A Life

S.V.

I

Childhood in Nice

The photos of my childhood prove it: we were a happy family. What affection there is, as the four of us, one brother and three sisters, cluster around Mama! In other photos, we are playing on the beach in Nice, or gazing straight out of the picture in the garden of our holiday home at La Ciotat, or my sisters and I are in fits of giggles on a guide camp. Good fairies must have leant over our cradles at birth. Their names were Harmony and Complicity, and they gave us the best weapons to face the world. In spite of the differences between us and the difficulties we were to encounter, our parents gave us the warmth of a close family and, most important of all in their view, an education that was both intelligent and thorough.

Later, but too soon, fate contrived to muddy those apparently limpid waters until nothing remained of that joie de vivre. Like so many French Jewish families, death struck us early and hard. As I write these lines, I cannot help thinking sadly that my mother and father will never have seen their children’s adulthood and the birth of their grandchildren, or known the joy of an extended family circle. In view of what happened to us, they will not have realised the true value of the heritage, precious and extraordinary as it was, that they bequeathed us.

The 1920s were years of happiness for them. They were married in 1922. My father, André Jacob, was then thirty-two and Mama, Yvonne Steinmetz, eleven years younger. There was no mistaking a dashing young couple back then. André bears the quiet, undemonstrative elegance he never lost, just as he clung to the creativity of his profession as an architect, harshly disrupted by four years in captivity shortly after he won the Grand Prix de Rome. Yvonne had that radiant beauty that puts many people in mind of the star of the day, Greta Garbo. A year later, their first daughter, Madeleine known as Milou, was born. Another year went by and Denise was born, followed by Jean in 1925 and me in 1927. In less than five years, the Jacob family had gone from two members to six. My father looks satisfied. France needed large families, he thought. As for Mama, she, too, looks happy: her family filled her life.

Both my parents were born in Paris, in the Avenue Trudaine to be precise, a stone’s throw from one another in a quiet corner of the 9th arrondissement where many Jewish families lived at the beginning of the century before later moving on to other areas. Although distant cousins, they did not know each other. On my father’s side, the family tree shows them settling in France at least as early as the first half of the 18th century. My ancestors lived in Lorraine at that time near Metz, in a village which I took my family to see a few years ago. The last Jew in the village, a sprightly centenarian, was tending the cemetery. He showed us our ancestors’ graves, one of which dated back to the 1750s. You can imagine how moved we were to see these distant vestiges of our presence in the village.

Even before the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, my paternal ancestors had moved to Paris, where they settled as craftsmen. They made little silver boxes, which had some success for they were sold as far away as Central Europe. Later, the business declined and the family had to adopt a more austere way of life. My grandfather took a job as an accountant in the Paris gas company, the Compagnie Parisienne de Gaz. However, he clearly managed to give his children a sound education, because my father took lessons in fine art and won the second Grand Prix de Rome before becoming an architect. His brother graduated as an engineer from the prestigious engineering college, the Ecole Centrale.

Like all those assimilated Jewish families, my father’s was deeply patriotic and secular. His forebears were proud of the country that had granted the Jews full citizenship in 1791. The wave of anti-Semitism that engulfed the country at the time of the Dreyfus Affair did little to shake their comfortable sense of security. Normality was quickly restored when the Republic recognised the captain’s innocence. ‘The descendants of 1789 could not be wrong’, my grandfather is supposed to have declared, uncorking a bottle of champagne to celebrate the occasion. So, when war was declared in 1914, just when my father had finished his military service and was dreaming of launching himself into his professional life, he was sent to the front like all French men of his age. He was posted to Maubeuge and entered the corps of balloon observers, but he was captured in October 1914. He spent the rest of the war in prison in increasingly difficult conditions after several attempts to escape.

Those years had a profound effect on him. When we were children, he showed no sign, in his extreme concern for our education, of the light-heartedness the friends of his youth displayed. As for Germany, he saw her as a ‘hereditary enemy’ and did not believe in the reconciliation preached by Aristide Briand.

I have fewer details about the members of my maternal family. They came from the Rhineland, my grandmother from Belgium, and they settled in France at the end of the 19th century. That whole little universe on my mother’s side was fundamentally republican and secular, as it was on my father’s, a point on which he was absolutely strict. I have a memory of a scene that took place when I was eight or nine. An Italian cousin who was staying with us had taken me to synagogue with her. When Papa found out, he warned the cousin that if she ever repeated the initiative, she would be banned from the house.

Quite simply, we were Jewish and secular and made no secret of it. At kindergarten, a four or five year-old fellow pupil once made me cry by telling me that my mother would ‘burn in hell’ because we were Jews. But I knew nothing about religion. In 1937, when we visited the Paris Great Exhibition, we were having lunch in a restaurant where we stalwartly ordered sauerkraut and sausages. When the cousins with whom we were staying found out, they exclaimed: ‘How can you! Sauerkraut and sausages! And on Yom Kippur, too!’ That event marked the beginning of my education about Jewish customs. I fully acknowledge without the least embarrassment that it is still limited.

Nevertheless, I have never had a problem with belonging to the Jewish community. My father felt strongly about it, not for religious but for cultural reasons. In his view, if the Jews were the chosen people, it was because they were the people of the Book, the people of thought and writing. I remember asking him when I was about fourteen or fifteen, ‘Would you mind if I married someone who was not a Jew ?’ He replied that, for himself, he would never have married a non-Jew unless she had been an aristocrat! In answer to my surprise, he explained, ‘Jews and aristocrats are the only people who have been able to read for centuries, and that is the only thing that counts.’

His remark impressed me. Not only did it confirm us in our opinion of him as uncompromising and eccentric, but it proved the extent of his attachment to the things of the mind. When we were children, after our bath we would go into his office to listen to him tell us Perrault’s fairy stories or La Fontaine’s fables. Later, when we were in our teens, he would not put up with us indulging in ‘petty novels’, like those by Rosamond Lehmann; we had to read, not only the classics, Michel de Montaigne, Jean Racine or Blaise Pascal, but also the moderns, Emile Zola or Anatole France and even, to my surprise, the raunchy Henry de Montherlant. He himself was a great reader. He was also a talented draftsman and painter, practising these arts with the diligence and commitment he applied to everything. I still own a few pretty watercolours by him. Unlike my mother, however, music was not part of his world.

A few more words about secularity: it was our guiding principle and remains so to this day. My mother was an atheist as I am myself, and she continues to epitomise supreme goodness in my eyes. Which is not to say that I do not recognise the help religions can bring believers, and I remember with admiration those young Polish girls, reduced to skin and bone by life in the camps, who nevertheless insisted on fasting on Yom Kippur. To them, respect for ritual was more important than survival. I remain impressed.

I mentioned our visit to the Great Exhibition. It was an adventure because we did not live in Paris. Two years after their marriage, in 1924, my parents left the capital and moved to Nice. My father had decided on the Côte d’Azur because of an intuition that proved correct, though alas, several decades too early, that business there would flourish. He had foreseen the boom of the construction industry along the up-and- coming Riviera. Nice in particular was undergoing spectacular expansion, due in part to the influx of foreigners. Convinced that the big time awaited him there, my father decided to set out for the south. Mama was not overjoyed at the prospect of uprooting the whole family. At her husband’s request, she abandoned her studies in chemistry, much as they had fascinated her, to devote herself to her home and her children. Now, she was going to have to leave Paris, her friends, her family and the concerts she loved. However, she did not make a fuss. She had a capacity for self-denial and was used to enduring the profits and losses which my father saw as minor details. But there can be no doubt that she passed on to me her desire for independence. To my mind and to hers, a woman with abilities owes it to herself to study and work, even if her husband is against it. It is a question of her freedom and her independence.

During the first years, Papa’s business enjoyed a promising upturn, as he had predicted. He took on two draftsmen and a secretary and he drew plans of a villa in La Ciotat, which he saw as the first in a long series, on land that had once belonged to the Lumière brothers and which had been bought by a seaside holiday company. We lived in Nice in a fine bourgeois apartment in the Musicians quarter. As far as I remember, my sisters and I shared a vast bedroom, while my brother Jean had his own. I particularly recall the architect’s studio where my father and his colleagues worked in a serious and concentrated atmosphere that impressed the little girl I was then.

That golden age was short-lived. Life in the 1920s had been easy; in the 1930s, it was difficult. The infamous financial crisis of 1929 hit my family hard, as it did so many French people. My father’s commissions abruptly declined. The situation was not helped by the fact that he was not very flexible with regard to his clients’ wishes and always tried to convince them of his own architectural preferences.

In 1931 or 1932, we had to sell our car, leave the city centre and move to a more modest and far less comfortable apartment. Gone was the central heating and in its place was a big fire in the entrance; simple Provençal tiles replaced the parquet floor, and my brother now had to sleep in the dining room. From then on, the financial troubles confronting our family began to impinge on our daily life. Even though, as the youngest child, I was less aware than the others, I could see that Mama missed our old apartment.

At the age of five, these practical nuisances were trivial and had little effect on me. On the contrary, I loved our apartment in the Rue Cluvier: the local district was delightful and the countryside only a stone’s throw away. We looked out on to the Russian church, an exact replica of a church in Moscow, built on the occasion of the Tsar’s visit to France. Even before the arrival of all the refugees fleeing the October Revolution, the whole area was steeped in Russian culture. Near where we lived, there were tennis courts, also built when the Tsar visited, and not much further away, a boulevard bore the name of the Tsarevich.

I can still see our room with its blue patterned wallpaper. It had a balcony with pot plants on it from which we looked down into the vast garden of a horticulturist. Then, only a few blocks from our apartment, the countryside began, with a real little mimosa wood carpeted with violets. We used regularly to go for a walk there on Sunday, and when we were a bit older, on Thursday with the guide group. The district is unrecognisable, now. I have been back a couple of times. All the green spaces have been built on and swallowed up by the city; I could barely find the boys’ school my brother attended, in its magnificent parkland setting. Today, it is surrounded by huge apartment blocks. Back then, the constant presence of the sea, the sun and the open country made my childhood idyllic.

The three of us, my two sisters and I, were seldom apart. I can see us in our room doing our homework together. We had a lot of work to do at home, even if, by my father’s exacting standards, it did not push us to academic excellence. Of course, we rose through the classes without trouble, but study was not our strong point. We won prizes in the subjects that interested us, but for the rest, we were content to do only what was necessary. Our teachers were excellent, however, nearly all agrégés.* Although I was not a good pupil, I was often the teachers’ pet. ‘You get away with everything!’ my classmates would say. ‘But if we did a fraction of what you do, they wouldn’t stand for it.’ They were not entirely wrong. I can think of a few teachers who did a lot to shelter me. Among them, when I was in class seven or eight, was a young couple without children who used to take me for tea after school and I was rather proud of this attention. As, in addition, Mama’s friends used to tell her repeatedly that she spoilt me far more than my brother and sisters because I was the little one, I thought for a long time that I was overprotected. Her friends’ predictions were grim: ‘Yvonne, you are spoiling Simone. She gets her own way and makes the whole family dance to her tune. She’ll be unbearable when she grows up, spoilt rotten!’ When I was a bit older, I would happily rush to the dictionary to have the last say on the meaning of a word.

There was no great danger, for Papa kept his eye on me. He always sat me to his right at table, on the grounds that I had to be kept in check. He thought I had my way too often, that I was badly behaved, that my education had to be refined and that only he could compensate for my mother’s over-indulgence. And then, my tendency to argue soon displeased him. In my amazement that he did not realise what a wonderful person Mama was, I was quick to say that I thought many of his decisions and prohibitions were a way of bullying her.

Yet I did not see my behaviour as extraordinary. There was nothing I liked better than to stay at home with Mama. I felt as though my greatest happiness was to live in symbiosis with her. I leant against her, held her hand, nestled against her knees and would not leave her. I would happily have had her all to myself. Nevertheless, there was a close bond between my brother and sisters. We accepted Milou’s authority, which was remarkably reasonable and to which Mama was happy to delegate her powers. In the evening, I could never have got to sleep if one or other of them had not come to kiss me goodnight. As for Jean, he watched over me attentively and tenderly. So did Denise, although she was already very independent.

The image of me as the favourite if capricious child was so enduring that when we came back from being deported and my eldest sister met up with a friend, the friend blurted out thoughtlessly: ‘I hope deportation has at least knocked a bit of sense into Simone!’ When Milou relayed this comment to me, I was horrified. What a strange time those years were, when people did not always realise the impact of their words. Yet that friend must have known what we had gone through out there. Was she, like so many others, trying to deny the facts because she found them so unbearable? Perhaps; but, although I can be tolerant about such things, remarks of that sort were not easily forgotten.

When I look back on those happy years before the war, I feel an overwhelming sense of loss. It was a happiness not easily conveyed in words, because it consisted of calm surroundings and little nothings, of shared confidences and bursts of mutual laughter, of moments that are lost forever. The terrible sequel has made the fleeting memories of childhood all the more painful to recall. Our pastimes were simple because, apart from reading, Papa would only allow the radio or a trip to the cinema as an occasional treat. In any case, I have no recollection of the odd films we managed to see at that time. Most of our free time was spent privately as a family, or later, when we were older, in the guide group to which we belonged. I did not really make a distinction between family life and the life I led out of doors, at school or with the guides. It all seemed part of a homogenous environment that cradled me in a comforting sense of security. I felt as though everything took place in the family, for my parents were friends with some of our teachers and invited them back to the house or went ski-ing with them, while the guides were also school friends and our families saw each other socially and ran little errands for one another. Mama, for instance, made the guides’ ties. Consequently, I seemed to live in a community where the boundaries were informal but the relationships warm and infinite. A few of the more salient times have escaped oblivion: I can remember a delightful Christmas, when my parents had let my sisters go ski-ing in the mountains with their friends and the three of us remained behind at home. I was thrilled to have Mama all to myself.

In the summer, family holidays were spent at La Ciotat, in the house my father had built. Between the beach, games in the garden and outings with our cousins, we had a full timetable. In Nice, my best friend had been my companion since year five. Her home life was unhappy, because she did not get on with her parents. They were Polish Jews who had come to France after the referendum of 1935 that annexed the Saar to Germany. We were very close and Mama readily invited her to our home. Together with two other guides, we were an inseparable foursome. Too soon, cancer carried off my three friends. I still feel their absence.

One of them and her sister, the Reinach girls, had arrived on the Côte d’Azur right at the start of the war. Their father, Julien, a Counsellor of State, had been debarred from the Upper Chamber by the first of Pétain’s anti-Jewish laws. They lived in the Villa Kerylos in Beaulieu, an extraordinary place which their grandfather, the Hellenist Théodore Reinach, had built in the early 1900s as a faithful reconstruction of an Ancient Greek mansion. It was vast and luxurious, and we were captivated by the ‘Greek villa’ with its fairy-tale splendour: at supper time, we ate off reproduction Greek dishes.

Politics, at that time, entered my schoolgirl’s life by stealth. I was in year six when the Popular Front won the elections of 1936. The girls in the older classes were very involved. They wore political badges, talked animatedly and discussed the events, marches and strikes. One of them put up a portrait of Colonel De La Rocque, head of the right-wing Croix-de- Feu, in her room. A few years later, the same girl had joined the Francs-Tireurs Resistance fighters and was deported to Ravensbrück.

So much political excitement was new for me. In the first place, politics was out of bounds at home, and then, as I discovered later, my parents did not share the same opinions. Papa took L’Eclaireur, a right-wing daily, whereas Mama read, more or less without Papa’s knowledge, the pro-Socialist Le Petit Niçois, as well as left or centre-left magazines, such as La Lumière, L’Oeuvre and Marianne. For their part, my mother’s sister and her husband, both doctors in Paris, made no secret of their left-wing leanings. They had had Communist sympathies, but a journey to the USSR in 1934 had effectively inoculated them. Like André Gide, they had come back sorely disappointed, without, however, veering to the