Hazkarah 2021 Ceremony: speech by Jean-Claude Grumberg
September 12, 2021, at the Shoah Memorial in Paris.
Commemoration dedicated to the memory of the unburied victims of the Shoah.
Transcription of the speech by Jean-Claude Grumberg, author
June 1, 21
A speech
Memorial
Jean-Claude Grumberg
Autumn 2021
A speech
How to say no to someone who does you the honor of soliciting your word in such a place on such a day? But how to say yes? One should possess the genius of a poet, or the heartbreaking voice of Scholom Katz singing the kaddish for the dead of Auschwitz, Maïdanek, Treblinka. How to say yes when one knows oneself from experience, when one feels incapable of sharing one’s own pain, then how to evoke the immensity of everyone’s pain? So I tried my usual neither-no nor-yes against Mr. Eric de Rothschild, and here I am.
But it is not the old writer who for ages tries to make laugh – yellow – of his misfortunes, no, it is the child, the child who stands before you. The child returning from the former free zone, from Moissac via Grenoble and Toulouse, his brother holding him securely by the hand; the child who does not recognize his mother and hides behind his older brother to escape the lady with a sharp voice who wants to kiss him while trying to stifle him on the landing of the family home; the child who cannot find his father whom he has no memory of, neither visual, nor sound; the child who learns to read the word «disappeared», then to decipher this mysterious word «deported», then who learns to write it, «father’s profession: deported», and finally to scribble the decisive word «deceased», «father’s profession: deceased, in Drancy Seine». Drancy? Whatever! I know, I know, I could today have this "death in Drancy" corrected by "death in Auschwitz" corrected by the civil status, but why should I do it? I prefer to keep this "death in Drancy" which testifies better than I can of the little case, interest, and respect that the victorious French Republic showed for our dead, as well as for the survivors and their families.
On this subject – how to repair the past through civil status – a lady, a reader, knowing that I was not using the Internet, kindly told me, after a search on her own device, what would be the «repair» waiting for me in any civil status office. Zacharie, my father, becomes my mother, Zacharie Grumberg, born in Galatz, Romania. And Naftali, his father, my grandmother, also born in Galatz.
The child who finally refuses to do his bar mitzvah as he feels in disagreement with higher authorities, while feeling deep inside himself, day by day, month by year, more and more Jewish, and even Jewish Jewish. Then it is the child leaving school, with a certificate in his pocket, after having visited on summer vacation, in Czechoslovakia, Terezin and in East Germany, Ravensbrück, among other children of deportees, even of executed prisoners, who never talked to each other about their parents' fate, of their brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, disappeared in Drancy or elsewhere, all of them standing at attention, red scarf tied around the neck, facing rising colors and falling flags seasoned with speeches without any connection to their own history.
Consider again, I beg you, the apprentice in short breeches, running from one boss – small boss, very small boss – to the other. He had eighteen. Eighteen bosses in four years of assiduous unlearning of the tailor’s trade, but eighteen opportunities to learn the living profession!
Every boss, every boss, every worker, every worker – I think of Bella, sitting on the stool next to Suzanne’s, my mom, both pulling the needle all day long. When I came to pick up my mother, on Saturday at noon, I only saw the number on Bella’s arm go up and down to the rhythm of the wide needled. Each, each had a story of life or survival.
Everyone kept it to themselves. The apprentice knew the meaning of these numbers traced indelibly on the very skin of the survivors. At camp, at the CEC, a mono, whose childish rumor whispered that he was a survivor of the death camps, wore a band-aid on his forearm. One day, I told him: "You know, I know what’s under your bandage." He blinked then and mouth at an angle slid: "The phone number of my hen."
One of my bosses, Mr. Spodek, in the middle of a dominos game, said one day to the apprentice: "We are going to take advantage of the off-season to bring all the machine heads for overhaul." There were three machines. Two Pfaff, one Singer.
He passed an arm through the head of one of the Pfaff telling me: "You see, you pass your arm there, you make a small movement there like that, it makes a click, and then you lift, it comes naturally." He looks at me. He has a machine head attached to his right arm. '– Yes, Mr. Spodek.' He repeats the maneuver of his left forearm, the numbered one. Then he stands in the center of his workshop – his dining room, indeed, which served as his workshop except during meal times – there, holding a machine head at each arm, he tells me with a chin-thrust that I must take the head of the Singer in my turn, probably had it-he left because it seemed lighter than Pfaff’s heads, and that in short, it was my machine.
I slide my arm, I block the machine head in the crook of my elbow, I make the small movement, no click. I look at him, with a nod he tells me to start again. I start again, still no click. Desperate, I then try to pull the head of the Singer from the table of the Singer. Nothing happens. Singer’s head remains riveted to his table. He then approaches, making me back with another head movement, then slips his left forearm again, the numbered one, click, and even clack, then moves thus towards the door. I rush to open it for him. He passes in front.
I follow him on the winding staircase of this dilapidated building in the Marais, carrying the three heads of machines clinging to his arms, me carrying my swaying arms. I follow her number with my eyes. I am ashamed, ashamed. And I tell myself, repressing my tears: you, you wouldn’t have even lasted a day there.
Never did Mr. Spodek talk to me about the camps, I never dared to question him even during those endless off-season domino games where I had to cheat to let him win.
I never spoke at home, on my way back from this summer vacation, about my visit to Terezin or Ravensbrück. We weren’t talking about anything, and especially not about that.
Was mom still waiting for dad? Was my brother still waiting for his father? I wasn’t expecting anything. I had no memory of Zacharie, neither of his physique nor of his voice, nothing.
We lived, my brother and I the nose in the books, books borrowed from the municipal library of the 10th district town hall. It is these books that threw me into our story. I had taken a book, The Last Frontier by Howard Fast, because it talked about Indians and cowboys. I loved books that talked about Indians and cowboys.
Howard Fast described soberly but meticulously the massacre of the last Sioux, the agony then the death of squaws and their children, old men, living treasures, all dying of hunger and cold in the snow, while the young warriors were being massacred by the United States cavalry. Is it the snow? Hunger? The death of children, babies and their helpless mothers, the death of men? In any case, after this reading, I fell into my story, our story.
Then there was The Breviary of Hatred by Léon Poliakov, then Le Pitre ne rit pas by David Rousset, and over the years history books, testimonies and The Last of the Righteous by André Schwartz-Bart that broke the silence for a while. Yes, it is these books, these thousands of books that have edified over the years and which still edify our history, thus restoring our dignity and memory.
During these years, Suzanne battled hard against the bureaucratic hydra in order to obtain a widow’s pension. At last she was told that she had no right to it, for if she herself were French, the disappeared was not. He was no longer even Romanian, he had become by the magic of a Vichy decree «stateless person of Romanian origin». That stateless persons pay pensions to stateless persons!
The young and victorious fourth Republic, although a legitimate heir of Vichy, did not want to ensure the after-sales service for the trade of humans delivered in cattle trains to the buyer, who never had enough.
It was therefore long after the buyer himself, Germany, the FRG, who volunteered to pay some subsidies to the families of stateless persons in need.
One day, we were waiting in line, mom and I – I always had to accompany her for the papers, me or Maxime my older brother, she didn’t know how to read well – we were in one of those consulates of the RFA, in a sumptuous building in the beautiful neighborhoods. There was a kind of debacle, a bit like when an American movie about the Jews came out in a cinema on the main boulevards, at the opening of the box the tail was no longer vertical but suddenly became horizontal, a shapeless and disorderly mass, all of them having such a need for a film that talks about them, all of them needing so much help too, and therefore papers, censuses, certificates, declarations on honor.
Everyone trying to queue up, questioning each other, whining in Yiddish. So a man came out of the queue and shouted very loudly, in Yiddish too, mom translated for me: "You are not ashamed? You are not ashamed? In front of them! To them!
He meant the bureaucrats. Mom had pointed them out to me: real Boche heads. "Hold on! Move in! Get respect!" No one listened to him, no one aligned themselves. “They are watching us. ” Are they watching us? Let them watch us! We owe them nothing, neither respect, nor politeness, nor above all discipline.
This war of papers lasted a long time for mom, a vain war that many survivors and families had to wage.
But Suzanne, she had to face on two fronts. At 34 rue de Chabrol, she received registered letters with acknowledgment of receipt from the building manager who was demanding immediate eviction – "immediate eviction" these two words made her tremble – the payment of rent during the years of war. She argued that there was a law stipulating that the wives of prisoners did not have to pay these rents. He replied: Yes, but your husband was not a prisoner of war; he was deported. This is how we learned a little late that it was much better to be a prisoner of war than deported.
My brother, when he started working, went to throw the little money he was earning in the face of the generous manager who wanted to make him pay as a bonus for the repair of the platform door, broken by police boots.
At home, there was only one gesture, let’s say a ritual gesture, intended for the memory of the absent, the disappearance and the disappeared. Between Rosh Hashanah and Kippur, on a day like today, therefore, mom lit on the kitchen window overlooking the tiny courtyard and without vis-à-vis, a silver timpani, adorned with a tiny wick that she carefully lit.
We asked him why this candle that lit so little? 'For the memory of those who are no longer.' She explained that it was especially not necessary for the flame to go out in the night, that it had to last until the morning so that the memory was maintained and respected. The next morning I went to check the very small flame of the memory, and each time it trembled a little more before extinguishing.
How to talk about the disappeared? About the disappearance? Of a father whose voice and face I know nothing about, if not through some too rare photos. How to pay tribute to him and his father Naftali, a blind deportee, carried down the stairs by two sympathetic cops... or in too much of a hurry. They had so much work, so many youpins to pick up!
Too often I found myself confronted with a strange argument: the cops, the gendarmes, the prefects, the sub-prefects, those who scooped up, those who filled trains with merchandise with straw on good days, those who crowded families, children like animals, those who stacked invalids on blind people, those who drove these trains, all those claimed and still claim that they did not know what the real purpose of the journey was. I personally think that these people were not very clever. Who would take a blind man, who would make him cross the whole of Europe in the middle of a war, in a cattle wagon? Where did we need so much chair repairers? Piano tuners?
It was when I lost one eye and the other was threatened that I intensely thought of Naftali, his loneliness in the carriage, his fear, his terror, during this last trip, the last trip of this old Romanian Jew, from Drancy to ... He left alone two months before Zacharie, alone in absolute darkness.
The great danger for the children and grandchildren of deportees is imagination. Above all, do not imagine transportation. Be careful not to end up on the train, in the wagon, with him, with them. Do not follow them in the wagons. And if they do not die during the transport, do not follow them to the arrival under the gas. Yes, imagination was and remains our enemy.
The loneliness, the fear, the suffering, the inexplicable end of these people who had crossed Europe in the other direction to find there, in France, welcome, protection, work, freedom. Freedom to think, freedom to be oneself and especially freedom to be what one is.
Recently, a man of my age, son of a deportee like me, whose father had left in the same convoy as Zacharie – the convoy 49 – told me:
– Your father, like mine, was part of the Sonderkommando.
I replied to him:
– No! Your father maybe, not mine.
He then replied to me:
– Yes yes! They were one hundred twenty-two, one hundred twenty-two men in this convoy to be selected to be part of the ...
– No! Your father if you want, but not mine.
– But how can you be sure? he said to me.
– Because it’s me who decides. He didn’t even enter the camp, he knew nothing, he saw nothing, he was gassed upon arrival.
There, that’s how I saved my father from the most terrible in my eyes.
Teenager, I waited, I hoped, yes, hoped that a survivor stood up and spoke to tell us the why of this abomination by delivering us the «objective» reasons– it was a fashionable word – of this bankruptcy of culture and civilization. I also hoped, selfishly, that he would thus give me a reason to live in this world that has become odious in my eyes. Gradually I stopped waiting, understanding that there was nothing to understand. Life on earth had become simply, even before the theater became aware of it, absurd. Absurd, hideous and obscene. But for us, for me, for the children of those reduced to ashes, it belonged, it belonged to me, to preserve the small flame that flickers on the edge of the kitchen windows so that it continues to flicker to illuminate, even if so weakly, the darkness.
The darkness by nature slowly dissipates and despite the past decades, it still stagnates around us. These few days last August brought us back to it. A title, a newspaper title emerged. I am everywhere. During the writing of L'Atelier, I read a few copies of this Je suis partout. One of its last edits stuck in my mind. Written by the two editors in chief, Rebatet and Cousteau.
The subject was literary. It seems that literature was a constant concern of these gentlemen. Therefore, the editorial is entitled Le Napu. The Napu would be the title of a novel by Léon Daudet. A child has a ray. Ray of death that is enough for him to direct at the person he wants to make disappear, his grandmother for example, hop, napu grandmother or anyone else. Well, then the editors of the editorial pass to the confessions. We have lost, we are defeated, our ideals, our dreams will not come true, but, but Napu, Jewish Napu.
There you go, it was like that in the spring of 1944. Rebatet and Cousteau were sentenced to death. In 1952, they came out of prison with their literary head on their shoulders and were able to resume their literary activity still rejoicing at the bottom of their heart about their Jewish Napu.
Today, I want to share the opportunity offered to me by the Memorial to finally try to honor this father and his father. I have no memories, no details to share, or so little.
I know that Zacharie liked to read Les Pieds Nickelés. My brother and I read Les Pieds Nickelés a lot and really enjoyed reading them. He liked camembert, we eat camembert. He loved going to the cinema, we really enjoyed going to the cinema. He also loved the eggplant caviar, the petlegele, that Suzanne concocted for him, my brother recently started making it.
I would like, yes I would like, I repeat, to be a poet, something like Victor Hugo, or Itzhok Katzenelson, the author of The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, to write, to say, to shout horror, love, pain, and everything I try to feel, or everything I felt and that I never knew how to say or write.
My father wrote us nothing, left us nothing, not the least letter from Compiègne or Drancy. My mother, she, saw him when he was in Drancy, from the tobacco window overlooking the camp yard, I don’t know how. Neither how he was warned, nor how she found this window, from which she spoke to him by gestures. I probably didn’t ask the right questions, or she didn’t give me the right answers, or I didn’t listen to her answers. In 2003, in My Father Inventory, I omitted to cite one of the rare dialogues between Zacharie and Suzanne, which she reported to me: Released from Compiègne before being retaken, he confided to her that after the war, thanks to friendships related to Compiègne with his co-detainees, prestigious lawyers or famous doctors, all wearing custom three-piece suits, he will stop working for others, start his own business and then, finally, everything will roll like clockwork.
Zacharie was born in Galatz, Romania, in 1898. They had to come, Naftali, Faïgué, his mother, and the whole family, to France around 1910.
Not far from Galatz, in Iassi, capital of the Romanian Jewish intelligentsia, was born the same year, in 1898, the poet and philosopher Benjamin Fondane.
I read Benjamin Fondane a lot, always associating him with Zacharie, consciously or unconsciously.
They could have, the tailor and the poet, crossed paths at Drancy and talked about the old country, little welcoming to the Israelites, it is true, and they could even have left together, in the same convoy.
To pay homage to Zacharie and Naftali, both tailor-made tailors for men, women and children, and to the poet, philosopher, filmmaker, and resistant, Benjamin Fondane, and to all those whose names are engraved on our walls, as well as to those, countless, massacred in all possible and unimaginable ways whose names do not appear on any wall, forever disappeared, I want to conclude by reading excerpts from one of the last poems of Benjamin Fondane, who died at Auschwitz.
It is to you that I am speaking, men from the antipodes, I speak man to man,
with the little in me that remains of man, with the little voice that I have left at the throat.
A day will come, it’s sure of the quenched thirst,
we will be beyond the memory, death
will have completed the work of hatred,
I will be a bouquet of nettles under your feet, -so, well, know that I had a face like you. A mouth that prayed, like you.
When a dust entered, or a dream, into the eye, that eye cried a little salt. And when a bad thorn scratched my skin,
there was flowing blood as red as yours! Certainly, just like you, I was cruel, I had
thirst for tenderness, power,
of gold, pleasure and pain.
Just like you, I was wicked and anxious solid in peace, drunk in victory.
Yes, I have been a man like other men, fed with bread, dreams, despair. Eh yes,
I loved, I cried, I hated, I suffered,
I bought flowers and I haven’t always
paid my term. On Sunday I went to the countryside to fish under the eye of God, unreal fish,
I was bathing in the river
who sang in the rushes and I ate fries
in the evening. After, after, I was going back to bed
tired, the heart weary and full of solitude,
full of pity for me
full of pity for the man,
looking, searching in vain on a woman’s belly for that impossible peace we had lost long ago, in an orchard where it bloomed
in the center, the tree of life...
I read, like you all the newspapers, all the books, and I understood nothing in the world and I didn’t understand anything to man, although it happened to me to affirm the opposite.
And when death, death came perhaps I pretended to know what it was but true, I can tell you at this hour,
she entered all into my eyes astonished, astonished to understand so little - did you understand better than I did?
And yet, no!
I wasn’t a man like you.
You were not born on the roads, no one
did not throw your little ones down the drain like cats without eyes,
You have not wandered from city to city
tracked down by the police,
you have not known the disasters of dawn, the cattle wagons
and the bitter sob of humiliation, changing name and face,
not to take away a name that one has booed
a face that had served everyone
of spittoon!
A day will come, no doubt, when the poem read
will be before your eyes. He does not ask
nothing! Forget it, forget it! It’s not
than a scream, that one cannot put in a perfect poem, did I have the time to finish it?
But when you tread this bouquet of nettles that had been me, in another century,
in a story that will be stale for you, just remember that I was innocent and that, just like you mortals of that day, I had also had a marked face
by anger, by pity and joy,
A man’s face, simply!
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