A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [22]
Emmanuel Ewenczyk had one thought upon liberation—to go back to Paris and reopen the family business on Rue Bleue. His father, Yankel, said, “You are crazy. Wait awhile. You can't go there now.”
“I've waited almost four years already,” said Emmanuel. “I want to get to work.”
Emmanuel and Yankel had many arguments like that. Emmanuel had not wanted to leave the shop in Paris in the first place.
Rue Bleue is a commercial Parisian street of unremarkable nineteenth-century buildings, long and not particularly wide, angling off in a slight curve as the blocks wind across the ninth into the tenth arrondissement. Before the war, the Ewenczyks lived there in a five-room apartment on the third floor. The two floors below were occupied by the family sweater-making business.
Before sweaters, the family business had been lumber. In the early twentieth century, the lumber business had boomed. Western Europe needed wood for new railroad lines, and Eastern Europe, Poland, and Russia, had the forests. Yankel Ewenczyk had been in the lumber trade in White Russia, Byelorussia, in an area that was largely populated by Jews. Jews even sat on the municipal council—which meant that after the Russian Revolution they were targeted by the Red Army. As a result, Yankel, his wife Syma, and their three young sons—Samuel, Oscar, and Emmanuel—moved a little west to Poland. The family continued to prosper in lumber, and in 1930, the oldest son, Sam, decided he wanted to become an engineer. He debated between going to a university in Haifa, in Palestine, where there were numerous Jews from Poland, or to one in Grenoble in the French Alps. He chose Grenoble, and for two years he studied there while Yankel sent him money. But in 1932 there was not much more money to send. The lumber business had collapsed, and the Poles were making it increasingly difficult for Jews to do anything in Poland.
In 1932 the Ewenczyks moved to Paris and found an apartment in the heart of a right-bank wholesale district on Rue Poissoniere. Sweater-making was an emerging trade in the neighborhood. The entire family worked together in a sweater shop, and with Yankel's instinct for trade and all five of them working, the little business prospered even in the difficult 1930s.
In 1940 all three sons, having become naturalized French citizens, were called into service in the French army for what would be a forty-six-day war with Germany. Oscar was among the thousands of prisoners of war taken near the Belgian border and deported to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Emmanuel's unit was captured in Orleans. The rest of the family fled to Grenoble.
Even then, as a prisoner of war, Emmanuel thought only of getting back to the shop on Rue Bleue which would now be full of fall merchandise. In all the chaos, he realized, other shops would not be producing goods. Emmanuel reasoned that the market would be hungry for his family's stock. It could all be liquidated at top prices—if only he could get back.
There were more prisoners than the Germans could handle. Emmanuel found himself in a column of two thousand French prisoners, guarded by a handful of Germans, being marched one hundred miles to Beauvais, north of Paris. There they would be questioned and sent to a distribution camp at Drancy and from there to Germany. Later, Drancy was to become a central transit point for shipping Jews to Auschwitz, but this was 1940, long before Emmanuel ever heard the word Auschwitz. He was just one of thousands of French prisoners of war.
At one point, a truck with a French crew came to distribute food to the prisoners. Emmanuel took off his army coat and, looking remarkably like a civilian, started helping the French crew distribute the food as if he were one of them. After everyone had eaten, the crew—including Emmanuel—got back on the truck and drove off. Simply by trying to get back to his shop, Emmanuel had probably saved his life.
Paris had been left undefended