The Postcard

by Anne Berest

Trains from the East arrive every hour, streaming into Paris’s various stations. Planes land at Le Bourget and Villacoublay sometimes, too. On the first day, a uniformed brass band welcomed the returning deportees with a rousing rendition of “La Marseillaise.” Passengers returning from extermination camps were helped off the train first, and then prisoners of war, and finally those who had been drafted into the Service du travail obligatoire. That was on the first day. Outside the stations, the returning survivors are told to board buses—the very same buses that, months earlier, transported rounded-up men and women to the transit camps that were their last stop before the stock cars and trains to the East. “There really weren’t any suitable alternatives,” they are told. The deportees remain standing on the bus, crowded closely together, watching the streets of the capital slide past beyond the windows. Some of them are seeing Paris for the first time. They can see the eyes of the Parisians widen as they pass, the pedestrians and drivers pausing for a few seconds, wondering where these hairless beings in striped pajamas flooding into their city...

offers the passengers a bag of juicy red cherries. He lifts the bag up toward the bus window, and dozens of arms thin as matchsticks reach out for it, their spidery fingers grasping for the fruit. “Don’t feed the deportees!” cries the Red Cross nurse aboard the bus. “Their stomachs can’t handle it!” The returning prisoners know very well that the cherries are poison for their systems, but the temptation is too great. The bus starts moving again, toward the Left Bank and the Place Saint-Michel, the boulevard Saint-Germain. And the cherries don’t stay down and are vomited up again. “They should mind their manners,” a watching pedestrian comments. They should eat more politely, thinks another. “They smell so bad. They should shower.”

One man recognizes the bus waiting outside the Gare de l’Est. It’s the very same bus that took him from Paris to Drancy.

The man thinks to himself that it’s been a long time since he had any kind of ID. Or any money. Or a wife, or a child, or hair, or teeth.

He knows that he used to dress just like these people crowding around him, that he had hair on his head and teeth in his mouth just like them, but he also knows he will never be like them again.

the bystander gives the yogurt to the man, and it perforates his stomach because it’s too heavy for someone hanging on to life by a single thread after being evacuated from Auschwitz by the SS in January, three whole months ago, after having somehow survived the final massacres and death-marches and forced walks through the snow beneath the blows of the soldiers’ truncheons, the constant humiliations, the chaos of the fall of the Reich, and the journeys in the same stock cars, on the same trains, and hunger, and thirst, and the fight to stay alive long enough to get home, a fight that has been almost impossible for his exhausted body, and so his heart finally stops beating there and then, on the day of his arrival home, on the gray pavement of Paris, at the bottom of the stairs on the rue d’Alsace, after weeks and weeks of fighting. His body is so thin that it folds in on itself as it crumples to the ground softly, like a dead leaf, and settles there slowly, without making any sound at all.

Who would take the risk of talking and not being believed? And who could bear to say things like this to the waiting families?

These men spray the deportees with this powder using long hoses. It’s hard for the survivors to endure. But, the men explain, there is really no other way.

Some French militia members even tattoo their left forearms with a false registration number to make it look like they’ve come back from Auschwitz.

“Don’t worry, the rooms are very well heated.” The radiators are turned to their highest setting even though it’s the middle of summer, because the deportees’ malnourished, stick-thin bodies are always cold. “They’d rather sleep on the floor even though the rooms have comfortable beds. It’s so strange.” The deportees lie on the floor because they can’t sleep on the softness of a mattress anymore. Often, three or four of them need to lie together, pressed against one another, in order to fall asleep. They’re all ashamed of their shaved heads and the sores and abscesses covering their bodies. They know just how horrific the sight of them is.

Some deportees no longer speak anything but German, while others repeat their registration number over and over.

Myriam approaches one of the panels just as the deportees who have just arrived do the same, drawn by all these photographs of the world from before, now buried beneath ash.

She isn’t the only one who will die here. There are dozens every day, their fragile, exhausted bodies unable to withstand the emotion of returning, of reuniting.

so she writes their first names in large capital letters, so they’ll be able to spot them easily amid the dozens, hundreds, thousands of forms papering the lobby. EPHRAÏM EMMA NOÉMIE JACQUES. Then she signs her name and writes her and Vicente’s address on the rue de Vaugirard so that her parents will know where to find her.

Sad

“Madame, we did send people to arrange repatriations from Ravensbrück. But there was no one left to repatriate.” The words are clear, but Myriam doesn’t understand them. Her brain simply refuses to register the meaning of the phrase. There was no one left to repatriate.

Amphetamines are known to diminish potency, but on that particular night the opposite had been true, and Lélia had been conceived during a night of seemingly endless passion. That was precisely what Vicente loved about drugs: the surprise.

1925 and 1950 weren’t so very far apart.

1950 and 1985 weren’t so very far apart.

The pattern was undeniable.

The book Georges gave me, Nathalie Zajde’s Children of Survivors, told me everything I should have said to Déborah during that Pesach dinner, just a few weeks too late. Déborah, I don’t know what it means to be “truly Jewish” or “not truly Jewish.” All I can tell you is that I’m the child of a survivor. That is, someone who may not be familiar with the Seder rituals, but whose family died in the gas chambers. Someone who has the same nightmares as her mother, and is trying to find her place among the living. Someone whose body is the grave of those who never had a proper burial. You said I’m only Jewish when it suits me. But, Déborah, when my daughter was born, when I held her for the first time, do you know what I thought of? The first image that went through my mind? It was the mothers who were breastfeeding when they were sent to the gas chambers. So yes, it would suit me not to think about Auschwitz every day. It would suit me for things to be different. It would suit me not to be afraid of the government, afraid of gas, afraid of losing my identity papers, afraid of enclosed spaces, afraid of dog bites, afraid of crossing borders, afraid of traveling by airplane, afraid of crowds and the glorification of virility, afraid of men in groups, afraid of my children being taken from me, afraid of people who obey orders, afraid of uniforms, afraid of being late, afraid of being stopped by the police, afraid whenever I have to renew my passport. Afraid of saying that I’m Jewi...

I am the daughter, and the granddaughter, of survivors.

The heroine of Noémie’s book was named Anne.

And Myriam never brought up any memories that would have made me question it. She never said ‘once in Russia,’ or ‘when I used to spend my vacations in Poland,’ or ‘when I was a little girl in Latvia,’ or ‘at my grandparents’ house in Palestine.’ We had no idea that she’d lived in all those places.”

Sometimes I felt like she saw us as a kind of adoptive family. She was happy to share a moment of warmth or a meal in our company, but deep down, all she really wanted was to be back with her real family.

Myriam had given the children she’d had with Yves the names of Jacques and Nicole.

They’d each had something tragic happen to them when they were teenagers, Jacques at age seventeen, Nicole at nineteen. No one had connected the dots. Because of the silence. And because, in this family, we didn’t believe in psychoanalysis.

Something very strange had happened: Myriam had forgotten how to speak French. She’d learned the language late, at age ten, and it was simply gone from her memory. She only spoke Russian now. As her mental capacity waned, she fell back into the language of her childhood, and I vividly remember writing letters to her in Cyrillic so we could still have contact with her.

“I’m sure you’re pregnant,” he said. “If it’s a girl, we’ll call her Noémie. And Jacques if it’s a boy. What do you think?” “No,” I said. “We’ll pick a name that belongs only to them, and no one else.”

“Myriam got very confused at the end of her life. She thought Lélia had known Ephraïm, Emma, Jacques, and Noémie. She even said to my mother once: ‘You know what your grandparents were like,’ as if Lélia had grown up with them.” That was when Georges suddenly had the idea of showing the postcard to Juliette. I had a photo of it on my phone. “Oh yes, of course I recognize it,” Juliette said. “What?” “I’m the one who sent it.” “What do you mean? You wrote this postcard?” “Oh, no! I only put it in the mailbox.” “But who wrote it?” “Myriam. Very shortly before she died. A few days, maybe. I had to help her a bit, guide her hand. She had trouble forming letters at the end.”

“Do you remember putting the stamp on upside-down?” “I don’t, no. It was dreadfully cold, and my husband was waiting for me in the car. I must not have been paying attention.

“But why did Myriam want to send this postcard to herself?” “Because she knew her memory was failing, and she said to me, ‘I can’t forget them. If I do, there will be no one left to remember that they ever existed.’”

With her sister Claire, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed biography of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse.