Hazkarah 2025,
the speech of 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. These were unforgettable holidays.

Time has not erased these moments from my memory. 

In the mid-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 have made plenty of new friends, there is one especially with whom I get along well and who is called Georges. He has a mania, he makes movie lists.” 

In another letter he writes: 

'Dear mom, dear dad, 

Today is mail day. A funny story happened and I don’t really know how to tell it, Georges who is next to me and who takes advantage of the mail hour to redo his list of films because he doesn’t have anyone to write to, told me that everything had to be noted down to remember it and tell 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 camps. To Georges who is also staying, I said that it was good, that all those who are staying will feel on vacation. But he didn’t know very well. Maybe his parents will come back soon. I promised to write him. If the mail day is maintained, he will have someone to write to now.” 

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

So I thought about all those years spent in the holiday camps of the Central Commission of Childhood. To all these years for which I always have impulses of tenderness. Why are they so present in what I write? As from book to book are present the children of these holiday camps of which I was the instructor. These children, especially those whose parents had been deported and with whom I learned so much and for whom I insisted on writing 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 the film 'Les 400 coups' by François Truffaut and then become his assistant. 

After becoming a filmmaker, although I really like fiction films as a spectator, it was documentary films that attracted me. With them something was going to start.

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 is related to an event, but also and especially 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 this reciprocal movement made of dialogue, looks, silences. A dialogue made of memory. 

In "I and You", 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 he should note everything down to remember and tell it later. It is, having become 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 I could, who those children were. That after having been hidden by neighbors or peasants, the Liberation came, they were taken into these children’s homes where educators were concerned to prepare a normal life for these children from whom their first possibility of love had been withdrawn. Those children whose smallest did not remember saying the words mom and dad. I told Eliane Victor that these children had become adults. And that I was wondering 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 she accepted my project. She only reminded me that the show was called 'Les femmes aussi'. So, under the title "The generation after" I added: "Five women raised in the homes of the Central Commission for Childhood, today mothers of families, 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 these five women. It’s to them, to all those children I met in these summer camps that I owe it to be there. These are the children I want to be remembered. 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 one hour long. I have chosen a few excerpts. 

To Liliane, I had asked if the fact of not having had models had played a role in her desire to have children. 

"To desire I don’t know, replied Liliane, but to raise him, I believe it was indeed a handicap. The benchmarks were practically zero, but I believe that instinctively I brought my daughter what she needed to bring. But there were many 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 these problems she thought about talking to her daughter.

"Yes, did she answer me, I think I will talk to her about it. I don’t know how to talk to her yet, but I think I will talk to her about it. I find it necessary that she knows what happened to her grandparents. It is a problem that always touches me and will always touch me.” 

I had asked the same question to Simone. 

"The motivations for which I will talk to them about it are very mixed. First, I will talk to them about it 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 believe that in reality it is ourselves who have difficulty 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 am the little girl, it’s very fugitive, and then that I am my mother. I feel like I’m doing, finding the same gestures again. There are silly things, for example, in the showers, we didn’t have showers at home and we went to a shower facility and I went with my mother and it’s one of the images that stayed with me, mom had a way of wiping her back with the towel that I am redoing, it’s silly to say like that, but you have to identify with something. 

And then there was Janine.

Janine who recounted that she had been in February 1962 at the anti-OAS demonstrations. 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 thought that she might have been among those dead and left her child orphaned as she had been since her parents had been deported. And it is while barely being able to hold back her tears that she told me that she could no longer go to protest.

Afterwards, she told me again:

“It was at the birth of my son that I felt I knew what a family really was. At his birth, my parents-in-law helped us quite a bit and I asked my mother-in-law when I could give it back to her because she had given me a lot, and she told me you won’t give me back, you will give my grandchildren back and that allowed me to move back into 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 spoke a lot about her involvement in public life. Her mother was deported. His father, Doctor Maurice Tenine, was shot on October 22, 1941, in Chateaubriant. 

This film, 'The Next Generation,' I dedicated it to Marcel Dorembus. And it is 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. There are beings with whom one is more readily attached. Marcel was one of those. But all the affection he was surrounded by 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 undoubtedly it’s 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 it. It started with the reading of «I and You» by Martin Buber. It was there that I read this sentence that says everything: "He would say what he is, before saying what by the encounter he has become."

It is about 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 we were in the same class. His name was Henri Beck. One day his parents and mine had to put in their window a poster mentioning the Jewish company. In French and German: Judishes Brac. On Monday morning, in June 1942, Beck had waited for me in front of his parents' grocery store to go to school. We both had, 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, informed us one afternoon that a big raid 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 is in this room that we hid. My father had run before the curfew to warn the Beck family, but either they didn’t really believe in it, or they didn’t know where to go, 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 March 22, 1931, in Krasnik, Poland, that he left Drancy on August 14, 1942, on convoy 19 towards Auschwitz and that the children of this convoy were gassed upon their arrival. It was in 1999 that my second book was published. It is titled 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 wrote to him: "Anyway, I have to continue writing to you, and it’s not because you won’t answer that the story will have to do 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 all that matters. And also to persuade me that in a certain way 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, it is for himself that Berg writes: "Beck only has one name left. Beck now is just the one I write to. He is the one I can’t write to. It’s that we don’t talk to a dead person like we talk to a living person. These words, these letters which were meant as words of life to whom were they intended? And since I write and remain with these letters, isn’t writing to Beck ultimately writing to myself? 

I question the street, but I am the only one to 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 when I wrote "it’s not because you won’t answer that history will have to do without you." History did not go without 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 place, something that in my last letters it had been difficult for me to imagine. 

At the initiative of a person 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 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 enrolled sang the 'Swamp Song'.

“In this dreary and wild camp. Surrounded by iron walls.”

After the ceremony, a gentleman came to me, he 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 in front of me your face that for eighty years I hadn’t seen again. I had written: Beck only has one name left. I had just found your face.

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

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

After assembling clothes, came the drawings. His drawings depicted zebras, these 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 was drawing writing so that something wouldn’t get lost. Signs that it is necessary to survive, that the leaves are full. That we don’t find a void there.

Painted, erased, rewritten, scratched to the point of wear, 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 reflecting on my mother, of finding something, it was 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 set out to copy, illegible words, unspeakable, words in search of a burial, covered with other words themselves without a burial. 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 has drawn. They can no longer not have been.

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

To this writing, he dedicated 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 older brother of a friend who, like me, lived on rue de la Butte aux Cailles, knowing that I was a tailor, told me about one of his student friends like him, but not quite. Not quite because he had prepared and passed his baccalaureate by himself. He also tells me that this friend’s parents were deported and that, being short of money, he absolutely had to find work. And he asks 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 me Mr. Grynspan.

– He has his baccalaureate.

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

– And apart from that? also seemed to say his gaze.

– Her parents were deported.

– Tell him to come, it was his response.

I knew that we were coming to a workshop to learn a trade. That day, I learned that one can 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 drift away, I sensed for him I don’t know what fate, guessing that he would be particular.

And then one evening – it is 1959 – I am 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 have 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. One could clearly see that while answering the questions, he was trying to grasp an ancient truth. He added that André had said: "My book is a small white stone that I placed on a grave."

I am not going to say here the importance of this book, to say in what way it is founding, inaugural. Others have done it and we will continue to do it. But it was that evening, in front of the television, that I learned to listen to the 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 discreetly 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 who reminded him of those his mother cooked in Metz where he had spent his childhood. I was only instructed not to report his presence in Paris.

One evening we found ourselves in a restaurant in the 13th arrondissement where he lived when he came to Paris. We generally liked to walk a little afterwards. And then, coming into one of those conversations that are born we don’t really know how, pointing to a piece of grass, André told me that 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 second and first year students had welcomed me in a room with walls covered with drawings that they had applied themselves to illustrating my work. I had been struck by one of these drawings: an immense heart, of a brilliant red, broken in the middle, filled the sheet of paper. A needle and thread were also drawn on it, and this needle carefully stitched up this broken heart.

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

«Sometimes it is true, the Heart wants to die of sorrow.»

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

I will end with the one I started with and who said «that you had to note everything to remember it and tell it later». I wrote that in a novel. Georges is a character from a novel. Now, precisely, if this novel exists, if everything I wrote exists, it’s 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: "Write it." Believing that it was friendship that spoke, it wasn’t until two years after his death that I wrote this short story. It’s six pages long, it tells a bit about my past as a tailor. And when Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens asked me what happened next, quite naturally I wrote: "I made lots of new friends, there is one especially with whom I get along well and who is called Georges..."

Forgetting that "What’s new about the war?" was a novel, many readers believed that the Georges of the letters I read for the moment was Georges Perec. They were right to believe him while being wrong. It wasn’t until 1975, at a mutual friend’s house, that I met him. It was just before I went to Poland to shoot 'Refugee from Germany, stateless person of Polish origin'

You have been listening to me for half an hour. A half hour during which I could have talked to you only 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 or the memory of childhood».

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

I could talk to you at length about this 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 had fallen into my arms in tears and that from this meeting was born the project to shoot together "The Tales of Ellis Island".

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

And tell why he dedicated the album of «Récits d'Ellis Island» to the memory of Madame Kamer, this woman whom I had long interviewed in Yiddish and who had told me: «I even forgot what Yiddish looks like.»

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

In my copy of 'W ou le souvenir d'enfance' whose pages begin to detach, at each of my readings I mark time stops. This one, page 59, that for obvious reasons I will not comment on:

« I don’t write to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I write because we lived together, because I was one among them, shadow in the middle of their shadows, body near their bodies; I write because they left their indelible mark on me and the trace is the writing: their memory died at writing; the writing is the memory of their death 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 the voice of Perec that I hear. A voice that I have kept in memory.

“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 squares; above the table, there would have been a suspension with a lampshade almost in the shape of a plate, made of white porcelain or enamelled sheet metal, and a pulley system with a counterweight shaped like a pear. Then I would have gone to get my schoolbag, taken out my book, my notebooks and my wooden pencil case, placed them on the table and done my homework. That’s how it went in my textbooks.”