anyway. They were not practicing Jews. Even though her father’s father had been a famous rabbi back in Czechoslovakia, Flora and her mother never went to synagogue or kept the Sabbath or said prayers or lit candles. What Flora felt was not Jewish, but scared and numb, yet when the teacher asked for hands, Flora thought that she ought to ask her mother first before doing anything, so she kept her hands folded on the desk.

“Good,” her mother said when later that day Flora reported what happened. But despite her relief her mother was agitated. Word reached them that Rachel and her family were probably now going to be something called “deported.”

Not only did Flora not return to school after that day, but her mother explained that she was going to send Flora to a new school, a Catholic one where she would be safe. She said that it wouldn’t be like the other place. It was just up the hill, right there in Nice.

Flora knew that it would be just like the other place because her mother wouldn’t be there.

She would believe for a long time that it was her mother who drove her to the convent that sat on a terraced hillside overlooking the Mediterranean, on a road that climbed between oleander bushes on either side. Below the convent’s high walls, olive, cypress, and palms trees ran down toward the sea. Then, with a promise to come visit her as soon as possible, she disappeared.

A towering woman in a long robe spoke to Flora from behind an iron grille, welcoming her to “the house of God.” That God had a house was confusing to Flora; that Flora had ended up in it made her want to giggle, except that the woman, obscured by the grille, was frightening her. God must have extremely long legs, she decided, to live both in the convent and in heaven as well. She wondered when she might meet him. She had the idea that she might become his favorite of all the girls there.

And who was this Mother Superior? What was so superior about her?

Afterward she was led up the hill, above the main building, to join the dozen other children congregating in front of a house ringed by rose hedges. It would be Flora’s home now, except that Flora would no longer be Flora. She had been given a new name to go with her strange new home. She must now forget she had even been Flora Hillel. That much had been made quite clear. She was now Marie Hamon, born in Corsica. She wondered if she would be the same girl as Marie Hamon. Marie Hamon, Marie Hamon, Marie Hamon.

The sisters had taken a vow of silence—and, it appeared to Flora, a vow of not bathing as well. But bathe Flora they did, holding her over an old sink to baptize her. It was yet another new terrifying experience. She barely knew what a Jew was, let alone a Catholic whose salvation required being doused with cold water in what looked like a thousand-year-old sink. What were they doing, pouring water over her head, and telling her she was a child of God?

Among the sisters’ jobs was embroidering religious garments and making holy wafers, but mainly, Flora observed, they prayed. They seemed to spend most of their time gliding silently through the halls in their mountainous robes and winglike white cornettes on their heads, or pacing the flat roof of the convent in postures of prayer, hands pressed against their breasts, eyes glued to the sky. Tiny Flora stood in the garden and watched as they paraded back and forth like huge birds of prey. In her loneliness, Flora prayed only that they would look at her, even just once, and not at the sky. Look at me, she wished. Look at me. Look at me.

The one game the children had was: racing to see who would be the first to finish their Ave Marias and Our Fathers and Mothers Who Art in Heaven on their rosaries. To see which of them could produce the fastest stream of prayer provided their greatest amusement.

NotrePèrequiestauxcieuxquevotreNomsoitSanctifiéquevotrerègneviennequevotrevolontésoitfaitesurlaterrecommeauciel… . JevoussalueMariepleinedegrâceLeSeigneurestavecvousvousêtesbénieentretouteslesfemmesetJésuslefruitdevosentraillesestbéni.

Worse than the discipline was the time when she was told the Jews had killed Jesus Christ. Who were these women who claimed to be married to God, yet never had a kind word for their charges, and called them killers? First they had taught her to identify with the baby Jesus, who had so many problems like her, then they said the Jews killed him? She and her mother had already been blamed, and had to be separated, because they were Jewish, and now this? At seven, Flora was not too young to feel the terrible injustice, but not old enough to understand it or defend herself against it.

There were no classes, as in her previous school. Much of the time was spent learning all the prayers, and the sign of the cross. At the large house just across the street, Nazis soldiers came and went, yet the nuns, who were known to supplement the rationing with extra food for Christian children in the area, seemed on good terms with them. To quiet the Jewish children’s anxiety, the nuns reassured them that God was listening. They told Flora that her mother, who had not even written her a letter, would come back, that God granted wishes in mysterious ways. Flora couldn’t understand his mysteriousness; after all, this was his house, yet she never saw him. There was no one to explain anything to her. Still, she prayed to see her mother, who was so nearby and yet seemed to have forgotten her completely, even if one of the sisters had helped her write her a letter.