A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [29]
Fania, too, wanted to go, and she told her mother so. Her mother looked at Fania with moist eyes and said, “So you are going to leave us all alone —just the two of us.”
It was true. Fania's mother had only her two daughters. Fania's father had died before the war, and there had been no word from any surviving relative back in Poland. Fania Elbinger's aliyah ended when she looked into her mother's eyes.
Yankel and Syma Ewenczyk stayed in Grenoble with their oldest son, Sam, who could at last finish his studies, after which he would remain at the university and work in nuclear energy research. Emmanuel's brother Oscar returned to Paris from Germany, where he had torn up his identity papers, concealed his Jewish identity, and spent the war in forced labor as a prisoner of war on a farm. At least on a farm he had had enough food to eat.
Oscar and Emmanuel kept the sweater business in Paris, and as Emmanuel had predicted, it was an instant success. As soon as they secured the supplies and their designers came out with a new line, the wholesalers started selling sweaters at top prices, as fast as they could produce them. France was hungry for consumer goods.
Fania and Emmanuel were married on December 30, 1945, in a just-restored synagogue on Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, one of several synagogues the Germans had blown up in October 1941. Two years later, Oscar married Fania's sister Georgette.
It took a long time to sort out the missing people. Many of them were never found. For some, like Fania's mother, it took time just to comprehend what had happened. Back in Grenoble during the war, Fania had shown her mother a flyer from the Jewish Resistance saying that hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been taken to camps in Poland were being gassed to death. Her mother had left parents, a brother, a sister, and a niece in Baronovitchi, in eastern Poland. Tossing the flyer down, her mother told Fania, “Don't believe that. It can't be true. It's not possible.” In fact, most of the Jews Fania talked to in the Grenoble area had not believed the flyer. How could you take hundreds of thousands of people and gas them to death? Perhaps some had been gassed, maybe even a few hundred, but more likely they had been shot. Rumors run wild in time of war.
After the Liberation, Fania tried without success to find a trace of her mother's family in Baronovitchi. She wrote letters. She went to special offices. She discovered that huge extended Jewish families had entirely vanished without a trace. Whole communities were gone, with no precise explanation. Europe was full of individuals who did not have a single friend or relative in the world. Some of them found each other and married quickly. Many went to Israel, at least to be with other Jews.
In early 1945 the elegant turn-of-the-century Hotel Lutetia, located at an expensive Left Bank Parisian intersection, was set up to receive concentration camp survivors. The original idea was to establish a reception center at the train station, the Gare d'Orsay. Liberated prisoners of war and labor camp inmates had already been coming in, a little thinner but happy to be home, and the staff at the center imagined that the liberated concentration camp inmates would be similar. But in April, when the first of them started returning—skeletal ghosts with glazed, sunken eyes—Parisians could see that something very different had happened to them. Some of the staff who worked in the Hotel Lutetia center openly expressed distaste for their work. The people were frightening to look at and terrible to listen to, with their tales of horror or, as one staff member put it, their “complaining.” This did not