A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [21]
In 1937 their son, Henri, was born. When he was three years old, the Wehrmacht took Paris. One of Henri's earliest memories was a train trip with his mother, for which they carried big packages. They were going to see his father. He can't remember much more. It was 1941. That year, concentration camps were built in Poland. In September all Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars. But even before that, on May 14, when the nationality of French Jews was still more or less respected, there had been a roundup of four thousand foreign Jews. Icchok Finkelsztajn had been caught on the street. Even if he had had the right papers, he had the wrong accent. He was sent to a prison—or, as it was officially labeled, a “lodging camp,” in Pithiviers, just a little south of Paris.
Soon after Dwojra and Henri went to visit him, Icchok escaped. The family hid in the town of Tarbes, in the Pyrenees. The Korcarzes fled to a neighboring town. Since they had been forced to flee in 1941, the Finkelsztajns and the Korcarzes were not among the Jews who were rounded up the following year on Rue des Rosiers and Rue des Ecouffes and shipped off to gas chambers in Poland.
Icchok found work in the Pyrenees. A group of Republicanos— Spanish leftists who had fought Franco and had taken refuge across the border in 1939—hired him, knowing he was Jewish and knowing he needed work. His job was chopping firewood in the mountains, sometimes for weeks at a time. Dwojra and Henri tried to stay indoors as much as possible. Only Icchok would venture out on his bicycle to shop for food or go off to work in the mountains.
Many of Henri Finkelsztajn's memories of Tarbes are glimpses from behind curtains. Henri would go to the window and lift up the bottom of the curtain about two inches, just enough for his eyes, and watch the Gestapo search the building across the street. Dark uniforms would move through the building. Suddenly one would appear on a balcony and then disappear, and then the same man would pop up a few minutes later at another window or on another balcony. It was fun to try to guess who would pop up where next. But he could sense his parents’ fear.
In 1943, Dwojra gave birth to another son, Willy. Icchok, the leftist atheist, surrounded by Gestapo, was adamant that his son must be circumcised. In 1943 nobody wanted to be circumcised, let alone have a circumcision performed on someone they loved. The greater part of that generation of European Jewry simply skipped this biblical demand. But somehow Icchok found a mohel, a ritual circumciser, some twenty miles from Tarbes in the Catholic shrine town of Lourdes. He brought this terrified elderly Jew to the apartment. The infant Willy was placed with the mohel in the living room, and a curtain was stretched across the corner for privacy. Little Henri of course peeked under curtains, but what he saw this time was in a way more terrifying than the Gestapo. The mohel had a knife in his hand and was leaning over Willy. Henri couldn't tell if it was his old age or just simple fear, but the hand with the knife never stopped shaking, causing the knife to wave in little abrupt spasms.
In the summer of 1944, young Henri Finkelsztajn was staying with the Korcarzes in their neighboring village. He was surprised one day to see his father coming for him, not on a bicycle but in a car. They rode back to Tarbes and saw all the Germans being held as prisoners. The townspeople, ordinary civilians, were walking up to them and spitting in their faces. Henri, still only seven years old, immediately understood this extraordinary scene.
“For me,” he said later, “this was the end of fear.”
2
Liberated
Paris
ON AUGUST 22, 1944, WHILE ALMOST FIVE THOUSAND Parisians were being killed or wounded in the liberation of the capital, Grenoble fell calmly. Townspeople shouted “They're here!” and an irregular army of resistance fighters walked, drove, and bicycled into town looking tired from days of fighting in the mountains.