A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [28]
One of Rene's daughters lost her husband, Georges Caen. Caen was not from the Norman city of the same name; he was a Kohen, a name that implied he was descended from the priestly line of Aaron. Georges Kohen was now trying to survive in Lyons as Caen, the name that his father had chosen years earlier to better blend into French society. The Germans never found out that this bourgeois Caen was no Norman. But someone informed on him for possessing a revolver, and so the Germans came to the Caens’ comfortable home and demanded Georges. The family, instead of hiding him or denying that he was there, ushered the Germans in, like confident Frenchmen who knew their rights. Georges Caen was taken away, never to be seen again.
Another of Rent's daughters was attending art school in 1944, and there she met Robert Altmann, the brother of a fellow student. Altmann had been born in Dusseldorf in 1922. His father came from a religious family but had moved away from religion as he became a successful businessman. He bought and sold steel, and after the Russian Revolution he did a lucrative business with the new struggling Soviet nation. The Russians had no cash, but they had a wealth of lumber that, as the Ewenczyks had also found, was in great demand in Western Europe. Altmann was able to work out barter arrangements with them—trading steel for wood.
After Liberation, Rene Levy and his family went back to Paris. He was unable to get back his business, which under Boussac went on to become one of the textile giants of postwar France. The Altmanns settled in Lyons, but Robert, who spoke flawless French, German, and English, went north and served as a translator for the U.S. Army until the end of the war. In 1947 he married Rene Levy's daughter, resumed his family's steel trading business, and started raising a family. Once again, they were simply affluent, assimilated Parisians living in an expensive neighborhood, eating an apple for Rosh Hashanah and matzoh for Passover so their three children would know that they were Jewish. Otherwise, they could live like other Frenchmen. The Germans were gone, and France was once again a liberal country where Jews did not have to mark themselves.
THE eAGERNESS OF ROBERT ALTMANN to pick up the old life he had left off was not characteristic of all French Jewry. Perhaps they would have felt differently if it had been only the Germans who had tried to destroy them. But it had also been the French. Many French Jews remembered that French police had rounded up French Jews for deportation. A widely reported Nazi expression attributed to number-two Nazi Hermann Goering was, “Wer jude ist, bestimme Ich, — I decide who is a Jew.” Assimilation had meant nothing to Goering and other Nazis. After the war, to many French Jews, the French ideal of assimilation seemed a fantasy of the foolish.
Most people do not have neighbors whose humanity has been tested. But in France, Jews now had such neighbors. The Nazis had proven throughout Europe that most people, when threatened, act badly. It is difficult to live in a society in which it has already been proven to you that your neighbors will pretend not to notice that your children have been murdered. Many French Jews preferred to go to an untested society and hope that Israeli or American neighbors would not be like this. In any case it would be better not to know for certain, as it now was known of European neighbors.
Zionism, the longing for a Jewish state, was first popularized by Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist who had covered the Dreyfus case. He had principally argued for Zionism in London, where the colonial administration of Palestine was controlled. But Zionism had found some of its strongest adherents in Poland. Even in the 1920s, Jewish communities in Poland had already been preparing for the aliyahy the historical return to Israel. Both Fania Elbinger and Emmanuel Ewenczyk had been raised in Polish Zionism.
Now, after the Nazi butchery, many Jews felt that surely no one could refuse