The Postcard

by Anne Berest

“There’s one word for the nuclear family, and another for in-laws, and a third term that means ‘those who are considered to be like family’ even when there’s no blood tie. And then there’s a basically untranslatable term, something like ‘foster family’—di kest-eltern. ‘Host family,’ you might say, because traditionally, when parents sent a child away to university, they looked for a family who would provide lodging and meals for that child.”

Deliberately provocative, he made a point of doing everything forbidden to Jews on the holiday of Yom Kippur: smoking cigarettes, shaving, eating, and drinking.

he’d just earned his degree despite the numerus clausus in effect, which limited the number of Jews admitted to university to 3% of total enrollment.

Tradition dictates that, on his wedding day, the groom must smash a glass with his right foot after the ceremony, a gesture representing the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

He’d loved it when his father explained to him that the sweetness of the apples was meant to remind Jews to be wary of ease and comfort.

Do you understand? It’s freedom that is unreliable, that is gained through pain.

And the bitter herbs remind us that the life of a free man is inherently painful. Listen carefully, son—the instant you feel the touch of honey on your lips, ask yourself: of what, of whom, am I a slave?”

Nachman had been a young man when everything was suddenly forbidden to Jews—attending university, traveling from one region to another, giving Christian first names to their children, putting on theater productions.

Before the Revolution, their father had belonged to the first guild of merchants, which meant that he was among those rare Jews who had the right to travel freely around the country. It was an unheard-of privilege for Nachman to be able to live as a Russian in Russia.

The evening had been so pleasant, the siblings uniting in gentle mockery of their father. The Rabinovitches had no way of knowing that these were the last hours they would all spend together as a family.

After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks began to eliminate their former comrades-in-arms, including the Mensheviks and the revolutionary socialists.”

‘Everything is always all right in the pre-dawn, in that gray hour before sunrise.

the little girl was the Princess of the Kingdom of Riga, a proud and confident child, fully aware of her importance in the eyes of her parents—and thus of the whole world.

“Machines will be a revolution. They’ll free women from the burden of housework.

“My husband is like electricity,” Emma wrote to her parents, “traveling all over, bringing the light of progress wherever he goes.”

But Ephraïm the engineer, the progressivist, the cosmopolitan, had forgotten that an outsider will always be an outsider. He’d made the terrible mistake of believing that he could rely on happiness in any one place.

Myriam delighted in it all, with that spiteful glee children always feel when something embarrassing happens to a grown-up.

a landscape in his mind through which he wandered desolately, sometimes for whole days. He felt as though his life—his real life—had never begun.

The only way to keep from suffering, she knew, was just to move forward, to keep going, and never, never look back.

of them in the schoolyard. The sisters had come to operate like the government of their own tiny country, over which they reigned as a pair of queens.

She disliked the feeling, on arriving in a new house or a new neighborhood, of having to find her routines and habits again as if they were an object she’d mislaid.

In them, he read articles accusing the Jews of every crime under the sun. And, for the first time, he saw the face of Germany’s new chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Then he went home and shaved off his mustache.

childless adults always fascinate children as much as they reassure them.

Myriam would remember declarations of war, later, as being very noisy.

Germania—“Germania, capital of the world.” Adolf Hitler wanted to turn Berlin into a model city, reproducing Europe’s greatest monuments but on a scale ten times greater than the originals, including the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe. His favorite building was the Opéra Garnier, with its neo-Baroque architecture.

The carefree interludes, the moments with no real purpose. That melancholy feeling that these were the last days, that life as it was had been irretrievably lost.

In times of peace, it is the Ephraïms who are the backbone of a people—because they have children and raise them with love, patience, and intelligence, day by day. They are the guarantors of a functioning country. But in times of chaos, it’s the Emmanuels who save their people—because they refuse to submit to any rule and because they sow their oats in other countries, creating children they will never acknowledge . . . but who will survive them.” “It’s horrible to think of Ephraïm being so obedient to the very government planning his destruction.”

“It’s also very important to note that the first deportments involved only ‘foreign Jews.’” “I’m sure that was deliberate.” “Of course. Naturalized citizens who were well assimilated into French society had too much support.

“Foreigners were less established in the country, so they were ‘invisible.’” “They existed in the gray area of indifference.

“Indifference is universal. Who are you indifferent toward today, right now? Ask yourself that. Which victims living in tents, or under overpasses, or in camps way outside the cities are your ‘invisible ones’? The Vichy regime set out to remove the Jews from French society. And they succeeded.”

Vicente Picabia was a young man who had grown up alone, like quack grass, the bane of a gardener’s existence, like dandelions, impossible to eradicate.

to soften their impact. How could she explain to Noémie that this night belonged to her, that she wanted to have an experience all to herself, for once?

pretty as the last one, little Rosie. Her son broke hearts with a dedication he didn’t seem to apply to anything else.

Myriam stepped back out into the streets of Paris feeling as if she’d lived her whole life in a single night.

Nothing would ever be the same again, because of this complicated, handsome boy, so beautiful she could die of it.

the ghetto became an open-air morgue, with dozens dying of starvation or disease every day. Bodies no one knew what to do with were left piled in carts. Putrid miasmas drifted through the air. The Germans did not enter, for fear of infection. They simply waited. This was the beginning of the extermination of the Jews, through death by “natural causes.”

occupiers. The exhibition opened on September 5, 1941, with the purpose of explaining to the citizens of Paris why the Jews as a race were dangerous for France. It sought to provide “scientific” proof that Jews were greedy, lying, corrupt, and sexually obsessed. It was a manipulation of public opinion that would demonstrate to the French that the Germans weren’t their enemy. The Jews were.

The Third Reich’s plan to exterminate millions of people was so vast that they had to proceed in stages over the span of several years. The first part of it, as you saw, was to enact ordinances aimed at neutralizing the Jews, to prevent them from acting. You see the sleight of hand there?” “Yes. They separated the Jews from the French population; they distanced them physically, made them invisible.”

Sometimes, the mind lingers on pointless things. Certain tiny, absurd details hold your attention when reality has lost all of its usual meaning, when life becomes so insane that you can’t call on any past experience to know what to do.

Lying side by side in the trunk, the young woman and the painter didn’t exchange a single word. The era of silence began that day; the era of words that, for the sake of self-protection, you didn’t say; the era of questions you didn’t ask, even in your own head, to keep from putting yourself in danger.

Fuel had been requisitioned by the Germans, and so Jeanine and Gabriële, like all the French, had to use other liquids capable of powering their combustion engines. A car would run on Godet cognac, eau de Cologne, fabric stain remover, the rubber-based glue used to repair tires, even red wine. That day, Jeanine and Gabriële were driving on a mixture of gasoline, benzene, and beet alcohol.

“I told you; I haven’t made up a single thing. Doctor Adélaïde Hautval really existed. She wrote a book after the war, Médicine et crimes contre l’humanité. I have a copy; it’s over there—grab it for me, will you? I’ve highlighted several passages. Look, she describes the day of July 17, when new internees arrived in waves:

Adélaïde Hautval was named Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel in 1965. At the time Noémie met her she was thirty-six years old, a neuropsychiatrist and the daughter of a pastor, transferred to Pithiviers to run the camp’s infirmary.

“They all wanted to reassure their loved ones. They didn’t want them to worry. So they said everything was fine. They never told the truth. That’s why the revisionists used those letters to argue their case, later on.”

The woman before you. She was a writer, too.” “Really?” Noémie asked. “There was another author here?” “What was her name again?” The Polish woman asked another detainee. “I only remember her first name,” the other woman said. “Irène.” “Irène Némirovsky?” Noémie asked, frowning. “Yes, that was it!” the young woman exclaimed.

“No was a wonderful assistant,” she wrote later. “She looked life square in the face, demanding something meaningful from it, something rich. She was always ready to throw herself into living, body and soul, seeing it as overflowing with possibilities, certain in the knowledge that she would be one, someday, to whom many eyes turned.”

“One day when I was in the prefecture archives in Eure, I stumbled across Ephraïm’s letter. It was overwhelming. I held in my hands the very envelope he had enclosed, with its 1.5-franc stamp bearing the likeness of Marshal Pétain. No one had ever bothered to reply.” “I thought the local authority archives had been destroyed after the war.” “Not really. It’s true that the French government had a major cleanout of its regional archives, particularly anything incriminating—but three departments refused to comply, and lucky for us, Eure was one of them.

Ephraïm looked at Emma. Her face was a landscape he had traveled so many times over. He took his wife’s feet, ice-cold in the freezing air of the livestock car, and breathed on them, and rubbed them with his hands to warm them up. Emma and Ephraïm were gassed immediately after arriving at Auschwitz, during the night of November 6–7, because of their ages: fifty and fifty-two. “Proud as a chestnut-seller showing off his wares to everyone who passes.”

Whether these situations were commonplace, risky, comical, unbelievable, or accepted, luck was on my side. I always tried to keep some hope and to stay as cool-headed as possible. I can remember it all in a split-second, but writing it down . . . well, that’s something else.

Somehow I managed to do all the things a mother does: tell my daughter to hurry up, help her get dressed in the changing room, fold the gi and put it in her sports bag, retrieve the socks caught in the bunched-up cuffs of her trousers and the sandals that had slipped through the planks of the changing room bench, all the miniature objects—shoes, lunchboxes, mittens connected by a strand of yarn—designed to vanish into every nook and cranny. I put my arms around my daughter and hugged her as hard as I could, trying to calm my own racing heart.