A Chosen Few (8 page)

In the summer of 1944, young Henri Finkelsztajn was staying with the Korcarzes in their neighboring village. He was surprised one day to see his father coming for him, not on a bicycle but in a car. They rode back to Tarbes and saw all the Germans being held as prisoners. The townspeople, ordinary civilians, were walking up to them and spitting in their faces. Henri, still only seven years old, immediately understood this extraordinary scene.

“For me,” he said later, “this was the end of fear.”

O
n August 22, 1944, while almost five thousand Parisians were being killed or wounded in the liberation of the capital, Grenoble fell calmly. Townspeople shouted “They’re here!” and an irregular army of resistance fighters walked, drove, and bicycled into town looking tired from days of fighting in the mountains. The Germans had left during the night, first emptying the Bank of France of 185 million francs and burning the Gestapo records.

Emmanuel Ewenczyk had one thought upon liberation—to go back to Paris and reopen the family business on Rue Bleue. His father, Yankel, said, “You are crazy. Wait awhile. You can’t go there now.”

“I’ve waited almost four years already,” said Emmanuel. “I want to get to work.”

Emmanuel and Yankel had many arguments like that. Emmanuel had not wanted to leave the shop in Paris in the first place.

Rue Bleue is a commercial Parisian street of unremarkable nineteenth-century buildings, long and not particularly wide, angling off in a slight curve as the blocks wind across the ninth into the tenth arrondissement. Before the war, the Ewenczyks lived there in a five-room apartment on the third floor. The two floors below were occupied by the family sweater-making business.

Before sweaters, the family business had been lumber. In the
early twentieth century, the lumber business had boomed. Western Europe needed wood for new railroad lines, and Eastern Europe, Poland, and Russia, had the forests. Yankel Ewenczyk had been in the lumber trade in White Russia, Byelorussia, in an area that was largely populated by Jews. Jews even sat on the municipal council—which meant that after the Russian Revolution they were targeted by the Red Army. As a result, Yankel, his wife Syma, and their three young sons—Samuel, Oscar, and Emmanuel—moved a little west to Poland. The family continued to prosper in lumber, and in 1930, the oldest son, Sam, decided he wanted to become an engineer. He debated between going to a university in Haifa, in Palestine, where there were numerous Jews from Poland, or to one in Grenoble in the French Alps. He chose Grenoble, and for two years he studied there while Yankel sent him money. But in 1932 there was not much more money to send. The lumber business had collapsed, and the Poles were making it increasingly difficult for Jews to do anything in Poland.

In 1932 the Ewenczyks moved to Paris and found an apartment in the heart of a right-bank wholesale district on Rue Poissonière. Sweater-making was an emerging trade in the neighborhood. The entire family worked together in a sweater shop, and with Yankel’s instinct for trade and all five of them working, the little business prospered even in the difficult 1930s.

In 1940 all three sons, having become naturalized French citizens, were called into service in the French army for what would be a forty-six-day war with Germany. Oscar was among the thousands of prisoners of war taken near the Belgian border and deported to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Emmanuel’s unit was captured in Orleans. The rest of the family fled to Grenoble.

Even then, as a prisoner of war, Emmanuel thought only of getting back to the shop on Rue Bleue which would now be full of fall merchandise. In all the chaos, he realized, other shops would not be producing goods. Emmanuel reasoned that the market would be hungry for his family’s stock. It could all be liquidated at top prices—if only he could get back.

There were more prisoners than the Germans could handle. Emmanuel found himself in a column of two thousand French prisoners, guarded by a handful of Germans, being marched one hundred miles to Beauvais, north of Paris. There they would be questioned and sent to a distribution camp at Drancy and from there to Germany. Later, Drancy was to become a central transit
point for shipping Jews to Auschwitz, but this was 1940, long before Emmanuel ever heard the word
Auschwitz
. He was just one of thousands of French prisoners of war.

At one point, a truck with a French crew came to distribute food to the prisoners. Emmanuel took off his army coat and, looking remarkably like a civilian, started helping the French crew distribute the food as if he were one of them. After everyone had eaten, the crew—including Emmanuel—got back on the truck and drove off. Simply by trying to get back to his shop, Emmanuel had probably saved his life.

Paris had been left undefended and possessed by what was called “the great fear.” Shops and apartments were abandoned, and the banks stripped of deposits. The streets were littered with jettisoned belongings. The main boulevards were crammed with cars, trucks, hand carts, and bicycles—and scared people clutching the most precious belongings that were portable and heading south. On June 14 the German Eighteenth Army entered the city and hoisted a red swastika on the Eiffel Tower.

But while other Parisians, especially Jews, were fleeing, Emmanuel wanted to go home to Rue Bleue. By the time he got there, the exodus was over. The shop and apartment were deserted except for one non-Jewish employee. Nobody in the neighborhood seemed even to realize that Emmanuel had been away. Things were not bad. People talked about how the
métro
was working well again. The big fear had ended. The German soldiers didn’t seem as bad as everyone had expected. In fact, some people were starting to come back. Jews were coming back. Nothing had happened, and perhaps they had fled too hastily.

Yankel sent word from Grenoble: “You must leave Paris immediately!”

“But we have merchandise,” Emmanuel pleaded.

“It’s nothing,” Yankel insisted. “Come right away!”

“I’ll come as soon as I liquidate,” Emmanuel answered.

On September 27, 1940, an item appeared in the newspapers: “All Jews must report by October 20 to the
sous-préfet
of the arrondissement in which they live to be registered on a special list.” A Jew was defined as “anyone who belonged or used to belong to the Jewish religion, or has more than two Jewish grandparents.” Emmanuel went, as did 149,733 other Parisian Jews. The French police put a stamp on his identity papers indicating that he was Jewish. Then he went home.

Confined to their buildings by a nighttime curfew, Parisians passed their evenings talking to neighbors. One neighbor on Rue Bleue was a French pilot who kept warning Emmanuel to get out of Paris. The pilot knew he was Jewish. Everyone knew that a man named Emmanuel Ewenczyk was Jewish.

But it took months for Emmanuel to unload all the stock at good prices, even with the high demand. Then there were taxes to pay. And rent on the apartment. How long would he be away? Finally, he paid several months’ rent in advance and joined his family in Grenoble.

W
HEN
P
ARIS WAS LIBERATED
, Emmanuel got on the first train available and went directly from the Gare de Lyon to Rue Bleue. He climbed the stairs to the third floor. The concierge, who had seen him come in from her perch behind the curtain at her glass door, followed him up the stairs trying to call him back, whispering, “Monsieur, Monsieur!”

Emmanuel knocked on the door on the third floor. A man answered and explained in a meek voice that he was a refugee. “And,” he added, his voice growing less meek, “I have a lease.” He waved the document.

Emmanuel went downstairs to the lower shop floor. Where sweaters had once been stacked, there now stood a neatly arranged pile of wooden legs. A full staff of craftsmen were working on artificial limbs. Then Emmanuel climbed up the shop stairs to the upper floor and discovered that a gendarme was living there.

True, he had signed the paper releasing the apartment, but with collaborationists being chased through the streets, beaten, arrested, and put on trial, no one would want to go to court and explain that they had forced a Jew in hiding to relinquish his property.

Before he went into “hiding,” Emmanuel had left a forwarding address with the concierge. While in Grenoble, the Ewenczyks had received a letter from the manager of the building on Rue Bleue, saying that it was apparent that they had left the building, and could they therefore write a letter agreeing to let the apartment go? The Ewenczyks wondered if non-Jews got such requests. Yankel reasoned that it would be better to avoid trouble and write the letter.

But Emmanuel thought differently. “I paid three months’ rent in advance!” he argued.

“But they have our address,” Yankel said gravely.

“But the rent is not that much! We can afford to keep paying—a few months at a time, if they want. This is a good set-up. We don’t want to lose it.”

With a grim face, Yankel told him, “Listen, Emmanuel. We haven’t left much there. We don’t want to do anything—risky. They have our address.” The family finally sent the letter. Then they lost contact with Paris.

When Emmanuel returned to Paris and found all three floors occupied, he went to see the owner of the building—a pleasant, polite man who explained sympathetically that he had given the man and his family the apartment because they were refugees. Their own home had been destroyed, the owner explained as he reached into a drawer and retrieved a folded piece of paper. It was an official city document clearly stating that this man and his family had lived at 19 rue Rodier until it had been destroyed.

Emmanuel had trafficked in false documents for the Resistance in Grenoble and knew better than to take official documents at face value just because they had the right form with the right stamps. He went to Rue Rodier, which was not far from Rue Bleue, and found number 19—standing whole and undamaged. These people were not refugees at all. They had simply wanted a better apartment.

All over Paris, Jewish property had been taken over.
Nobody had expected the Jews ever to come back
. When Emmanuel asked friends for advice they repeatedly told him not to pursue his claim. Even though he seemed to have a good case, it would take years in the French legal system to win it. He would be better off finding another place so he could start working. He could not apply to reopen his business until he had an address, and with all the shortages, if he could get into production at a new place soon, his business would boom. But still, Rue Bleue was his home.…

He went to see the gendarme who was living in the upper story of what had been the sweater shop. “Monsieur,” the gendarme told him icily, “I am here because the gendarmerie gave me this apartment, because I have a wife and child. I do not have the slightest intention of leaving.”

Emmanuel went back to the owner and said the “refugee” family on the third floor had false papers—the building on Rue Rodier had never been destroyed. The owner nodded in agreement and said with a polite smile, “But what can I do?”

“And what about this gendarme? What right does he have to be there?”

The building owner answered with seemingly irrefutable logic, “But he is there, and there is nothing I can do about that. You will have to take it up with him.”

Emmanuel went to the gendarmerie in the neighborhood, where he was told, “Well, he is living in the apartment. If he doesn’t want to leave, there is nothing we can do.”

Emmanuel went to the building manager who had so courteously extracted the letter from him when he was in hiding. The manager said he would make it up to him and offered another apartment in a different neighborhood. “And why is this apartment available?” Emmanuel wanted to know.

“Ah, because the tenants left.”

“Were they Jews?”

The manager said he thought they were—“but they have not come back.” Everyone was confident that the Jews weren’t coming back. But Emmanuel was not eager to grab this place. And in a few weeks, although the tenants themselves did not come back, one of their parents claimed the apartment. Then the embarrassed manager offered Emmanuel two little rooms on the sixth floor of the building on Rue Bleue. Six flights of stairs to bring merchandise in, six to take it out? Emmanuel thought. But still, it was an address, and he could apply for a permit with an address.

Emmanuel set up the sweater business there. Everything in Paris was rationed and tightly controlled after the war, but the Ewenczyks had bought large orders of wool for their business before the war, and everyone was permitted to acquire materials now based on their 1940 purchases. The same distributors were back in business, and the demand for sweaters, cloth, and even sacks was at a level that Emmanuel had never seen before.

H
OW COULD
the pig-headed Emmanuel Ewenczyk ever have resisted the equally strong-willed Fania Elbinger? Fania was a nervy, outspoken twenty-year-old who had immigrated to Paris with her mother and sister from Poland in 1930. Having met in the Resistance in Grenoble, Fania and Emmanuel seemed destined to love and argue. While they were living in Grenoble, about once a month Fania would travel to nearby Chambéry with money and clothes and sometimes even a little meat that the Jewish Resistance
had smuggled into the district to feed Jewish families. Sometimes she was able to save their children by taking them to the Swiss border with false papers. The Germans would let children pass the border, provided their papers showed that they were not Jewish. In the Resistance, men were of limited use in this kind of work. Although there was no problem in providing them with top-quality Christian identification papers, the Germans would sometimes stop men on the road and make them show that they were uncircumcised. When the Germans moved into the formerly Italian-occupied zone of France, they decreed that any circumcised male was a Jew, regardless of what his papers said. For this reason, much of the underground work was done by women.