Hitler Made Me a Jew

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HITLER MADE ME A JEW

by

Nadia Gould

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BOSON BOOKS

Raleigh

Published by
Boson Books

3905 Meadow Field Lane

Raleigh, NC 27606

ISBN 0-917990-19-6

An imprint of
C&M Online Media Inc.

Copyright 2000 Nadia Gould

All rights reserved

For information contact

C&M Online Media Inc.

3905 Meadow Field Lane

Raleigh, NC 27606

Tel: (919) 233-8164

e-mail: [email protected]

URL: http://www.bosonbooks.com

Contents

Chapter 1

1940: To be Jewish with Honor

I was thirteen when I discovered I was Jewish. American Jews find this hard to believe. How can that be? Didn't your parents tell you? They don't understand what it was like to live in a country where the French Revolution and the Catholic Church were the important influences. My parents were atheists.

As free thinkers, they had no reasons to tell me I was Jewish. Both my parents were born in Poland when it was occupied by Russia. My father's parents went to live in Moscow. This privilege was given only to a few Jews—those with special skills. My grandfather as a textile engineer was considered desirable and was allowed to live in the capital. My mother's family went to settle in Harbin, China. There the Jews were encouraged to settle and establish their own businesses. The Russians were occupying Manchuria and were building the TranSiberian Railroad that would link Japan, Korea and China. They gave the Jews many incentives so that they would move in that frontier region and develop it. My grandfather quickly became a successful businessman selling lumber for the railroad. He made a fortune and was a powerful citizen in his community.

My father's parents were not religious. My mother's parents on the other hand were very religious and followed all the practices of the Jewish religion.

Being Jewish became a problem for us only when the Germans occupied France in 1940. The Jews in France were either French-born, unrecognizable, or they were foreigners (etrangers). My parents were foreigners with a strong Russian accent, and because the French are xenophobes, my parents' accent caused me distress in public. I would have preferred them to be like every one else, just ordinary French people.

To learn I was Jewish came to me as a relief. Even though, we are sometimes told surprising things about ourselves, once the initial shock wears off, we feel free, cleansed, as if, deep down, we had known the truth already. I remember feeling that it made more sense for me to be Jewish. I knew in my gut that I wasn't really Russian. Jeannette, who lived in my house, had said I was Russian Orthodox, once when I had been asked what was my religion if I was not Catholic. I thought Russian Orthodox sounded great and exotic. No one in school had ever heard of it, and I loved being different. Being Jewish didn't conjure up anything romantic for me. I accepted it as reluctantly as I did my brown eyes and straight hair. It was also part of my penance for feeling different from my parents because I didn't have a foreign accent. I felt guilty about it but I couldn't help feeling embarrassed my parents' accent.

I escaped the Holocaust thanks to my parents, their friends, the Jewish organizations that gave us money when we reached Spain, and the American Quakers who arranged for children like me to come to America in 1943. But I still often wonder why I had to leave France—the only country I knew at fourteen. Why did I have to give up the language I loved? Why did I have to stop singing the songs I could sing so well? I was French. I loved France and the blue, white and red flag. I had been well instructed in my French school that France was the center of the Universe. Why did I have to leave?

Since I was thirteen, when I learned I was Jewish, it is clear to me now, some fifty years later, that I was a pretender for most of my life. I was born in Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, the land the French went to war in 1914 to recapture from the Germans. I was profoundly touched by the patriotic fervor of this region which I had the honor to represent because I had been born there, had worn the costume of the Alsatian women with its voluminous black bow in all the pageants and special ceremonies of the schools I attended. Yet my parents left Strasbourg when I was nine months old, and I had no recollections of that city.

Nevertheless, it served me well to have been born in Strasbourg as a child because it gave me distinction. In school I was always the only representative of the Alsace province. Alsatians stayed home; they didn't move around the country; they kept their mystery. But in the end it was the fact of my being Jewish, the meaning of which I didn't even understand, that determined my fate and not Strasbourg, the city of my birth.

My father had left Moscow when he was sixteen. He was not interested in politics, so he escaped the Russian Revolution and survived by his wits, traveling across Russia as the assistant of a guru, a man who preached about living a healthy life by eating no meat, drinking no wine, and doing exercise. This was quite revolutionary in those days.

He eventually joined a merchant ship, which he jumped to land in Palestine. There he had relatives and could work and save the money he would need to study at the University of Liège in Belgium.

My mother was able to go to study in Liège also. Her father preferred that she attend the University of Liège rather than any university in Russia. He didn't like Communism.

My parents met and fell in love at the University of Liège in Belgium. My mother told me how my father courted her and how he would show off and ride a motorcycle, standing on the seat of it, with his arms spread out. They had many friends which they kept to the end of their lives and which I met later on also. They were all young people from Poland or Russia—all Jews. Then my parents transferred to the University of Strasbourg. I believe they wanted to live in France. When my mother thought she was pregnant, they quickly got married.

When they finished their studies they remained in France since they could not return to either of their countries. The Communists were in Russia, and Japan was at war with China. But as foreigners, in France, they could not work. They were stateless and carried for identification a document called
Nansen
(
sans nationalite
or without nationality). I, on the hand, was French by birth and also by naturalization.

When I was three, my parents were working on a milk farm in Provence. There, I have memories of having been a cat torturer. I played with a small kitten that I dressed in doll clothes. I put him in a box and looked through a hole to see what it would do and I saw his big yellow eyes staring at me. I was also fascinated by his movements when I pulled out his legs. My mother was surprised the animal didn't scratch me. I didn't understand why the cat ran off and disappeared. I looked for him in vain going under the cows in the meadows. My mother also marveled at the sensitivity of these large beasts that never stepped on me even though I was a nuisance to them.

On the farm, I also had several pretty standard childhood memories of accidents that caused me my first pain. I fell on a rock and cut the corner of my mouth. It made a lump inside my mouth that I can still feel today with my tongue. I remember tasting my blood for the first time.

I fell on my crotch into a milk can as I jumped from can to can, one leg in the can the other outside. The blood ran down my legs and my parents rushed me to an old country doctor who quickly reassured them that I had not lost my virginity. Later, my mother told me, they had been amused because that had not been their worry.

One day I was in the farm truck when it crashed in a trap that a neighbor had made for another neighbor with whom he was feuding. My father's arm grabbed me before I could fall out, and I was surprised to feel his chest tremble. I had never imagined that my parents could be afraid.

Of these days I also remember hating the shoes laced up above my ankles that my parents insisted I wear—brown boy's shoes—a mortifying style for me who dreamed of wearing black patent leather shoes with straps and pearl buttons. My parents were convinced these ugly brown shoes would make my ankles stronger.

Since we didn't go to church, I had no Sunday clothes, and my father was annoyed because I never looked clean. Each time we got dressed up to go on a visit or a special outing, I had a fight with him. He always found a stain somewhere on my clothes. “Look at you!” he would roar. “When are you going to learn to keep food off of yourself? You're as bad as your mother!” I hated it when he screamed at my mother. “Why can't you pay attention to her? You two disgust me!” My mother would raise her eyes to the sky but she never answered back. “He thinks he is right. What can I say?”

Meanwhile, I imagined myself wearing a coat with a black velvet collar and underneath a lace collar on a velvet dress to match. I daydreamed and wished that I had long curly hair like some little girl I must have seen in a magazine.

Chapter 2

Aix-les-Bains 1934

I was five when I first went to school. We were living in Aix-les Bains, a small resort town in the French Alps, and I was bewildered by the large number of children in my class. It was the first time I had ever seen so many children at once. The teacher, tall and kind, saw that I was uneasy and tried to comfort me. I was given a new slate and homework to do. I didn't understand what I was supposed to do.

My father cleaned my slate with his blue denim apron when I came home. He was then working with my mother in a vegetable store that supplied luxurious hotels in the region. He always took great care to dry the slate so that it looked dark and was easy to write on. We did my homework together, but my feeling of uncertainty about it has never left me. I can feel it today.

Neatness was very important in French schools. We all wore black aprons to protect our clothes from ink spots. In kindergarten we didn't yet use ink, but we had to be clean anyway. I was anxious most of the time I was in school.

The teacher was the wife of my parents' boss. One day she stopped coming to school. Later, I learned that she had killed her son with a butcher's knife. People said she had a fit of madness in the middle of the night. They took her away and locked her up in an asylum. I was sad she was gone. I had liked her, and she had told my mother that I was a good child. When my mother told me that, after the teacher was gone, I missed her even more.

Most of the time I played by myself near the store where my parents worked. One day I was playing in a truck across the street, making believe I was a trucker. I screamed at imaginary drivers on the road until I fell asleep. When it was dark, my mother shouted for me to come in, but I didn't hear her. Everyone in the neighborhood began looking for me, and, finally they called the police. When I appeared, groggy with sleep, there were cheers of delight. For a moment. I was the center of interest, and I liked that feeling.

Later, my parents worked in a girls boarding school. My father was the cook and my mother, the nurse. We lived at the school, and I had plenty of time to poke around on my own. The Head Mistress was very strict. The girls were not supposed to wear make-up, but they kept face powder and lipstick hidden in their lockers. One day, I opened all the lockers and had a great time playing “Beauty Salon.” I took out the creams, eaux de colognes and powders and started mixing them, putting the results on my cheeks and lips. I also found money. Forgetting the “Beauty Salon,” I left the room in wild confusion and headed straight for the bakery shop where I bought chocolate animals. As I was walking aimlessly home, eating my spoils, I heard my mother calling from the window. I waved happily at her. She rushed down to meet me, astonished to see me in the street when she thought I was in school. As she began to question me I answered innocently. She was horrified and began to reproach me. I had to answer for playing hooky, stealing and leaving a mess in the dormitory. My father decided I would have to apologize to my victims in public.

A special assembly was called. On stage I repented, in front of the entire school. My father publicly gave me a spanking with my pants down. However, the humiliation and the pain of this evaporated quickly because I became a martyr to the girls who then gave me money, and I was able to buy chocolate as often as I wished. Also I had liked being on stage with a sympathizing audience.

The Head Mistress, too, was very generous with me. Once she bought me the most beautiful Christmas tree I had ever seen which she had decorated herself, placing many presents under its branches.

When we were not at the school we lived in a sparsely furnished apartment in Aix. But we were rarely home. It was then that I began to go to church by myself. I liked the quiet and the splendor, the candles burning, the paintings on the walls and the stained glass windows when the sun shone. I began collecting pictures of saints. I was thinking about going to catechism, and someone had made me sign my name in a book. It impressed me that someone wanted my signature, and I practiced writing it with elegant flourishes. I was pleased to know by sight regular members of the church who approved of my being there, something my parents had no idea of. But going in secret made me feel righteous and close to God.

Occasionally, my father worked as a cook in an expensive restaurant in the Alps near a huge lake. My mother and I went to visit him and eat the specialty of the area, tiny fried fishes. I found the Alps an unforgettable sight and was sure I had seen one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Life was hard for my parents in Aix-les-Bains and they thought they could do better in Paris. My father went ahead to find us a place. He found us La Cité Nouvelle, a collective in Chatenay-Malabry, a southern suburb of Paris.