Hitler Made Me a Jew (2 page)

Chapter 3

Chatenay-Malabry 1936

Chatenay-Malabry was a small city, with a tortuous cobbled main street and an imposing church on its square. Statues of Voltaire, who is said to have been born there, are displayed in many places. Chateaubriand's home is in Chatenay. There is also nearby the Chateau de Sceaux with its large park built by Colbert.

When I first came to Chatenay it seemed to me a big and important place. The road from the Cité Nouvelle to school appeared long. Actually, as I realized much later, it was just a very short distance. The Cité was at the corner of the Avenue Jean Jaures and the main street where the bus stopped and about three miles from the metro station in Sceaux.

Our new home was surrounded by high stone walls, and you had to push the majestic front gate hard to get in. The spacious house looked so much like the classic house of my drawings that I liked it instantly. The furniture was sparse and simple. On the walls were colorful reproductions of paintings by artists I had never heard of before—Matisse and Picasso. Not many people paid attention to such works of art in 1936. The dining room had an extended table that could seat, and often did, at least fifty people.

The house was filled with people. I had never seen so many grown-ups together. Marcel, who was the head of the house, became a sort of surrogate parent to me, as did many of the others who lived there. Marcel inspired me to draw. He thought my drawings were “original” and funny, and he gave me courage to draw what I pleased.

Marcel was one of the founders of the unusual living arrangement at the Cité. He was an architect, interior decorator and a former patient of the doctor Paul Carton, a tuberculosis specialist who had the reputation of having saved thousand of lives, a man ahead of his time because his prescriptions are still recommended today. During his lifetime, he was unique. Marcel had been told he wouldn't live long, but after years of close adherence to Dr. Carton's regimen, he lived to be a healthy old man.

The diet recommended by Dr. Carton was subversively un-French. It forbade wine, liquor, meat and coffee. According to Dr. Carton, for a healthful life one needed rest, exercise, hydrotherapy and sunshine. On the whole the people in the Cité agreed with everything he recommended. They were vegetarians, nudists and addicts for the outdoors. But in contrast to the doctor, they were also Marxists. Dr. Carton was a good Catholic and the people in the Cité were atheists. My parents were not communists, and they made no pretense of being so. I wanted them to be like everybody else in the house, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Because my mother didn't have a job, she was hired to cook for the Cité. Albert, a small man who went camping and wore short pants while riding his bicycle, was paid to do the garden work. When he worked, he would grow wonderful vegetables. But he was a free soul and often went away to roam, which was most unusual for a Frenchman. Germans were known to do this kind of thing, but not a respectable Frenchman. Once, Albert planted a lot of small potatoes and he told my mother that she should boil them and serve them to company with the skins on. This way they wouldn't eat so much because they would be so busy peeling the skin off them. This tip impressed me very much.

My mother often unnerved her “customers,” who, ten minutes before the meals were supposed to be served, sulked and walked around the kitchen. They were sure they would starve. Then suddenly she would arrive and throw everyone out, put up pots filled with water on all the ranges with the heat turned full blast and rushing about here and there, finding the ingredients, and in ten minutes, everything would be ready.

My job was to set the table. Jeannette, the daughter of Maria and Emile was about one year older than I. She was like my sister and we were to share the job but she could say “No” and she never set the table. It made me mad, but no one paid attention to the injustice of it.

In 1938, the summer when I was seven-and-one-half, I was sent to a public summer camp on the Cote d'Azur. I remember waiting on line in the sun with crowds of children and hearing muffled sounds around me. Then I woke up in a white room with nuns in immaculate white uniforms smiling down on me. I was in the hospital of Saint Raphael and they said, “Thank God, you're alive!” I had had
une angine diphterique
. It was very serious, and I had been very sick for ten days.

I was thinking I was alone and perhaps going to die when my door opened and a tall man walked in. He was wearing very short shorts and thick leather sandals, and looked like a cave man with long curly hair on his bare chest. The nuns seemed alarmed at his wild looks. He was Achilles's husband, Charles Navel, a poet who also wrote books about his experiences as a manual laborer. Achilles and Charles were friends of the Cité and visited almost every weekend. My mother was very fond of Achilles who was also a writer. She had studied Russian and loved to practice it with my mother. They were Socialists. My parents had asked Charles to go see me in the hospital. I was very happy with his visit and pleased to show the nuns that I had not been abandoned, after all.

Sometimes, my mother worked in Paris, selling trinkets at a street market. Then Annie, who lived in the Cité with her husband Marcelot, took over the cooking job of my mother and also took care of me and helped me with my homework. No one had asked her to take care of me, but it was customary for whoever was home to take care of the children. Annie was not as fast a cook as my mother. I sat with her in the kitchen and helped her peel vegetables, and she talked to me as if I were a grownup. I liked that. She told me the gossip, listened to my complaints, and was always on my side, even if I was wrong.

Annie and Marcelot were newly married and they kissed all the time. Everyone teased them about it. She had just arrived from a farm in Normandy, she used to tell me about how they did things back home. She thought Dr. Carton was weird,
coucou
as they say in French, but it was not up to her to criticize him, she would add. She, however, craved real food and a glass of good ordinary red wine. Marcelot was a carpenter. He made me an oak desk when I was nine. He had designed the desk himself. It was modern with a cobalt blue linoleum top. It was one of his best pieces and when I had to leave the Cité, Marcelot took the desk back.

Jean was our neighbor on the first floor landing. He was thirty and married Guida shortly after we arrived. He also had had tuberculosis. Guida was perfect for him, everyone said, because she was a nurse. She was a foreigner and talked like my parents with an accent. Jean was tall and lanky. He was a civil servant in the city hall of an adjacent locality and spent a good deal of time in his room because he needed a lot of rest. I visited him often, and I became the first member of the children's club he was organizing. Jean had a gigantic table in his room with electric trains on it. These could be made to race and one could place bets on them. It was a very elaborate setup with miniature buildings and elevators and cars and light signals which all were operated with electricity. Its countryside was filled with tiny farms and animals, rivers, lakes, a cascade and mountains. Jean was constantly adding diminutive objects to this train table and embellishing its panorama.

When Jean was feeling well, he went to Paris with his trains to raise money for the

Party. His stand was always the most popular because people loved to gamble at his table. Jean wanted me to recruit young people my age about nine or ten-years-old to join the club. It was not easy, most of my friends had things to do on Sundays. The only children willing to come to the meetings of the club were the poor ones. They didn't mind coming for the food, but they were not dependable, and they dropped out quickly when we had to work hard. They were not as loyal and devoted to Jean as I was.

I attended all the meetings of Jean's club. Sometimes I was the only one present. But Jean and I didn't mind: Jean made me feel a part of something important. We collected money for the Spanish refugees from the Spanish Revolution. I thought the civil war in Spain was terrible and I felt bad for the people who had had to leave because of a dictator like Franco. Guida, his wife, was tolerant and patient but sometimes she had enough with Jean's trains and his club members. She would tell me to go to my room because she needed to be on her own. That meant we had to stop the meeting.

Maimaine was my best friend. Her name was short for Germaine. I was called Nana short for Nadia. We met in school the first day I arrived in Chatenay, and we were inseparable from that time on. We knew how to please grownups, how to be polite and say “Oui, Madame” but then do as we pleased. We were naughty and got away with it. We rang doorbells in the street and ran as fast as we could to hide. No one ever suspected the good little girls that we feigned to be. We were always ready to laugh hysterically at anything.

We were both short and the best students in the class. Madeleine who was Maimaine's sister was a teacher. She helped Maimaine with her homework. She was more qualified than Annie who helped me with mine. Maimaine and I took turns at being the first in the class,
la première
. Class rank was important for us in school, but we competed with good humor. I loved going to Maimaine's big stone house. Her father was the plumber in Chatenay. He knew everybody, and he smelled of wine, grease and soap. He thought I was funny, so as soon as I saw him, I was funny, and I loved him for making me say funny things without my even thinking about saying them.

Maimaine's mother was a great cook. I ate my first pigeon with tiny green peas cooked with lettuce in her kitchen. There I could eat all the forbidden foods listed by Dr. Carton that we didn't eat in our house: dry garlic sausages, small pickles in vinegar and mustard.

Maimaine told me she liked coming to my house because she liked seeing the weird people in short pants, and she liked the grated raw carrots and sprouted wheat germ we ate—strange foods in those days when the French considered green salads food for rabbits.

Once we played hooky and went to a movie in Sceaux. It was thrilling to be where we were not supposed to be. I was sure we would meet people who would recognize us. However, nothing happened.

A day came when Maimaine suddenly stopped playing with me. She was hiding something, and it tortured me. Later I saw her with Monique, a girl from our class that we didn't like, but I remembered that Maimaine had said, “Isn't Monique's brother cute?” She had begun to like boys before I did. I felt betrayed and forsaken.

Around that time, I misbehaved in school and got a zero in conduct on my report card. I signed the card myself thinking that no one would know the difference, but to my astonishment it didn't work. They made a fuss in school, and I was ashamed and ridiculed. Later Marcel teased me for many years about having signed so badly. The incident also embarrassed my parents, and I felt regretful. After that I was careful to tell the truth.

Monsieur Richet was both our art teacher and the Mayor of Chatenay. Whatever picture I drew, he picked it and put it on the board to show the class what he was trying to have them do. I didn't take drawing very seriously and I didn't know why he liked my pictures that much. If I met the Mayor in the street, he always said “Hello” and introduced me to his friends
as une artiste de grand talent
. The art teacher who replaced him when I was promoted to the next class was also very amiable, and my good fortune in art class continued. This teacher was a very tall lady with hair the color of a lion's mane. She asked me to make invitation cards for her, and she gave me money to buy a box of paints. I felt privileged and successful.

Once we had to make a mural of the French Revolution for school, and I was put in charge. I loved the French Revolution. I liked the idea of the poor people rising up to liberate the Bastille. We made stick figures with round faces and detailed clothing for the crowd. And although I felt sorry for Marie Antoinette who was guillotined, I enjoyed drawing her fancy dress.

I began to like and use geometry in drawings when we had to compose friezes to decorate the top of our page each school day, below an ethical saying like why we shouldn't gossip or steal.

In Chatenay, people scorned the way we lived in the collective. We were considered revolutionary and dangerous. I realized this only after I had a fight with the girl whose grandparents lived next door to us. We were exchanging words in the schoolyard when she screamed to me
Va avec tes couche tout nus
which in English meant, “Go with your people who sleep naked,” a reference to our being nudists. I was shocked. I said I dare you to repeat that and she repeated what she said with great pleasure, in a loud voice in front of everybody. “I am going to tell your grandmother,” I said outraged. And she said “Go ahead, that is what she calls you,
les couche tout nus,
see if I care.” I was dumbfounded. Then I dared everyone to follow me. I would go to face her grandmother myself and hear this insult. I raised my arm as if I were to assault the Bastille. I was sure the grandmother would back me up, and I was going to show this nasty girl how stupid and mean she was. Imagine my mortification when the grandmother sweetly said to me, “Listen, Nana, isn't it true that you sleep in the nude?” I was so stupefied and humiliated I couldn't answer. Anyway it was true, we did sleep in the nude.

Before the war had begun around the end of 1938, the French police came to our house and arrested my father, Marcel and several other of the men. They were accused of having typed a Communist leaflet on my father's typewriter. My father was rarely at home my mother told the police, and he was not a communist, but they didn't want to hear it.

The comrades who were Communist and Party members were supported by Party lawyers, but they refused to include my father in their defense because he was not a member.

My mother was bitter about this. Ironically, it was she who managed to have my father released with the help of her own lawyer, who happened to have been a Jewish friend and who did the job for free. Consequently, the others were also freed as well. After that my father left Paris to join the Foreign Légion, since as a foreigner he couldn't be in the regular French army. My father told me that a man who would have been heir to the throne if France had still been a monarchy, a Monsieur Henri (I guess, as a royalist, he couldn't be in the regular army either), was with him in the Légion too. In the early thirties, the popular singers and later Edith Piaf sang great love songs about the soldiers of the
Légion Étrangère
.