Time and Atrocities

Forty years ago (at 21 years old) I came to Paris with my 17- year-old sister for our junior year abroad/gap year. We met two 19-year-old Canadian girls en route and became fast friends. We four travelled together, partied together, and learned together. Us “Paris gals” have remained good friends throughout the years while we bounced our lives off of each other ever since.

Forty years doesn’t seem very long to me ….sure we ‘Paris Gals’ have raised kids, fallen in and out of love and changed homes and husbands over the years. But we are still the same as we ever were really. Essentially nothing about us has changed in that time. This weekend, we had a zoom reunion and picked up our conversation as if nothing had ever stopped it.

Forty years before that date (when we awesome modern world travellers met in ’82) back in July of 1942 the French Police (not the German Nazis, but the French police mind you, under Petain) rounded up Paris’ Jewish citizens (even though nobody had even told them to do so, despite my previously understanding the German’s had not demanded this deportation). These people were collected over the night between July 16^th and 17^th and taken to the Velodrome d’Hiver (which was just outside Paris city limits) to be processed and shipped off to Auschwitz as part of the French deportation effort. Other Parisians were told at the time that these families were foreigners – but many of the fathers had actually fought for France in WWI. On that fateful night the men were already gone though, and it was the women and children who were shipped off to death camps.

There is now a memorial garden for the more than 4000 kids who were taken from their Parisian beds during the night, counted, processed and shipped off to die. This weekend I also observed their descendants grieve for their grand-aunts and uncles. It occurred to me that those deported children would have been the same age as my parents, and I grieved for the evil that destroyed them all.

It wasn’t until the presidency of Jacques Chirac (I always liked to call him ‘Black Jack Shellac’- after bug’s bunny’s French gambling character) that France finally accepted this country’s complicity in Hitler’s final solution. So that would have been maybe about thirty years ago?

Twenty years ago my youngest sister visited while doing a paying gig for her college professor about the Jews in Paris during the “occupation” – strangely named actually when you consider that Petain welcomed the Nazi bullies with relatively open arms rather than risk any more blood bath. Hahahahaha.  Of course a huge exodus of Parisians followed the Paris occupation (and the Germans did bomb those people as they were walking away) of anybody who could get out of town, and as far south as possible – Jews included. The Parisians weren’t happy to see the Germans. But many people were stuck here anyway.

My sister’s visit was before the book called Le Suite Française was published (found in the private trunk of a “final solutioned” author by her daughter). But I had seen a smattering of signs around the Marais, particularly in the Jewish neighborhood along rue de Rosier (the road of rosebushes). Back in the ‘90s there were still Jewish bath houses, delis with awesome Russian pickles and yarmulkas for sale in little shops off the rue de Rosiers. To this day there is a working trade school, mostly for Jews but not exclusively – as established by Rothchild a long long time ago in that now highly sanitized neighborhood. The Marais is now the world’s largest open-air ‘please touch museum’ but the Ashkenazi Jewish neighborhood has been replaced by a self-conscious Sephardic Jewish quartier. There is also a memorial to concentration camp deaths on the tip of the Ile de la Cite which is quite moving, though that historic spot would date back to the time of Julius Cesar if you think about it.

Anyway twenty years ago, my kid sister and I made a concerted effort to learn about this infamous “vel d’hiv” where the ‘raffle’ (or round up) took place. The Velodrome d’hiver, as the name implies had been for bike races in the winter, but it served the anti-semites as a convenient holding place for the 13,000 Parisians who were collected in the dead of night so that their neighbors could maintain deniability. Since it had been just outside the city limits at the time, my sister and I thought it was further away from the Eiffel Tower than it has proven to be. I recently learned that during WWII Algerian (and there were lots of Jews from Algeria) could have gone to the Grande Mosque of Paris and been declared Moslem and therefore exempt from this deportation…..So I think antisemitic is a misnomer, Ashkenazi jews are not Semitic but Muslims are if you ask me (but of course nobody has)

Then, 15 years ago, I bought a flat across the street from where, unbeknownst to me, the “Vel D’hiv” had been. It turns out that the boulevard Grenelle, above which runs metro line six (and it was running at that time too) was the boundary of Paris right on through WWII. What may now be the most touristy metro stop in Paris (named Bir Hakeim instead of Eiffel tower as a nod to a small battle in North Africa during WWII and as a good way to confuse tourists) was on the very edge of town. Metro Line 6 is largely above ground and was built where one of the city’s protective walls had once been placed, and where executions took place during the ‘belle epoque’

Here is the picture that somebody found of the night of the round-up. It was practically taken from my apartment window (this apartment was supposedly built for the builders of the Eiffel tower – so it was certainly here in 1942)

 I’ve often wondered what the tenants at that time thought as they looked out the window.  I believe in locational Karma and I think I should burn some sage.

Years of construction across the street from our newly purchased apartment in this new millennium saw the destruction of the Ministry of the Interior and the building of the headquarters for Le Parisian newspaper business. They also built a pretty little “Jarden des Enfants” with a wall that includes all the names of the children who were sent to their death from right here 80 years ago this weekend. I love the four teenaged boys names that say escaped next to them.

Fifty years ago – I remember travelling through London on my way to Africa in the 1970s and all the adults, “old people” to 11 year old me, explained how “this spot was bombed, that spot was where we hid” etc. But the whole story felt like ancient history because it was before I was born. Then when I got to Paris in ’82 it looked so untouched by the war that I could effectively avoid thinking about that nasty history for the most part. I saw the plaques though, and there was a plaque near the Latin quarter, and on the same street on which Descartes died, which amounts to a piece of poetry written by a Jewish poet and put outside the home he was pulled from on July 16^th 1942 that still makes me cry when I show it to friends.

This weekend, protected by the same police force that rounded their great aunts and uncles up 80 years ago, the children and grandchildren of the Jewish deported showed up for a religious memorial. Our new prime minister – Elizabeth Borne – is the daughter of a deportee. I understand her dad committed suicide after he got back home. Simon Weil’s son was there yesterday as well.

Here is a picture of saturday evening’s Jewish mourning service.                                            

It disturbs me because it looks too much like the old picture. I vowed that if they started putting people in those unmarked vans and taking them away I would film the whole thing as a testimonial. Luckily they didn’t.

So I have been a bit sick all weekend,  I’m trying to work through my thoughts about time and atrocities. The first time I saw a memorial celebration for the children of the Vel d’hiv I brought down some California almonds to share and improve the karma as best I could.  I’m trying to share my thoughts here as a way to off-load them and to unburden myself.

Time is short, History is long and I am tired. But its important that we not raise our children nihilistically.

The civilization that is the EU today has come at a terrible price and I wish the US and Israel could achieve this same civilization. But it seems that revenge and greed are in the way – “ask not what the world owes you but what you owe the world”…this too shall pass.