A Chosen Few (9 page)

Wartime life was relatively easy for Jews in Grenoble, at first. The entire southeastern border area, from Grenoble to Nice, had been occupied by Italian troops instead of Germans. Not only did the Italians not harass the Jews, but on several occasions, when French police arrested Jews, the Italians had them released. But in September 1943 the Italians surrendered, and the Germans moved into Grenoble. One night Emmanuel brought Fania home with him to try to persuade his parents to assume a false identity and leave the town. Fania could get them the papers they needed.

“Why should I leave?” said Yankel Ewenczyk.

“Your name is Yankel. Yankel and Syma. You can’t stay like this.”

“Why not? Why should I fear the Germans? Let them take me—I have nothing to hide. I’ve never done anything wrong in my life. But if they catch me with false papers, then what do I do?”

“Papa, you don’t understand. Just listen to your accent.”

“What can I do about my accent?” He shrugged.

Emmanuel went to the library in Grenoble and spent an entire day leafing through the pages of the official journal that published names of people who had been naturalized, looking for ideas. Finally he found an Armenian couple from Turkey.

“You can be from Armenia,” he told his father. “Armenians have accents. A lot of people in Turkey are circumcised because they are Moslem. If the Germans see that you are circumcised, that is more or less explained—”

“What’s to explain?” Yankel protested. But they got him the papers.

After the Liberation, Fania returned to Paris with her mother and sister. But when the three arrived at the family leather goods
shop, they found that it had been rented to someone else, as was their seven-room apartment. The new tenant was a refugee, but unlike the family at Rue Bleue, this tenant was a real refugee. The Elbingers decided to fight, but the years of futile legal battles that they spent trying to recuperate their spaces only proved to Emmanuel that he had received good advice when he had been told not to pursue it.

A
ROUND THE CORNER
from Rue Bleue on Rue Cadet was a club for diamond merchants. Diamonds, a traditional Jewish trade, was a fast business in 1945, because so many people were selling off their jewels in order to survive. In times of crisis, gold and diamonds flourish, and in 1945, in the diamond and jewel districts of the ninth arrondissement, near the garment district, people had money. But they still had trouble getting food.

Icchok and Dwojra Finkelsztajn, on the other hand, had food, but they needed money. There were shortages of almost everything in Paris, especially food, which was tightly rationed. But it was different in the Pletzl, where numerous Polish peasants lived among the Jews who had moved there from Poland before the war. When food became scarce during the war, these peasants, gravitating toward what they knew best, had moved out of the city and grew food on small plots. By chance, Dwojra ran into a family she had known in Poland, and they offered to sell her their produce. This was, as the French like to say, not altogether legal. In fact, it was a black market that circumvented the rationing system. But Paris was full of black markets. Dollars and silver were traded illegally on the narrow Rue des Rosiers sidewalks. Everyone wanted food, and Dwojra now had access to it. The problem was that nobody in the Pletzl had very much money. Then Dwojra found a diamond merchant.

Icchok and Dwojra would regularly get on the
métro
with large net bags full of black market food and go to the diamond traders’ club on Rue Cadet. In a thickly carpeted room, they would lay out fruit, vegetables, meat, and butter from Polish farmers, on the waxed dark wood furniture. The Finkelsztajn family supported itself and even saved a little money from this.

The Finkelsztajns had returned to Paris from the Pyrenees in December 1944, during one of the coldest winters on record, a winter that further toughened the bitter battle that was under way
in the Ardennes. Some winters, Parisians do not see a single snow-flake. But this winter, the streets were encrusted with a thick layer of snow. Icchok, Dwojra, Henri, and their baby had gone to 14 rue des Ecouffes, where they had left their apartment fully furnished with most of their possessions. When they opened the door, a woman holding a child stared at them, and several more pairs of young eyes peered out at them from inside.

“Excuse me,” said Dwojra. She closed the door, and the Finkelsztajns went back down the stairs and left.

Other apartments were available on Rue des Ecouffes. In the summer of 1942 the police, using the lists they had made in the fall of 1940, had sealed off Jewish neighborhoods. In the middle of the night they had pulled whole families from their apartments and put them in a sports stadium, where they wallowed in squalor until they could be deported for extermination. In this citywide operation—which yielded only 12,884 Jews, not even half of the number hoped, based on the lists—Rue des Ecouffes was one of the richer veins of the motherlode. Number 22 alone, with the work of forty policemen, had yielded five whole families and a total of fifteen children. In the winter of 1945 there were still empty apartments at number 22, and the Finkelsztajns rented one of them, a two-room apartment with a bathroom. In the Pletzl, two rooms for four people was considered a good apartment and a bathroom was a notable luxury.

Icchok, who did not want to go back to day and night labor in the hot basement of the Korcarzes’ bakery, learned of a pleasant little space that was available on Rue des Rosiers. Started by Alsatian Jews, it had been a Jewish bakery for almost a hundred years. The ovens were still in the basement, but the ground floor was big enough that the ovens could be moved up there, and the floor above had a large four-room apartment. The apartment even had enough space to build a bathroom.

The owner of the bakery was a Romanian Jew. During the war his shop had been “Aryanized.” All over Paris—in fact, all over Nazi-occupied Europe—Jewish commercial property had been Aryanized, or given to non-Jews. When the policy was instituted in 1941, more than twenty thousand Jewish-owned businesses had immediately been confiscated and handed over to those who were willing to call themselves “Aryan” in exchange for the gift of someone else’s shop. But this Romanian had surprised the new “Aryan” owners of his bakery by surviving the war. He demanded back his bakery after
Liberation. Since most of these “Aryans” had received their property as a reward for their collaboration, they were lucky to escape the Liberation with their lives. Yet in late 1944 there were still more collaborators than Jews living in the Pletzl. Little by little they were losing their property, but not their arrogance. They had numbers on their side, and there was little in the way of police or any kind of law to oppose them. The war was still going on, and Hitler was still in Germany and still had a fighting army—and who could be sure that the Nazis would not come back to Paris? Collaborators in the Pletzl regularly shouted from their windows, “
Vive
the Nazis! Down with the Jews!” A group of these so-called Aryans were so arrogant that they actually staged a demonstration protesting the return of the shops to Jews.

The Romanian, however, fought until he got back his bakery. But at the end of 1945 he decided to sell it to a Jew from the Pletzl. He liked Icchok, but the amount Icchok and Dwojra had saved was not even close to the price he wanted. The Romanian agreed to hold the bakery for Icchok and gave him a deadline for raising the rest of the money. Their fundraising became a Pletzl-wide project. Most of the merchants on Rue des Rosiers donated, and soon the Finkelsztajns had their own new bakery.

If Icchok had to be a baker and spend his life working alone and indoors, at least he would do it the right way in his own shop. He was not going to spend his days laboring in a dark basement. After moving the ovens to the back of the ground floor, he permanently sealed up the basement, proclaiming that working in a basement was slavery.

Their first customer was the diamond merchant who had taken them to the club on Rue Cadet.

I
T WAS NOT ONLY
small businesses that “Aryans” had taken. René Lévy lost a huge enterprise. At the outbreak of the war, he had been the sixty-two-year-old retiring president of the textile association. He had foreseen that he would lose his extremely profitable factory, which produced men’s handkerchiefs, those huge rectangles of fine material that were a stylish accessory in the 1930s. Smart “Aryan” businessmen knew that they didn’t have to offer Jews good prices for their businesses, since the Jews were going to have to sell anyway. Lévy, with little choice, sold to the association secretary, a man named Boussac.

The Lévy family’s fortunes had risen and fallen with a half-century of French history. In 1895 the Lévys had been an established French textile family, part of the solid upper-middle class of eastern France. In January of that year, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was publicly degraded, his buttons removed, and his sword broken, as an angry crowd shouted “Death to Jews!” Dreyfus was of a background similar to the Lévys’, and, like them, he made the mistake of thinking that he totally blended into French society. Now suddenly he was being convicted of passing information to the Germans, based on erroneous evidence and supported by the notion that “Jews are like that.” Anti-Semitism became so virulent at workplaces, in schools, and on streets, that the Lévys were forced to leave France, where their family had lived since before the Revolution, and relocate their textile business to Belgium.

After a decade had passed, the anti-Semites became quiet again, except for a few radical-right newspapers. The Lévys moved back to France. Their son René married a woman who, also like Dreyfus, was from an affluent Alsatian Jewish industrial family. Her family had built a textile factory in northern France. In 1912, René Lévy and his wife settled into the grand bourgeois life of western Paris. He became the president of the textile association and was well-known to important politicians between the wars. Religion was of little concern to him. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, he would eat an apple. On Passover, always known in France as “Jewish Easter,” he would eat matzoh, not because of any religious belief but because matzoh was the holiday food. More basic to the Lévys’ lives were the rounds of opera once a week and dinner parties in their elegant apartment, where they brought in musicians for small performances.

In 1940 the Lévys once again had to leave Paris. This time they went south and became non-Jews. In Klaus Barbie’s Lyons, the Lévys—now the Picards—lived a quiet life. They bought a nearby plot of land and hired a peasant to work it, assuring themselves of a good food supply throughout the war. In the summers they vacationed in Argenton-sur-Creuse, a short drive away from Oradour-sur-Gland, where 642 Jews were massacred by the SS.

One of René’s daughters lost her husband, Georges Caen. Caen was not from the Norman city of the same name; he was a Kohen, a name that implied he was descended from the priestly line of Aaron. Georges Kohen was now trying to survive in Lyons as Caen, the name that his father had chosen years earlier to better blend
into French society. The Germans never found out that this bourgeois Caen was no Norman. But someone informed on him for possessing a revolver, and so the Germans came to the Caens’ comfortable home and demanded Georges. The family, instead of hiding him or denying that he was there, ushered the Germans in, like confident Frenchmen who knew their rights. Georges Caen was taken away, never to be seen again.

Another of René’s daughters was attending art school in 1944, and there she met Robert Altmann, the brother of a fellow student. Altmann had been born in Düsseldorf in 1922. His father came from a religious family but had moved away from religion as he became a successful businessman. He bought and sold steel, and after the Russian Revolution he did a lucrative business with the new struggling Soviet nation. The Russians had no cash, but they had a wealth of lumber that, as the Ewenczyks had also found, was in great demand in Western Europe. Altmann was able to work out barter arrangements with them—trading steel for wood.

After Liberation, René Lévy and his family went back to Paris. He was unable to get back his business, which under Boussac went on to become one of the textile giants of postwar France. The Altmanns settled in Lyons, but Robert, who spoke flawless French, German, and English, went north and served as a translator for the U.S. Army until the end of the war. In 1947 he married René Lévy’s daughter, resumed his family’s steel trading business, and started raising a family. Once again, they were simply affluent, assimilated Parisians living in an expensive neighborhood, eating an apple for Rosh Hashanah and matzoh for Passover so their three children would know that they were Jewish. Otherwise, they could live like other Frenchmen. The Germans were gone, and France was once again a liberal country where Jews did not have to mark themselves.

T
HE EAGERNESS OF
R
OBERT
A
LTMANN
to pick up the old life he had left off was not characteristic of all French Jewry. Perhaps they would have felt differently if it had been only the Germans who had tried to destroy them. But it had also been the French. Many French Jews remembered that French police had rounded up French Jews for deportation. A widely reported Nazi expression attributed to number-two Nazi Hermann Goering was, “
Wer Jude ist, bestimme Ich
,”—“I decide who is a Jew.” Assimilation had
meant nothing to Goering and other Nazis. After the war, to many French Jews, the French ideal of assimilation seemed a fantasy of the foolish.

Most people do not have neighbors whose humanity has been tested. But in France, Jews now had such neighbors. The Nazis had proven throughout Europe that most people, when threatened, act badly. It is difficult to live in a society in which it has already been proven to you that your neighbors will pretend not to notice that your children have been murdered. Many French Jews preferred to go to an untested society and hope that Israeli or American neighbors would not be like this. In any case it would be better not to know for certain, as it now was known of European neighbors.