Hazkarah 2025,
the speech by Robert Bober
commemoration

In July 1945 I found myself with more than a hundred other children in Andresy, not far from Paris, at the manor of Denouval.  We all had in common to have been hidden children. It was an unforgettable vacation.

Time has not erased those moments from my memory. 

In the middle of the eighties, forty years later, I wrote a book, "What’s new about war?" whose first pages are written about this summer camp by a 13-year-old boy, Raphaël: 

" Dear mom, dear dad, 

"... I’ve made a lot of new friends, there’s one especially with whom I get along well and whose name is Georges. He has a habit, he makes lists of movies.” 

In another letter he writes: 

Dear mom, dear dad, 

Today is mail day. A strange story happened and I’m not really sure how to tell it. Georges, who is next to me and takes advantage of mail time to redo his list of films because he doesn’t have anyone to write to, told me that everything had to be written down so we could remember and recount it later." 

And in the last letter before returning to Paris:

Dear mom, dear dad,

We learned that many children were going to stay at the manor after the holidays; these are all those whose parents have not yet returned from camp. To Georges, who is also staying, I said that it was good, that all those who were staying would feel like a vacation. But he didn’t know very well. Maybe her parents will come back soon. I promised to write to her. If the mail day is maintained, he will have someone to write to now.” 

I was like Raphaël, that boy from this summer camp, since I had a mother and a father to whom I could write. I wrote to them that I ate well, that I had fun, that we learned songs. Also, I was surprised when Éric de Rothschild, in a friendly letter, did me the honor of inviting me to speak at this ceremony of the Hazkarah. It seemed to me that others, more than I, were legitimate.

So I thought about all those years spent in the summer camps of the Central Childhood Commission. To all these years for which I still have surges of tenderness. Why are they so present in what I write? As from book to book are present the children of these summer camps for which I was the monitor. These children, especially those whose parents had been deported and to whom I learned so much and for whom I wanted to write later that my presence among them was perhaps more important to me than to them.

It is thanks to them, to what I had learned with them, through them, that I was able to take care of the children in François Truffaut’s film "Les 400 coups" and then to become his assistant. 

After that, having become a filmmaker, although I liked fiction films a lot as a viewer, it was documentary films that attracted me. With them, something would start up.

Singularly, it is by reading "Les Récits Hassidiques" by Martin Buber that I understood why I wanted to make documentary films. For the Relationship. Not only what we relate about an event, but also and above all in the context of documentary films, what happens between those who film and those who are filmed. The relationship is essential, because it alone allows for this reciprocal movement made of dialogue, glances, and silences. A dialogue made of memory. 

In "Je et Tu", also by Martin Buber and whose reading was decisive, I had emphasized this sentence: "We look at each other, each waiting for the other to offer to do what both wish." 

I said it at the beginning, Georges, this boy who didn’t have anyone to write to, had told his friend Raphaël that everything needed to be written down so he could remember and tell it later. It was, as a filmmaker, what I tried to do in a film that I called "The Next Generation." 

It was in 1970 that I had the project to make this film. As part of a series called "Les femmes aussi" produced by Eliane Victor. I went to see her to talk to her about this project. I told him about the manor of Andresy. I told him, as best I could, who those children were. That after being hidden by neighbors or peasants, the Liberation came, they were taken in these children’s homes where educators were anxious to prepare a normal life for these children from whom their first opportunity of love had been withdrawn. Those children whose youngest ones didn’t remember saying the words mom and dad. I told Eliane Victor that these children had become adults. And that I wondered how they had become adults. How do you become a father and mother when the role models have long since disappeared?

Eliane Victor listened to me and accepted my project. She only reminded me that the show was called "Les femmes aussi". So, under the title "The next generation," I added: "Five women raised in the homes of the Central Commission for Childhood, now mothers, tell..." 

I started earlier by talking about my hesitations, my surprise at having been invited to give a speech, and if I am here today it is so that we can hear from these five women. It’s thanks to them, to all the children I met in these summer camps that I have to be there. These are the children I want us to remember. And that we will listen to. Listen to them, as one listens to the moments of life that one does not want to leave behind.

The movie is an hour long. I chose a few excerpts. 

To Liliane, I had asked if the fact that she did not have any role models played in her desire to have children. 

"To desire I don’t know, replied Liliane, but to raise him, I think it was a handicap indeed. The landmarks were practically useless, but I think that instinctively I brought my daughter what she needed to bring. But there were a lot of things I thought I didn’t know how to do well because I didn’t know if that was how it was done.”

At the end of the interview, I asked her if she thought about talking about these problems with her daughter.

«Yes, she replied to me, I think I’m talking to her about it. I don’t know how to talk to her yet, but I think I’m talking to her about it. I think it’s necessary for her to know what happened to her grandparents. This is a problem that always touches me and will always touch me.” 

I had asked the same question to Simone. 

«The reasons why I will tell them about it are very mixed. First, I will tell them because I want them to know. They were born in France, but I have the impression that they are a bit different from other children of the same age because they are marked by everything I can do, unconsciously. 

When you have children, it’s still not easy to play house. You have to reinvent everything, you had to guess. But I think that in reality it’s us who have trouble getting out of childhood. That’s why we always cling to the images we received, which are printed. Sometimes when I take care of the girls, suddenly I feel like I’m the little girl, it’s very fugitive, and then that I’m my mother. I feel like I’m doing, or finding the same gestures again. There are some silly things, for example, at the showers; we didn’t have showers at home and we used to go to a shower facility, and I went with my mother, and that’s one of the images that stayed with me: mom had a way of wiping her back with the towel I’m redoing. It’s silly to say it like that, but you have to identify with something.” 

And then there was Janine.

Janine, who recounted that she had been to the anti-OAS demonstrations in February 1962. It was on her way home that she learned from the television that there had been eight deaths at this demonstration. And she was terrified at the idea that she could have been among those dead and left her child orphaned as she had been since her parents had been deported. And it was when she could barely hold back her tears that she told me she couldn’t go to the protest anymore.

Afterwards, she told me again:

It was at the birth of my son that I felt I knew what a family really was. At her birth, my parents-in-law helped us quite a bit and I asked my mother-in-law when I would be able to give it back to her because she had given me a lot, and she told me you wouldn’t give it back to me, you’d give it back to my grandchildren and that allowed me to find myself in a lineage." 

These interviews I also had with Bernadette and Nadia. 

With Bernadette we went to the park of the manor she told me about with nostalgia while her son ran in front of us between the trees and the groves.

Nadia talked a lot about her involvement in public life. Her mother was deported. His father, Dr. Maurice Tenine, was shot on 22 October 1941 in Chateaubriant. 

This film, "The Next Generation," I dedicated to Marcel Dorembus. And it was for him that I wrote the last words:

He had arrived in Andresy in 1945 at the same time as the others. He was six years old. He did not want to enter this house too big for him, this house that in no way reminded him of his first childhood. He is a person to whom we are more readily attached. Marcel was one of those. But all the affection with which he was surrounded had not prevented him from being alone. One day in November 1963 he went to kill himself in the park of Andresy, he was twenty-four years old. I don’t know if we can explain a death, and it’s probably better to keep quiet. Yet, this death, since I have known it, I can no longer forget it. It may be because Marcel did not die on November 26, 1963, but had already been killed with his parents a little more than twenty-five years ago.

I believe that nothing can be built without meetings. And, as was my case, it takes a lifetime to become fully aware of this. It started with the reading of "Je et Tu" by Martin Buber. That’s when I read this sentence that says everything: "He would say what he is, before saying what he has become through the encounter."

It is from some of these meetings with whom I shared moments of life that I would like to talk about.

I lived at 30 rue de la Butte aux Cailles above a shop where my father made and repaired shoes. At 7 of the same street lived a boy whose parents ran a grocery store. We went to the same school and were in the same class. His name was Henri Beck. One day, his parents and mine had to put in their window a poster bearing the mention "Jewish company." In French and German: Judishes Aca. On Monday morning, in June 1942, Beck had waited for me outside his parents' grocery store to go to school. We had both, sewn on the left side of our jacket, the yellow star whose wearing was mandatory for Jews over six years old, and we had almost eleven.

A few weeks later, the police commissioner of Bobillot Street, to whom my father made custom-made shoes, told us one afternoon that a big roundup would take place the next morning. My parents had in the same building a small room lent by neighbors in which leather was stored.  It was in this room that we hid. My father had run before curfew to warn the Beck family, but either they didn’t really believe it, or they didn’t know where to go, so they stayed home. Neighbors, later, told that they had seen police officers take away the entire Beck family. They were taken to the Vel’d'Hiv. It was the morning of Thursday, July 16, 1942. 

For Beck, there was no more back-to-school. 

In the deportation memorial, I learned that he was born on 22 March 1931 in Krasnik, Poland, that he had left Drancy on 14 August 1942 by convoy 19 to Auschwitz and that the children of this convoy were gassed as soon as they arrived. It was in 1999 that my second book was published. Its title is Berg and Beck. It is a novel, but I insisted that Beck’s name be kept. In this novel, Berg from a children’s home whose parents were deported writes to Beck. He writes to her (the letter is dated February 1952) that he is able to give her news from around the world. He tells her that he has fallen behind. Ten years. And he writes to him: "Anyway, I have to keep writing to you, and just because you won’t answer doesn’t mean the story will have to go without you." 

In March 1952, speaking of these letters he wrote to him: "I believe that these letters are made to be written. Only to be written. And to keep our eleven years intact since that’s the age you kept. And maybe that’s what counts. And also to persuade me that somehow you are still present.” 

Further on, it is from a café in the rue de la Butte aux Cailles that Berg writes to Beck:

«I am at the café, but who is waiting for me here? I am here and I write. Yes, I will continue to write to you since it seems that you only have life because I am still alive.”

At the end of the book, Berg writes for himself: "Beck has only one name left. Now Beck is just the one I write to. He is the one I can’t write to. It’s that you don’t talk to a dead person like you talk to a living one. These words, these letters that were meant to be words of life, for whom were they intended? And since I write and live with these letters, isn’t writing to Beck ultimately writing to myself? 

I ask the street, but only I see us and we are no longer the same age. Write to Beck who, I now have the certainty, will accompany me until the end.

I was not mistaken in writing twenty-five years ago that Beck will accompany me to the end, and not either when I wrote "it’s not because you won’t answer that history will have to do without you." History did not pass by Henri Beck.

Two years ago, I wrote to him to tell him what happened in front of 7 rue de la Butte aux Cailles on January 25, 2022.

Dear Henri,

I have something to tell you. Something that happened in front of your house, something that in my last letters it had been difficult for me to imagine. 

At the initiative of someone who now lives in your building, a commemorative plaque bearing the names of the seven people who had lived there before being deported was placed on the wall where your parents' grocery store was located. With the support of the Paris City Hall, a ceremony was organized for this tribute. There were official and friendly speeches. More than one hundred and fifty people had come, gathered in front of your house, attentive and respectful. They had come to learn what had been committed there on July 16, 1942. And the choir of the college where we had been educated sang the "Swamp Song".

"In this camp, dull and wild. Surrounded by iron walls."

After the ceremony, a man came up to me, told me his name, that he was still a baby when you were arrested and that you were his uncle. He told me again "I have something for you" and gave me a photo. I had your face before my eyes that for eighty years I hadn’t seen again. I wrote: Beck has only one name left. I had just found your face.

I am going to tell you about a boy named Serge Lask whom I met at summer camp when he was fourteen years old.

When he was old enough to work, like me, sitting behind a sewing machine, he assembled clothes. The trade, he had learned it with his father in the workshop where, when he was small, his mother and his father worked. He was five years old when his mother was deported.

After assembling clothes, the drawings came. His drawings depicted zebras, those striped animals. The zebras were chased by wolves.

One day he had in his hands a book written in Yiddish. This language that he did not speak, that he did not read, that he could not write, he had decided to paint it. He drew writing so that something would not be lost. Signs that it is necessary to make the leaves survive, that the leaves are full of them. That there is no emptiness.

Painted, erased, rewritten, scratched until worn, covered again, Yiddish on Yiddish, hidden, in order to reappear again, the work of Serge Lask tells what was stolen from him.

He had written: "Sometimes I think that writing is a bit like the portrait of my mother, this way of giving an account of my mother, of finding something, it was the writing. My mother is in another world. It’s the writing that allows me to talk about it.”

The Yiddish on Yiddish that Serge stubbornly tried to copy out, unreadable words, unspeakable words, words in search of a grave, covered with other words themselves without a grave. But his words are there.

"The one who was can no longer not have been," said Vladimir Jankélévitch. We can also say it from the words that Serge Lask drew. They can no longer not have been.

This paper must be worn out with writing, he had said.

To this writing, he devoted the last fifteen years of his life. Serge Lask, born in Paris in 1937 died on October 13, 2002.

One day, it must have been in 1949, the eldest brother of a friend who, like me, lived on rue de la Butte aux Cailles, knowing that I was a tailor, tells me about one of his student friends like him, but not quite. Not exactly because he had prepared and passed his baccalaureate by himself. He also told me that this friend’s parents had been deported and that, being short of money, he absolutely needed to find work. And he asked me if I could talk to my boss about it.

So I talk about it to my boss, Mr. Grynspan, but without really believing in it because it was a small workshop.

– What does your friend know how to do? asks Mr. Grynspan.

– He has his baccalaureate.

My answer came to me spontaneously, in complete innocence. It is the surprised, disconcerted look of my boss that made me quickly understand that to assemble the pieces of a garment it was not necessary to hold such a prestigious exam.

– And besides that? also seemed to tell his gaze.

– His parents were deported.

– Tell him to come, that was his response.

I knew that people came to a workshop to learn a trade. That day, I learned that you could also receive life lessons.

This friend, with whom I was going to spend an entire season in this workshop, was André Schwarz-Bart.

I knew that his situation behind a sewing machine was temporary. At the end of the day, when we separated, when I watched him walk away, I had an inkling of his fate, I don’t know what it would be special.

And then one evening – it’s 1959 – I’m in front of my television screen, watching "Readings for All". André Schwarz-Bart is there with Pierre Dumayet. He had just written "Le dernier des Justes" which was going to obtain the Goncourt prize.

Of all the writers I received at "Lectures pour tous", Pierre Dumayet later told me, André is certainly the one who impressed me the most. The slowness he put between almost all the words was fascinating. It was clear that while answering the questions, he tried to grasp an ancient truth. He added that André had said: "My book is a small white stone that I placed on a tomb."

I will not say here the importance of this book, how it is founding, inaugural. Others have done so and we will continue to do so. But it was that evening, in front of the television, that I learned to listen to silences. Those of André Schwarz-Bart were impressive. As if they allowed the words not to go astray.

After living a few years in Switzerland, André had quietly retired to Guadeloupe where his wife Simone was from.

During his visits to Paris, he used to call me. I am in Paris, he said. And the next day he dined at home, and Élen, my wife, did not fail to make him a broth accompanied by Kneidlekh which reminded him of those his mother cooked in Metz where he had spent his childhood. My only instruction was not to report his presence in Paris.

One evening we met in a restaurant in the 13th arrondissement where he lived when he came to Paris. We usually liked to walk a little afterwards. And then, coming in one of those conversations that are born we don’t really know how, pointing to a piece of grass, André told me he could die there, like that, and that it wouldn’t matter much. It was said without sadness, there was no trace of weariness in his voice. It was only, it seemed to me, the voice of a man who had accomplished what he had to accomplish.

In 2002, I was invited to meet students from a high school in the small town of Charlieu near Roanne. The students of second and first had welcomed me in a room with walls covered with drawings that they had applied themselves to doing illustrating my work. I had been struck by one of these drawings: an immense heart, bright red, broken in the middle, filled the sheet of paper. A needle and thread were also drawn there, and this needle carefully stitched up this broken heart.

"It’s a Jewish heart" shyly said to me one voice, then of myself, it was the author of the drawing, a child about fifteen years old. This heart, drawn by this child, sent me back to the last page of the "Last of the Righteous". There, André Schwarz-Bart, out of breath, gives the names of the concentration camps. And then these words:

"Sometimes it is true, the Heart wants to burst out of sorrow."

André Schwarz-Bart, born in Metz on 23 May 1928 died on 30 September 2006.

I will end with the one I started with, which said "you have to write everything down so you can remember it and tell it later." I wrote that in a novel. Georges is a character in a novel. Now, precisely, if this novel exists, if all that I have written exists, it is because Georges Perec, one day in 1980, when I had just told him that I had the idea of a short story, not wanting to know what it was about, said to me: "Write it." Believing that it was friendship that spoke, it was only two years after his death that I wrote this short story. It’s six pages long, and it tells a bit about my past as a tailor. And when Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens asked me for the next step, I naturally wrote: "I made a lot of new friends, there is one especially with whom I get along well and who’s called Georges..."

Forgetting that "What’s new about the war?" was a novel, many readers believed that the Georges of the letters I read so far was Georges Perec. They were right to believe him while being wrong. It was only in 1975, at a mutual friend’s house, that I met him. That was just before I went to Poland to shoot "Refugee from Germany, stateless person of Polish origin"

You’ve been listening to me for half an hour. A half-hour during which I could have only spoken to you about Georges Perec. And that half-hour wouldn’t have been enough.

"Memories are moments of life torn from the void," he had written in "W ou le souvenir d'enfance."

These moments of life spent with him, how can I talk about them?

I could talk to you at length about that first evening during which he absolutely wanted me to tell him more about my filming project in Poland, whereas I wanted us to talk about "W or the memory of childhood" that I had just read.

I could tell you that after the screening of the film, he fell into my arms in tears and that from this meeting was born the project to shoot together "Ellis Island Tales".

And then talk about the photo taken at the Bar-Mitzvah of my son Nicolas on which we can see how carefully he listens to my father’s Yiddish accent, that accent he had not been given time to hear.

And why did he dedicate the "Ellis Island Tales" album to the memory of Madame Kamer, the woman I had interviewed at length in Yiddish who told me: "I even forgot what Yiddish looks like."

And tell you again how and why a young woman translated into Yiddish the text that Perec had written for the "Ellis Island Tales" after hearing him say in the film: "I do not speak the language our parents spoke."

In my copy of "W ou le souvenir d'enfance," the pages of which are starting to detach, with each reading I make time stops. This one, on page 59, which for obvious reasons I will not comment on:

«I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I write because we lived together, because I was one among them, a shadow in the midst of their shadows, a body close to their bodies; I write because they left their indelible mark on me and the trace is their writing: their memory is dead at the writing; Writing is the memory of their deaths and the affirmation of my life.”

From this book, of which everything should be remembered, there is another moment that I will read to you after having told you that there are texts that I like to know and say by heart. But not that one. Not that one because it’s Perec’s voice I’m hearing. A voice I remember.

«I would have liked to help my mother clear the kitchen table after dinner. On the table, there would have been an oilcloth with small blue checks; above the table, there would have been a suspension with a lampshade almost in the shape of a plate, made of white porcelain or enameled sheet metal, and a pulley system with a counterweight in the form of a pear. Then I would have gone to get my schoolbag, I would have taken out my book, my notebooks, and my wooden pen tray, I would have placed them on the table and done my homework. That’s what happened in my textbooks.”