House of Glass Read online

  I received the olive oil and marmalade, thank you. I think some fruitcakes got damaged in the parcel and 200g of chocolate was missing.

  I am worried about mum and on top of that my son and his wife do not respect me. Zenek shouts a lot since he got married. He does not care about his parents any more. I do not speak to him any more and I speak with his wife only when I need something when she goes shopping etc. This is how thankful he is for the fact I have been supporting him financially all his life.

  If you have any socks size 8 you do not need, please send me 3 or 4 pairs but no underwear please. Also 20 laxative tablets as I cannot take any liquids and the herbs you sent before are not helpful for constipation. Also shaving cream and lime tea, please. Thank you for looking after me.

  Lots of love,

  David Lemberg

  But Henri and Sonia couldn’t look after everyone. One by one, the Ornstein cousins were killed off. And as they were murdered, in scenarios that were both horrific and by then unexceptional, the Glass siblings started to fall apart emotionally.

  Soon after the war started Josek Ornstein joined the Resistance network, Alliance, run by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, an extremely impressive young woman who wasn’t even thirty when she created a web of spies across France. Josek was one of those spies. In Fourcade’s book, Noah’s Ark: The Secret Underground, she refers to him as ‘little “Gigot”’, Gigot being his spy name, and the ‘little’ confirming that he had the same build as Alex. Josek was arrested by the French police in 1942 when he was caught trying to cross the demarcation line to get to Paris, and the documents in his pocket confirmed that he was not only Jewish but a member of the Resistance. The police handed him directly over to the Abwehr, or German military intelligence service, who put him in the notoriously brutal Fresnes prison, just south of Paris, where prisoners were starved, threatened and, in some cases, tortured.[5] Josek somehow – almost certainly through the Alliance network – managed to get word to Alex, who was now down in Cannes, that he had been arrested and asked for his help.

  ‘I loved Josek,’ Alex wrote. ‘As kids we played together and were very close. Immediately, I went to Vichy to see Perré. Could Perré intercede to free Josek?’

  The answer, unsurprisingly, was no. Colonel Perré – who had helped Alex get into the Foreign Legion – was by this point a high-ranking official in Vichy. Since 1940 he had been head of the military tribunal in Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne in central France, which not only specifically cracked down on resisters but had already targeted and imprisoned several members of Josek’s own Resistance network,[6] meaning Perré had personally overseen the incarceration of various Alliance spies like Josek. Moreover, while Perré himself was more interested in the sovereignty of France than Nazism, he was close friends with some of the most deranged anti-Semites in Vichy. One of these friends was René Bousquet, who was then working as secretary-general to the Vichy regime police, and decades later would be indicted for the deportation of 194 Jewish children from France to the death camps.[7]

  So as fond as Perré was of Alex, and as much as he considered him to be ‘le bon Juif’ – an exceptional Jew who deserved saving, unlike the others – there was no way he was going to save his Jewish, Resistance spy cousin. That Alex thought he might says a lot about their friendship.

  ‘I tried all my contacts. Nothing could be done,’ Alex wrote. On 30 November 1942, at 14.36, Josek was executed at Mont-Valérien,[8] a fortress to the west of Paris, alongside eight other men in his Resistance network.[9] One of these fellow Alliance resisters, a handsome young man called Lucien Vallat, left behind a letter he wrote while in prison with Josek. It said: ‘I think I have done my duty to my country and my comrades, you will never need to blush on my account. That is a great comfort to me. Be courageous. Be courageous, all of you. Farewell, everybody. Farewell, Mother.’[10] The Germans killed more than a thousand Frenchmen at Mont-Valérien during the war, almost all because they were Resistance fighters.

  Alex was devastated by the loss of his favourite cousin, the person who he considered as close as a brother, and with whom he enjoyed a much less complicated relationship than he had with Henri and Jacques. ‘To say I was sad would be a huge understatement. I was completely crushed, eaten by remorse not to have been able to save Josek,’ he wrote.

  Alex had always thought that if he befriended as many famous and high-ranking French people as possible, he would be safe and he could save his family. But for perhaps the first time, Alex realised the truth of the current situation. It didn’t matter how many French people he knew, and on what side, because the majority of French people didn’t care, and if Alex couldn’t keep his cousin safe then he couldn’t keep himself safe either.

  Around the same time as Josek’s arrest, Josek’s older brother, Maurice Ornstein, and his wife Giselle paid a boatman to take them across the river in the town of Chalon-sur-Saône, which would take them into the unoccupied zone. They had two children, an especially cherubic little boy called Armand, who was three and a half, and a one-year-old daughter, Rosette. Before they made the crossing they left the children with a family friend in the countryside, arranging to send for them when they got across. They never made it. During the crossing they were shot, possibly by the boatman who had pocketed the money and decided they weren’t worth the risk, possibly by a soldier who had spotted them from the shore. Their children Armand and Rosette lived with a woman who Armand today remembers only as ‘a woman in a white dress’ – a nun? A nurse? – who miraculously didn’t turn them in but instead cared for them for almost a year. However, little Armand told some of the neighbours that he was Jewish and the children had to be moved again, fast, this time to another family whose name has long since been lost in history. Armand was even put in an orphanage for a period of time, to try to keep him safe. (Armand, now eighty and still living in Paris, remembers only fragments about this time; the memories have been buried so deeply inside him for so long it’s like they never existed at all.) Eventually, Giselle’s sister Monique walked all the way from Paris out to the countryside where the children were – possibly dozens of miles away, possibly hundreds – took them into her custody and hid them for the rest of the war.

  Not long after Maurice’s murder, his sister Rose, Sara’s beloved almost sister, was on a bus, also trying to cross the demarcation line. Her husband, Herman Brenner, had managed to get to the United States in June 1941, and the plan was that Rose would join him once he had sorted out a place for them to live. Dr Brenner found a lovely home for them in Queens, not too far from Sara and Bill, much to Sara’s ecstatic delight. But by the time Rose set out from Paris it was too late. America had entered the war and it was no longer possible to get visas. As she couldn’t get to America from France, she decided to take a bus to Switzerland and somehow get to the United States from there. She hoped that the border police would be too busy to check everyone’s passports, because all she had left to cling to were impossible odds. The bus stopped at the border and when the Vichy police got on and walked down the aisle towards her Rose quickly scribbled on a postcard, gave it to the person sitting next to her and asked them to send it. No one knew what happened to Rose until Sara finally received the postcard years later, after it had been held up during the war. It was addressed to her in America and it read simply, ‘They are coming for me. I love you. Goodbye.’ She was killed in Auschwitz. When Sara finally received that postcard after the war, years after Rose sent it, she screamed and collapsed in her hallway, watched by her toddler son Ronald, my father.

  Rose Ornstein and Herman Brenner.

  Also killed in Auschwitz were Rose’s sister, Anna, and Anna’s husband, Samuel Goldberg, my relative Anne-Laurence Goldberg’s grandparents. By the end of the war, of the seven Ornstein siblings only three survived: Alex Ornstein, who eventually raised his nephew Armand and niece Rosette after getting them from Monique; Arnold Ornstein, who died shortly after the war ended from health problems; and Sarah Ornstein, who went to Isr
ael.

  Anna Goldberg, an Ornstein cousin who was killed in Auschwitz, with her husband (who was also killed) and their children. Their son, Roger Goldberg, is in the middle.

  The Ornsteins had come to Paris for safety, and France decimated the family. The only reason the Glasses had come to Paris was because of the Ornsteins – the gentle, sweet, funny and fun Ornstein cousins, some of them as close as siblings to the Glasses – and the Glasses never really recovered from the devastating loss. They were the roots back to the past, part of the Glasses’ childhood, and when they were killed, the ties that held the family together began to loosen. Alex never forgave himself for, as he put it, ‘failing my brother Josek’. But as Alex wept in Cannes over Josek, he didn’t know what danger the rest of his family was in.

  They tried to stay alive as best they could, the ones who somehow were living in the shadows. Roger Goldberg was the son of Anna Ornstein and her husband Samuel Goldberg. Roger and his wife, Renée, were both younger than the Glasses, but they became extremely close to their older relatives during the war. Roger and Renée were often separated as they, incredibly, both managed to travel around France while evading capture and their letters to one another are some of the best sources I found for learning what life was like for the Glasses during the war. However, they are written in an extremely stilted, halting tone, nothing like how Roger and Renée talked, and occasionally make no sense. This is because the couple had to make up a code in order to evade the censors, and despite some of the code remaining uncrackable, as the only people who could break it have long since died, it is clear that Roger and Renée were part of a Resistance network.

  Roger and Renée Goldberg during the war.

  ‘At Sonia’s I learned that the doctor was in the north and that he called one evening. Which surprised me because we would have known but everyone confirms it,’ Renée writes in 1943. It’s possible ‘the doctor’ was simply a doctor, but Renée never wrote in this tone – vague, banal, pointed – in letters before or after the war. So it seems much more likely that ‘the doctor’ and ‘everyone’ referred to particular people in their Resistance network.

  ‘Alex is on the coast where he eats a lot of oranges, but he is going to go elsewhere without a doubt,’ she writes in 1943. In fact, Alex Maguy was nowhere near the coast at this point – he was hiding in the centre of the country in the Auvergne. So while he may well have been eating oranges this sentence was also almost certainly code.

  And this, also from 1944: ‘Henri had a serious illness, so the apartment is not very healthy. Odette and I would very much like to leave until it is disinfected,’ Renée writes to Roger. Nowhere does Henri mention being ill during the war, so it is far more likely that Renée was telling Roger that Henri had been nearly captured and they now needed to stay away from the apartment for a while.

  Whether Henri and Sonia were also part of a Resistance network or not, Henri was certainly part of the Resistance effort and they were both nearly caught multiple times. After the Nazis arrived Henri continued to work covertly at his microfilming company, Photosia, with Marc Haenel. The German Army moved into Haenel’s building, where Henri frequently came to meet him. ‘We worked under very dangerous conditions. Nevertheless, we built our machines right by the enemy,’ Henri later wrote in his records.

  Henri’s machine, the Omniphot-Microfilm, was so good at photocopying and shrinking blueprints that when the Banque de France contacted Kodak before the Nazis arrived in Paris to ask them to copy their most important documents, Kodak recommended they go instead to Omniphot-Microfilm. Haenel, who was not Jewish, quickly grasped the value of this machine in wartime: industrial plans and public archives could be copied, miniaturised and stored, protecting them from the Nazis. So he and Henri decided to make this the focus of their business.

  ‘For racial reasons, I was not allowed to be the owner, and Paris being occupied, I was forbidden any activities. But day and night we microfilmed public and private archives. I threw myself into the fight,’ Henri wrote in a letter shortly after the war ended. ‘Everything was forbidden to me, of course; yet I built more machines.’

  French politicians and companies quietly contacted Photosia to ask for help, and Henri microfilmed the archives of businesses, museums and small towns, saving countless records – of architecture, people’s life savings, their homes – from decimation. He could shrink thousands of records down to the size of a thumbnail, which made them both easy to store and unrecognisable to any potential enemies wishing to destroy them. The port authority at Le Havre became one of his clients so that after the war, when the port was destroyed, Henri was able to return to them the microfilms he’d made of their designs. ‘Thanks to our help – though modesty should prevent me from saying it – the port of Le Havre was rebuilt in record time,’ Henri later wrote.

  Because Henri was the only person who knew how to work the machine, he had to transport it around the country and do all the microfilming himself whenever the machine was hired for a job. In 1941 he went to the town of Valenciennes in the north of France, which French troops had looted and was now occupied by the Germans. He spent nine months living in the basement of the museum microfilming the local archives that the mayor had managed to save, plus another two years of repeated visits, according to Henri’s meticulous records. Directly across from the museum was the local Gestapo office, in the Valenciennes park. Only once did a policeman come to the museum to see what was happening there. He looked at Henri’s identity card – ‘a total counterfeit’, Henri later recalled – and walked away. Henri went right back to microfilming. ‘It was a very close call. It really could have been the end for me,’ Henri wrote in a letter.

  While Henri was travelling around the country, Sonia was all on her own in Paris, tasked with looking after both Mila and Chaya, the latter of whom insisted on only eating kosher and did not give a damn how hard that was to find in Nazi-controlled, strictly rationed Paris. Every so often Sonia would go back to their apartment on rue Victor-Cousin to look through their post and pick up the letters from her family, who still used her old address. One day as she approached the building she just happened to look up at their apartment window. She saw a hand sticking out, waving frantically. Sonia recognised it as belonging to the concierge of the building, with whom she’d always been friendly, and she knew what her friend was telling her: ‘The police are searching the apartment for you. Stay away and run away.’ Sonia ran. Another time a French policeman did catch her and arrested her for having false papers. Sonia refused to cry, but she pleaded with him, as a Frenchman, to have mercy. He refused. On the steps of the police station, as he was just about to turn her over, Sonia desperately offered him all the jewellery she was wearing – all costume, of course, but it looked real enough for the policeman. He could have pocketed the jewels and still turned her over, but he was kind enough – or dumb enough – to let her go. Another time she was seized by a German officer and, gathering all her self-control so as not to show the slightest hint of fear, she imperiously told him she was the wife of a high-ranking German politician and if he mistreated her in any way her husband would hear about it. Terrified, the officer let her go. Henri had always known Sonia was an extraordinary woman, but it wasn’t until the war that she herself realised how extraordinary she could be.

  But the biggest danger for Sonia turned out to be her neighbours. Several times, when she came to rue Victor-Cousin to look through the post, she would find letters of denunciation from her former neighbours taped to the front door, telling the Vichy police that Henri and Sonia were still in Paris. Even though it was always extremely dangerous for her to return to rue Victor-Cousin, Sonia started coming back more often, just to tear the denunciation letters off the door.

  Sonia had told me about these letters, and it was a story I assumed I’d have to take on good faith. How do you prove someone tore a denunciation note off a door eighty years ago? On a sunny afternoon, a decade after Sonia died, looking through the shoebox in my gran
dmother’s closet, I found out how. Because there, among the photos, was a photocopy of one of the denunciation letters. One read:

  The Jewish family, Glass, who lives in Rue Victor-Cousin, and who the police are looking for, are currently living at 60 Avenue des Minimes on the 5th floor. Their fake identity cards are issued in the name of Classe. This Jewish household continues to live in the city.

  It was written in the distinctive curlicue cursive all French children are taught. Every French exchange student I’d had at school wrote like that, as do all my French relatives, for that matter. As much as I know about France’s culpability and collaboration during the war, it felt genuinely devastating to see such cruelty written in the familiar French handwriting, like hearing your father shout racist obscenities. Writing about a country behaving badly can feel abstract, clinical, even; undeniable evidence of the wickedness of the individuals within is piercingly personal. Later, Henri microfilmed the denunciation letters for Sonia, and they sent some copies to Sara. Even if they rarely talked about this, they wanted to remember it for ever, and for others to know.

  It is estimated that up to a million French people denounced others to the authorities during the occupation, sending between 3 and 5 million letters to local and national politicians and law enforcement bureaus[11] although it is an impossible number to confirm, given that few saved the letters and many denunciations were made in whispers.[12] ‘[Denunciation] was a fundamental characteristic of Vichy France. In a sense it was the only way people could express themselves in a country where there were no demonstrations, no rights, no vote: it was the voice of the people, although a mean and petty voice, a way of swearing allegiance to the powers that be,’ historian Laurent Joly said in 2008 at the world’s first international conference on French denunciation in the Second World War.[13] The Vichy government didn’t officially encourage denunciations, unlike Italy and Germany, but it certainly didn’t discourage them either. The problem for the government was that French people got a little too enthusiastic about them, once they realised that denouncing people was an easy way to get rid of someone who was in their way, whether Jewish or not: if you wanted someone’s job, or apartment, or wife, denouncing them was a good way to get closer to your goal. And given how tight rations were, there was an extra impetus to denounce one’s long-hated neighbour. After all, you might not get their house, but you might at least get their food. False denunciations became such a problem that the Germans started punishing people who made them – in one reported case, sending a woman and her lover to Germany after they falsely denounced her husband[14] – and on 1 January 1942, in his New Year’s message to the country, Marshal Pétain announced that anyone who made false denunciations was an ‘adversary to French unity’ and an ‘enemy of the National Revolution’. Real denunciations, however, were a different story. Anyone who denounced Jews living illegally was helping the Vichy regime, and writers in the pro-Nazi French newspapers regularly urged their readers to denounce any foreign Jews they knew, saying it was part of their national duty. But in fact, far from ‘strengthening national unity’, as pro-Vichy propaganda suggested, the culture of denunciations harmed it, with neighbours informing on one another to enrich themselves personally.