Speak You Also: A Holocaust Memoir

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Epigraph

Apprenticeship

Digression I

The Last Fight

The Life and Death of Philippe

Digression II

The Black Hole

The Last Salon

One Sunday in Spring

The Big Bluff

Digression III

The Verdict

The Slap

Digression IV

Funeral March

The Last Lap

Hindsight

Copyright

Speak, you also,

speak as the last,

have your say.

—PAUL CELAN

Translated by

Michael Hamburger

Apprenticeship

I was in my junior year at the Lycée Claude-Bernard. I was almost seventeen. I’d barely made it through my first baccalauréat examination, scraping by with only one and a half points to spare.

It was September 23 and I’d just spent a few months in absolute euphoria, which might, in the year of disgrace 1943, seem hard to believe.

I’d been suffering from gambling fever for a full year, ever since one of my classmates, who was later to have a brilliant career as a racing columnist, had dragged me along with him to the Auteuil racetrack, in the Bois de Boulogne. I didn’t need much persuasion. From that day on, I was hooked. I cut classes to go to the track, and during the winter, since I couldn’t go all the way across Paris to the Vincennes racecourse, I counted the days until the steeplechase and flat-racing season opened again. It wasn’t long before I was in hock up to my neck, to the tune of two years’ spending money.

There wasn’t a single school chum, friend of the family, or vague acquaintance I hadn’t hit up for money, including even the old Russian guy with the lending library. I’d been reduced to slinking around, and rumor had it I’d sold the family silver, which was an exaggeration: at most I’d swiped a bit of money from my father’s pockets.

Things had reached this sorry pass when my day arrived. The moment of glory every player encounters once or twice in a lifetime. I was later—much later—to have two more such strokes of luck, but by then I was no longer a serious gambler, so my good fortune didn’t thrill me anywhere near as much.

*   *   *

On the day in question, I arrived at Auteuil for the third race; I had thirty francs on me, and the infield lawn, the cheapest public enclosure, was bathed in sunshine. The race was a steeple with nine starters. I picked Kami, owned by the baron de Bourgoing, and bet ten and ten. Kami romped home at four to one.

The fourth event was the main hurdle race of the spring season. I’d made my choice long before: M. Cruz Valer’s Ludovic the Moor, ridden by Bonaventure, red cap, red and yellow stripes. The horse had run three times that season without showing, and I was convinced he’d been held back for this race. He was a horse of supreme elegance. I adored the way he caressed the hedges going over them. He was a great favorite, three to one, if I recall correctly. He won by three lengths and was never even challenged. I’d bet thirty francs each way. Out of gratitude I’ve bet on Ludovic the Moor’s offspring down to the third generation.

The fifth race was the big steeplechase for four-year-olds. I was on a roll. I chose Melik II, trained by Buquet, ridden by Dornaletche (who won once in a blue moon), ten-to-one odds. At the eighth pole water hazard, I was a little worried; Melik was in sixth place but running clear. I lost sight of the horses when they tackled the last turn by the porte de Passy and the Open Ditch, I heard shouting from the stands when someone took a spill, then the horses hurtled past me a hundred yards from the finish. Melik II, blue cap, blue and white checked silks, had a six-length lead and danced past the winning post.

I was loaded with money. I felt like I was God and that the future was up to me. In the sixth race I recognized an old acquaintance: C. V. Lombard’s Kitai, eight big goose eggs his last eight times out, now at forty to one. The hour of his resurrection had come. I bet a hundred francs to place and Kitai promptly came home second, paying twice as much as the winner.

At that point I decided to call it a day. The next morning I paid my debts, cash on the barrel head. I bought all the books I wanted. I still had more than enough left for a few splurges in the near future. Except for one small hitch: the following week, I lost almost everything.

But what relief, what delight, what luck it was to live that day!

*   *   *

My obsession did not prevent me from keeping up with the news. The war had taken a turn for the better. Italy had switched sides, the Soviet army was running roughshod over Jerry and approaching the Polish frontier, everyone was waiting for the Allied landing, and the collabos were looking grim. The wind had shifted. I had long ago stopped wearing the yellow star; the turf was one reason, plus I figured it was a trap for suckers.

I wasn’t a complete idiot. I’d noticed my circle gradually thinning out, I’d heard about the Vel d’hiv’* roundups, which had barely touched the posh 16th arrondissement, where I lived. I knew that being one of the chosen people was not the fashion of the day or even of yesterday, let alone of the days to come.

My father had never bothered to talk to me about what might lie ahead. My sister was in unoccupied France with false papers, my brother had been in England since 1936. I was the youngest; my father didn’t care much for me. After all, I’d killed his wife, my mother, when I was born. I loathed my stepmother.

As for my mother, I had to wait until the winter of 1992 to introduce myself to her. In East Berlin, at the old Jewish cemetery. At her tomb, clean and neat in that ravaged junkyard of families, their descendants extinguished because they burned so well. Thanks to my brother, her grave had been maintained. I brought back photos: my daughter Hélène saw her grandmother Hélène’s name engraved on the plinth of gray marble.

True, a friend of the family, Mme Lurienne, had stepped in and tried to hide me with some farm people she knew in Troissereux, north of Beauvais. We’d taken the train at the Gare du Nord and then a wheezy country bus. I’d brought along my fishing pole, with which I’d been contributing to my little family’s supply of protein by catching gudgeon, roach, and bleak beneath the pont Exelmans. I was sometimes joined by a classmate, Jacques Deniaud, an experienced angler who’d reel in five fish for my every one. It was my first encounter with technical skill.

Waiting for me in Troissereux was a real French family. Father, mother, their little mam’selle, and Auntie examined me suspiciously and kept me for three days, which I devoted to fishing for rainbow perch in the local pond. Then they informed Mme Lurienne that they couldn’t run the risk of letting me stay, for fear of upsetting the Kommandantur. I packed my stuff and returned to Paris, not forgetting my fishing pole.

My best friend, Pierre Bertaux, who lived in Sèvres and in whose home I’d spent many a Sunday, could not persuade his parents to take me in, either. His father was some sort of administrative secretary in the Senate and was afraid of jeopardizing his sinecure.

And so that’s how I came to set out on September 23, 1943, armed with ration coupons, to fetch our daily bread from the bakery on the boulevard Exelmans, just beyond the corner of rue Erlanger.

A few years later, in 1950, while driving north to Le Touquet, I went through Troissereux again. I allowed myself the luxury of stopping there. The farm was a bit more dilapidated. The small grocery store, which the family ran to earn a little something extra, had closed.

Mam’selle, who still was one, did not recognize me, or pretended not to. I had to explain to her that I was the boy who (and so on), that I’d been deported shortly afterward, that I’d made it back by the merest chance, and that I held her and her parents in everlasting contempt. She mumbled a few indistinct words, among which I made out the inevitable We didn’t know. I must really have spoiled her afternoon. Cold comfort.

Back at the bakery in 1943, the long arm of the law had been waiting. There were two plainclothes policemen and they were on to me. The informer’s letter had been quite explicit. Times were hard: the police didn’t have a car so we took the Métro. They explained to me that they were armed and would use their guns if I tried to escape. They didn’t bother with handcuffs.

I suppose that in September 1943 two police officers taking a sixteen-year-old kid, probably Jewish, on the Métro in handcuffs might have aroused the ire of the working classes and that my escorts preferred to avoid embarrassment. I must have had two or three chances while our train was sitting in a station, before the doors had shut, to make a run for it. I did no such thing … My life would have been completely different, and I would not be writing these lines.

I think the Cité station was closed; we got out at Odéon, and there I had a strange inspiration. I asked my cops if I could duck into Librairie Maloine, a bookstore on rue de l’École-de-Médecine; I still had a tiny reserve left over from my exploits at the track, and I chose a book of analytical inorganic chemistry. I knew absolutely nothing about the subject, which was part of the first-year university curriculum for the degree in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, but I was very keen on chemistry.

M. Artigas had been my physics and chemistry teacher at Claude-Bernard for two years in a row. He was not exactly charismatic—indeed, my classmates found him frankly pathetic—but by some miracle, through some improbable channel, he’d managed to get me interested in chemistry. Only chemistry; I was a washout in physics.

Mendeleyev’s table, valences, inorganic chemical reactions like H2SO4 + KMnO4 held no secrets for me, and I haunted the science museum, the Palais de la Découverte, where I discussed rare earth metals with the head of the inorganic chemistry department. The periodic table, in color, was the sole decoration of the closet that served as my bedroom.

The book was to come with me to Drancy, the collection camp on the northeastern outskirts of Paris, and on to Auschwitz, where it was confiscated, but by then I knew it by heart, and the knowledge I’d acquired would later help save my life.

Long afterward, around 1960, a friend who was a math instructor helped me track down Artigas, who happened to be teaching in my friend’s lycée. I went to see him and recounted my story. I sometimes imagine that he was deeply moved by it; I would have been, in his place. Can one conceive of a more magnificent destiny for an educator than saving someone’s life through his teaching? If he was touched, he didn’t show it. I did not see him again. Peace to his soul!

From Odéon we walked to police headquarters, myself in front, the cops two steps behind. We went up a few flights to a shabby office. There they went through the motions of questioning me as to the whereabouts of the rest of my tribe. I played dumb, and they didn’t press me.

I was only just beginning to feel distressed. I think I had tears in my eyes at one point. I sensed, and rightly so, that I was at a turning point in my life.

They decided to take me home so I could pack a suitcase. I tried in vain to find out what