The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (17 page)

WHEN VISITORS THINK
of Jewish Paris, they think first of the Marais, which has been a center of Jewish life since the Middle Ages. The rue des Rosiers in the Marais was once Paris’s main “Jewish street.” An ambitious urban renewal project that began in 2004 transformed it into a gentrified pedestrian walkway. Most of the Jewish shops and restaurants have given way to designer boutiques, restaurants, and bars.

There are other Jewish enclaves in Paris: Belleville and La Villette in the northeast, where Jews from Germany and Poland settled in the nineteenth century; the suburb of Sarcelles, where the Jewish pharmacy was torched, which is known as “Little Jerusalem” because it is home to about fifteen thousand Jews; and my neighborhood, the Ninth Arrondissement, which has seven synagogues (but just four Catholic churches). In the 1880s, Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe settled in the Ninth and other parts of Paris. North African Sephardic Jews came later,
from Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and Algeria, because of the Arab-Israeli conflict following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948; a second wave arrived after decolonization.

Today the main Jewish area in the Ninth is southeast of the rue des Martyrs, where the rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, the rue Cadet, and the rue Richer intersect. On Friday evenings and Saturdays until dusk, Orthodox Jews wearing yarmulkes and prayer shawls walk in and out of neighborhood synagogues. The rue Richer, famous for the Folies Bergère theater, is the neighborhood’s main Jewish shopping street, with kosher food stores, a bookstore, restaurants, bakeries, and a chocolate shop. Some of the signs are in both French and Hebrew.

Although the rue des Martyrs has no kosher shops, you can find its Jewish spirit at the bottom of the street. The Carrefour supermarket stocks various kinds of matzo, halvah snacks, and candles for Shabbat. Joseph Amiel, who owns the Orphée jewelry shop, is a Jewish émigré from Tunisia; so are the florists running the outdoor flower shop off the rue des Martyrs on rue Hippolyte-Lebas.

The Grand Synagogue, with eighteen hundred seats, is the architectural jewel of the Jewish community in Paris. Opened in 1875, it was a symbol of the rising power, influence, and high standing enjoyed by the Jewish bourgeoisie during much of the nineteenth century. The family of Emperor Napoleon III donated the land; the Rothschild family, an international banking family with ties to European nobility, largely financed the construction.

The entrance is on the narrow rue de la Victoire, not on a grander and better-trafficked street. Napoleon III’s Spanish-born wife, Empress Eugénie, did not share her husband’s affection for Jews and disapproved of an entrance to a synagogue
between two nearby churches: Trinité and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. So the synagogue is oriented north, not east toward Jerusalem, as it should be.

The foyer, grand staircase, and gilded candelabra are done in ornate Second Empire style. With its soaring facade, high nave, and enormous organ, the synagogue has the feel of a cathedral. Light streams into the ninety-two-foot-high sanctuary through circular stained-glass windows. A Hebrew inscription from the Book of Genesis announces, “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” The synagogue looks European and familiar, not Moorish and foreign. Like the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame Cathedral, it has been classified as a national monument worthy of preservation. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy attended Yom Kippur services in 2006, when he was interior minister. Earlier that year, then-president Jacques Chirac participated in a memorial service at the synagogue for Ilan Halimi, a twenty-three-year-old Jewish man who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in the Paris suburb of Bagneux by a gang whose members called themselves
les barbares
. It was believed that Halimi was targeted because he was a Jew.

President François Hollande and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu came here in 2015 for a ceremony honoring the memory of the Jewish victims of the supermarket attack. In his remarks, Netanyahu refrained from urging French Jews to leave France and settle in Israel, as he had done before. He was more subtle, noting that all Jews today are “blessed” with the right to live there together with their Jewish brothers. Later in the ceremony, some people in the crowd shouted, “
Vive Israël!
” and others followed with “
Vive la France!”
The Israeli national anthem was sung, followed by “La Marseillaise.” And, as is the custom,
the congregation asked God to protect the French Republic. The message of the synagogue is clear: the Jewish community is integrated into the fabric of France.

THE EDGAR QUINET HIGH SCHOOL
nearby on the rue des Martyrs is similarly assimilated into French daily life. Yet it also bears witness to France’s collaboration with the Nazis. Once a public school for girls, it is now co-ed. It occupies the original three-story structure built in the late nineteenth century on the site of a private home, and there is still a garden with trees and rosebushes in the back. It is named after Edgar Quinet, a nineteenth-century French writer, philosopher, and historian who advocated free, secular, obligatory education for both sexes. His book collection and personal papers, including an exchange of letters with Victor Hugo, sit in a bookcase in the principal’s office. The school has a history of service to the French state. During World War I, the girls sewed bandages and clothing for the soldiers to wear in the trenches, and the soldiers sent back letters of thanks.

The outside of the school has been sand-blasted so thoroughly that its buff-colored stone seems to shine. The interior is run-down, with chipped, yellowing paint on the walls and bare parquet floors. Many students have ethnic roots in Arab North Africa, black sub-Saharan Africa, and Sri Lanka and come from working- and lower-class enclaves in the nearby Eighteenth Arrondissement. With few exceptions, they study technical subjects and trades.

Every year during his four-year tenure as principal until 2014, Jean-Claude Devaux hosted a ceremony of remembrance for the nineteen female students and one teacher who died during the
Occupation. “To our martyrs, victims of Nazi barbarism who died for France,” says a large memorial plaque in the foyer. “Tortured, deported, gassed, killed on the way or during bombings. To forget would be to betray.” Although the plaque, which lists all the girls’ names, has been in place since the end of World War II, it took fifty years for a French president—Jacques Chirac—to acknowledge the country’s role in the deportation of Jews and to formally apologize.

Scores of Paris schools have similar plaques. In the Ninth and Eighteenth Arrondissements, the Nazis deported about six hundred Jewish children to death camps. However, this plaque is unusual because the word “martyrs” is written in the feminine—
martyres
—because Edgar Quinet was still a school for girls in the 1940s.

The rue des Martyrs could have been named for them, for Fernande, Andrée, Blanche, Jacqueline, Huguette, Renée, Fanny, Marguerite, Lucienne, Louise, Alice, Lucette, Denise, Alice Rose, Lina, Éliane, Suzanne, Germaine Louise, and Madeleine Anne-Marie. The teacher is listed only by her last name: Dreyfus. Three died at Auschwitz, three at Ravensbrück. How the others perished is unknown.

One year I attended the remembrance ceremony at Edgar Quinet. I had expected a formal presentation in the auditorium, with all the students, where perhaps we would hear readings from Anne Frank’s
Diary of a Young Girl,
or a concert by the school chorus. Many of the students face discrimination in their daily lives, and I thought they would be moved by tragic stories of genocide and inhumanity.

Instead, the commemoration was a modest, intimate affair. Bouquets of peach-colored roses still wrapped in cellophane sat on
the floor below the plaque. Three students and a handful of teachers and administrators represented the school. A dozen elderly “Quinettes,” members of the alumni association, joined them. The night was damp and cold, and none of us took off our coats.

“We pass by this plaque every day, and too often we forget to look at what is written here,” Devaux told the group. “Every day we see the names of the martyrs on the rue des Martyrs. We have a duty to remember these girls—they were all girls—and their teacher, who were sought out and taken away to be killed.”

His message grew more urgent. “It is now our responsibility and yours, young students, to tell others they must remember so that it will never again be possible for police to come into our classrooms as hunters,” he said. “French police came to hunt down French girls, classmates of women who are with us tonight. Be vigilant so that it never happens again. Because anything is possible, always, always. You students must transmit the message to your generation that you must not discriminate, that you must not differentiate, that there can be no killing for religion or skin color.”

He called for a moment of silence. Then he asked the elderly women if they knew anyone named on the plaque. No one spoke at first. Then, one after another, the women began talking.

“My mother knew Blanche’s family.”

“Lucienne was in my class.”

“Lina and I went on vacation together. And Huguette was in my class.”

“Germaine Louise and Madeleine Anne-Marie were sisters who joined the Resistance.”

The women recalled the two-day
rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv’—
the massive roundup of Jews who were brought to the sports stadium
called the Vélodrome d’Hiver—in July 1942. Because it was summer vacation, the Jewish students from Edgar Quinet were taken with their families from their homes. One of the Quinettes at the commemoration recalled that the wailing of women and children had echoed off the buildings on the narrow streets as they were led away. When the roundup was over, more than twelve thousand Jews, including more than four thousand children, had been arrested in the city of Paris.

Lucienne Roudil recounted, without emotion, the story of her father, who had been a volunteer in the French army. He was deported to the internment camp at Drancy, outside Paris, where he died in 1941. Lucienne quit school at seventeen to help support her family. “I had the good fortune to be spared,” she said.

Madeleine Kahn said she had been visiting her grandmother in Romania during the summer of 1939. When the Germans closed the border, she, her grandmother, and her aunt were forced to relocate to a remote corner of Romania. Her grandmother died, but Madeleine was hidden by nuns and reunited with her family after the war. “The generations that came after us, yes, it’s hard for them to understand and learn from it,” she said.

Devaux thanked his guests and invited us upstairs for a reception. We followed in silence and sat around a long table in an unadorned conference room lit in bright fluorescence. “Who wants a hot drink?” he asked. No one replied. Tea or instant coffee was not what they had in mind. He tried again.

“Who wants something cool and refreshing? Something bubbly?”

Ah, yes, they murmured. He poured a budget brand of champagne into flutes, and when there weren’t enough to go around, a teacher fetched water glasses.

The women talked about mass killings of Jews in Ukraine during the war and how, even now, that horror is not fully known. They agreed that the Poles and Romanians had been more anti-Semitic than the Germans, and that anti-Semitism in Poland is still widespread. They lamented that too many young people today are indifferent to the Holocaust. One asked whether Jesus, born a Jew, would have been deported to a concentration camp if he had been living during Nazism.

Then, perhaps because of the champagne, perhaps because they themselves had survived, or perhaps because the trauma of remembrance was too painful to sustain, they turned to other subjects: the television series
A French Village,
about daily life during the Nazi Occupation; the injustice of the surveillance of private citizens around the world by America’s National Security Agency; the impossibility of having a typewriter repaired these days; the magic of the iPad.

Life goes on.

I NEVER WOULD HAVE
talked about religion in my proper, refined neighborhood off the rue du Bac. But along the rue des Martyrs, religion is a natural part of life. Stories emerge when you least expect them. One day I met with Jean-Michel Rosenfeld to learn about the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a scholarly organization named after the founder of modern French socialism. The foundation is run out of a building in the Cité Malesherbes, the private gated street halfway up the rue des Martyrs. Rosenfeld worked for forty years as a special counselor to Pierre Mauroy, a Socialist leader who was prime minister for three years in
the early 1980s under President François Mitterrand. “I was with Mauroy when he died,” Rosenfeld recalled. “I closed his eyes for the last time.”

Although he is retired, Rosenfeld serves as the foundation’s volunteer spokesman. He told me the complicated story of the building. It was constructed as a private home, then transformed into a single-room-only residence, “the kind of place where lonely people live.” Rosenfeld lowered his voice and added, “It is believed it was also a house for extramarital assignations.” During World War II the Nazis requisitioned the house. “The bastards,” he said. “One version of the story is that it became a private bordello for German officers.”

After the war, the Socialists worked in secret here. Mitterrand himself came on a regular basis before he was elected president in 1981.

“If only these walls could tell their stories,” said Rosenfeld.

Our conversation meandered, and he began talking about the Nazi Occupation. And Jewishness. His Jewishness. “It’s such an honor for me, a descendant of poor Jews from a miserable Polish shtetl, to have been awarded the Legion of Honor,” he said. “And I was interviewed by Steven Spielberg for his film
Schindler’s List
. I’m in his archives!”

Rosenfeld was five and living in Paris when his father left in 1939 to fight with a French unit of mostly Jewish soldiers. His father was captured and imprisoned by the Germans. Rosenfeld said that when the Nazis occupied France and then began deporting Jews to death camps, he and his mother were allowed to stay in the country. “My mother was French, a Jewish Frenchwoman, and my father was a prisoner of war,” he recalled. “There was a
law that protected the wives of prisoners, as long as they were French. If they were foreigners, they would be deported.”