Transcription of the speech by
1 June 21
A speech
Memorial
Jean-Claude Grumberg
Autumn 2021
A speech
How can one say no to someone who does you the honor of soliciting your word in such a place on such a day? But how can one say yes? One should possess the genius of a poet, or the heartbreaking voice of Scholom Katz echoing the kaddish for the dead of Auschwitz, Maïdanek, Treblinka. How can one say yes when one knows each other from experience, when one feels unable to share one’s own pain? How can one then evoke the immensity of everyone’s pain? So I tried my usual no-no-yes in front of Mr. Eric de Rothschild, and here I am.
But it is not the old writer who for ages has been trying to make people laugh – yellow – at 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 who hides behind his older brother to flee the lady with the 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, of whom he has no memory, neither visual nor audible; the child who learns to read the word "disparu," then to decipher this mysterious word "deported," then to write it, "father’s profession: deported," and finally to scribble the decisive word "décédé," "father’s profession: deceased, in Drancy Seine." Drancy? Whatever! I know, I know, I could have the civil registry correct this "death in Drancy" by "death in Auschwitz," but why should I do it? I prefer to keep this "death in Drancy" which testifies better than I could do the little case, interest, 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 the civil registry – a lady, a reader, knowing that I did not use the Internet, kindly told me, after a search on her own device, what "repair" would be expected of me in any civil registry office. Zacharie, my father, becomes my mother, Zacharie Grumberg, born in Galatz, Romania. And Naftali, his father, my grandmother, is also born in Galatz.
Finally, the child who refuses to do his bar mitzvah as much as he feels in disagreement with higher authorities, while at the same time feeling inside himself, day after day, month after year, more and more Jewish, and even a Jewish Jew. Then there was the child leaving school, certified, after having visited during summer holidays in Czechoslovakia, Terezin, and East Germany, Ravensbrück, among other children of deportees, or even of executed men, who never talked to each other about their parents' fate, of their brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, disappeared in Drancy or elsewhere, all standing at attention, red scarves tied around the necks, facing rising colors and falling flags seasoned with speeches that have nothing to do with their own history.
Please consider again the apprentice in short trousers, running from one boss – small boss, very small boss – to another. 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 mistress, every worker – I think of Bella, sitting on the stool next to that of Suzanne, my mother, both pulling the needle all day long. As for me, when I came to pick up my mother on Saturday lunchtime, all I saw was the number on Bella’s arm going up and down to the rhythm of the large switches. Each one 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 CCE, a mono, whose childish rumor whispered that he was a survivor of the death camps, wore a plaster on his forearm. One day, I told him: "You know, I know what’s under your bandage." He blinked and then gave me the slip: "The phone number of my chicken."
One of my bosses, Mr. Spodek, in the middle of a dominoes game, said to the apprentice one day: "We’re going to take advantage of the off-season to bring all the heads of machines to study." The machines were three in number. Two Pfaff, one Singer.
He put an arm through the head of one of the Pfaff people, saying to me: "You see, you pass your arm there, you make a little movement there like that, it clicks, and then you lift it up, it just comes naturally." He is looking 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, in truth, which served as his workshop except during meal times – there, holding a machine head on each arm, he points me with a push of his chin that I must take my turn from the head of the Singer, probably had it for mehe left it because it seemed lighter than Pfaff’s heads, and that in short, it was my machine.
I slide my arm, I lock the machine head in the crook of my elbow, I make the small movement, no click. I look at him, he nods and tells me to start over. I start again, still no click. Desperate, I then try to pull the Singer’s head from the Singer’s table. Nothing happens. Singer’s head remains attached 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 walks in front.
I follow him on the winding staircase of this dilapidated building in the Marais, carrying for him the three heads of machines clinging to his arms, me with my arms dangling. I follow his number with my eyes. I am ashamed, ashamed. And I say to myself, covering my tears: you, you wouldn’t have even lasted a day there.
Never did Mr. Spodek tell me about the camps, never did I dare to question him even during those endless domino games of dead season where I had to cheat to let him win.
I never spoke at home, on my way back from these summer holidays, 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 Zacharias, neither of his physique nor of his voice, nothing.
My brother and I were living with our noses in books, books borrowed from the municipal library of the 10th arrondissement town hall. It was these books that threw me into our history. I had taken a book, Howard Fast’s Last Frontier, because it was 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 and then the death of the squaws and their children, the 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 Le Bréviaire de la haine by Léon Poliakov, then Le Pitre ne rit pas by David Rousset, and over the years books of history, testimonies and Le Dernier des Justes by André Schwartz-Bart that broke the silence for a while. Yes, it is these books, these thousands of books that have built up over the years and which still build up our history, thus restoring our dignity and memory.
During these years, Suzanne fought hard against the bureaucratic hydra in order to obtain a widow’s pension. Finally, she was told that she was not entitled to it, because if she herself was French, the disappeared was not. He was no longer even Romanian, he had become by the magic of a Vichy decree "stateless of Romanian origin". That stateless people pay pensions to stateless people!
The young and victorious fourth Republic, although a legitimate heir of Vichy, did not want to provide after-sales service for the trade of humans delivered by cattle trains to the buyer, who never had enough.
It was therefore long after the buyer himself, Germany, the FRG, had 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 go with her for the papers, me or Maxime my older brother, she couldn’t read very well – we were in one of those consulates in the RFA, in a sumptuous building in the beautiful neighborhoods. There was a kind of debacle, a bit like when an American film about the Jews came out in a cinema on the Grands Boulevards. When the box was opened, the line was no longer vertical but suddenly became horizontal, a shapeless and disorganized mass. all of them have such a need for a film that speaks about them, all of them also so much in need of help, and therefore of papers, censuses, certificates, and sworn statements.
Everyone trying to jump the queue, calling each other out, grumbling in Yiddish. Then a man stepped out of the line and shouted very loudly, in Yiddish too, and mom translated for me: "Aren’t you ashamed? Aren’t you ashamed? In front of them! To them!”
He meant the bureaucrats. Mom had pointed them out to me: real Kraut heads. "Here you go! Pull over! Get yourself respected!" No one listened to him, no one lined up. "They are watching us." Are they watching us? Let them watch us! We owe them nothing, neither respect nor politeness, and especially not discipline.
This war of papers lasted a long time for mom, a vain war that many survivors and many families had to fight.
But Suzanne, she had to face two fronts. At 34 rue de Chabrol, she received registered letters with acknowledgment of receipt from the building manager, who was demanding them on pain of immediate eviction – "immediate eviction" - those two words made her tremble – the payment of rent during the years of war. She pointed out 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. That is how we learned a bit late that it was much better to be a prisoner of war than deported.
My brother, when he began to work, went and threw the little money he was making in front of the generous manager who wanted to make him pay as a bonus for repairing the landing door, which had been broken by police boots.
At home, there was only one gesture, let’s say a ritual gesture, intended to remember the absent, the disappearance and the disappeared. Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, on a day like today, mom lit up on the kitchen window overlooking the tiny courtyard, without any vis-à-vis, a silver timbale, adorned with a tiny wick that she carefully lit.
We asked him why this candle that illuminated so little? "For the memory of those who are no longer." She explained that the flame should not be extinguished during the night, that it should last until morning so that the memory is maintained and respected. The next morning I went to check the very small flame of the memory, and each time it would still tremble a little before dying.
How to talk about the disappeared? About the disappearance? Of a father whose voice and face I know nothing about, except through some too few photos. How to pay tribute to him and his father Naftali, a blind deportee, carried down the stairs by two compassionate cops ... or too much in a hurry. They had so much work, so many youpins to pick up!
Too often I have found myself confronted with a strange argument: the cops, the gendarmes, the prefects, the sub-prefects, those who scooped up, those who filled trains of goods with straw on good days, those who crowded families, children like beasts, those who stacked invalids on blind people, those who drove these trains, all those there claimed and still claim that they did not know what the real purpose of the journey was. I don’t think these people were very smart. Who would take a blind man, who would make him cross all of Europe in the middle of a war, in a cattle car? Where were we in such need of chair removers? Of 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 terror, his terror, during this last journey, the last journey of this old Romanian Jew, from Drancy to ... He left alone two months before Zacharias, 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 transport, do not follow them upon arrival under 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 above all freedom to be what one is.
Not long ago, a man of my age, the son of a deportee like me, whose father had left on the same convoy as Zacharie – 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:
– Yes, it is! There 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 asked.
– Because I’m the one who decides. He didn’t even enter the camp, he didn’t know anything, he didn’t see anything, he was gassed as soon as he arrived.
There, that’s how I saved my father from the most terrible in my eyes.
As a teenager, I waited, I hoped, yes, I hoped that a survivor would stand up and speak up to tell us the reason for this abomination by delivering us the "objective" reasons – it was a buzzword – of this failure 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 is slowly dissipating and despite the past decades, it still stagnates around us. Those few days in August last year brought us back to it. A headline, a newspaper headline came up again. I’m everywhere. When I was writing L'Atelier, I read a few copies of this book I am everywhere. One of its last editorials stuck with me. 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. So the editorial is entitled Le Napu. Le Napu is said to 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 are confessing. We have lost, we are defeated, our ideals, our dreams will not come true, but, but Napu, Jewish Napu.
There you have it, that’s how it was 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 in the depths of their hearts from 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 memory, no details to share, or very little.
I know that Zacharie liked to read Les Pieds Nickelés. My brother and I have read Les Pieds Nickelés a lot and really enjoyed reading it. He liked Camembert, we eat Camembert. He loved going to the movies, we really enjoyed going to the movies. 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 all that I felt and never knew how to say or write.
My father didn’t write us anything, left us nothing, not a single 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 had found that window, from which she spoke to him through 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 forgot to mention one of the few dialogues between Zacharie and Suzanne, which she brought back to me: Released from Compiègne before being recaptured, he confided to her that after the war, thanks to the friendships linked to Compiègne with his codetainees, 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 go smoothly.
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 a lot of Benjamin Fondane, always associating him with Zacharie, consciously or unconsciously.
The tailor and the poet could have met at Drancy and talked about the old country, which was not very 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 countless others, 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.
I’m talking to you, men from the antipodes, man to man,
with the little in me that remains of man, with the little voice that I have left at my throat.
A day will come, it’s sure of the quenched thirst,
we will be beyond the memory, death
will have completed the works of hatred,
I will be a bouquet of nettles under your feet, -so, well, know that I had a face like yours. A mouth that prayed, like yours.
When dust entered, or a dream, into the eye, that eye cried a little salt. And when a thorn scratched my skin badly,
There was blood running down there as red as yours! Certainly, just like you, I was cruel, I had
thirst for tenderness, for power,
of gold, pleasure and pain.
Just like you, I was wicked and anguished solid in peace, drunk in victory.
Yes, I have been a man like other men, fed with bread, dreams, despair. Yes, indeed,
I loved, I cried, I hated, I suffered,
I bought flowers and I didn’t always
paid my due. On Sundays I went to the countryside to fish under the eye of God, unreal fish,
I was bathing in the river
who sang in the reeds and I ate fries
in the evening. Afterwards, I would go back to bed
tired, the heart weary and full of solitude,
full of pity for me
full of pity for man,
searching, searching in vain on a woman’s belly for that impossible peace we had once lost, in an orchard where flowers were blooming
in the center, the tree of life...
I have read, as you do, all the newspapers, all the books, and I have understood nothing in the world, and I have understood nothing to man, even though I have sometimes asserted the opposite.
And when death, death came, perhaps I pretended to know what it was, but true, I can tell you at that time,
She entered my astonished eyes, astonished at how little I understood- did you understand better than I did?
And yet, no!
I wasn’t a man like you.
You weren’t born on the roads,
has not thrown your little ones down the drain like cats without eyes,
You have not wandered from city to city
tracked by the police,
you have not experienced the disasters of dawn, the cattle wagons
and the bitter sob of humiliation, changing name and face,
so as not to take away a name that we booed
a face that had served everyone
spitting!
One 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
that a scream, which cannot be put into a perfect poem, did I have 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 out of print for you, just remember that I was innocent and that, like you, the mortals of that day, I too had a marked face.
through anger, through pity and joy,
A man’s face, quite simply!
Review the 2021 Hazkarah ceremony
