House of Glass Read online

  In French, there are two words for denunciation: ‘dénonciation’ refers to uncovering something, like discovering a fact, and is a neutral term. ‘Délation’ suggests something more malevolent, something more rooted in self-interest with a negative impact on others. ‘Vichy attempted to uphold the distinction between the two words, but to little avail,’ historian Shannon Fogg writes in her 2003 essay, ‘Denunciations, Community Outsiders and Material Shortages in Vichy France’.

  But of course, not all denunciations were false or stemming from petty feuds. Plenty of French people considered turning in Jews to be their patriotic and civic duty, even if they had once been their friends. According to Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld, 75,721 Jews from France were deported to the death camps.[15] Not all of those were caught because of denunciations, but these mass arrests and murders would have been a lot more difficult for Vichy to pull off without the complicity of people whom the Jews had once thought were their friends. Henri and Sonia survived the war, despite the best efforts of their neighbours, and unlike so many Polish Jews in Paris. They were blessed with an enormous amount of ingenuity and even more luck, but not everyone in their family had both or even either of those advantages. So for Jacques there was no need for any French people to denounce him, because he denounced himself.

  Jacques, as drawn by Arthur Weisz, 1942.

  9

  JACQUES – Captured

  France and Poland, 1940s

  IN MAY 1941 Jacques was at home with Mila on rue de la Tour when he received a green postcard, slipped under his door. It was not from a friend.

  Préfecture de Police, Paris, le 10 Mai, 1941

  Mr Glass is requested to present himself, in person, accompanied by a member of his family or a friend, on 14 May at 7 a.m. at the Caserne Napoléon to discuss his situation. Please bring ID. Anyone who does not come at the specified day and time risks the most severe punishment.

  The Police Commissioner

  Mila was in the early stages of pregnancy and not feeling well so Jacques asked his older brother to go with him. Henri not only refused but begged Jacques not to go either.

  ‘You’re going to end up like one of those poor Jews in prison camps!’ Sonia later recalled Henri telling him, referring to the thousands of foreign Jews from ‘enemy territories’ whom France had already incarcerated in internment camps.

  Jacques laughed off his brother’s concerns. ‘It is only an administrative matter,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll be home for dinner.’

  Early on Wednesday, 14 May 1941, Mila and Jacques left their home on rue de la Tour. It was already a sunny day and as they walked together along the Seine, past the Tuileries and towards the Marais, they would have looked to casual onlookers like the image of a happy couple taking a romantic stroll through some of Paris’s prettiest places. Just before 7 a.m. they reached the Caserne Napoléon, an old barracks, just a few streets away from where Jacques’s mother used to live with Sara. Photos of that day from contemporary newspapers show a small crowd of Jewish men, waiting for what they thought was a meeting with the police, milling about in the road, looking serious but relaxed, clutching pitifully small bags, containing, at most, lunch. When they arrived, the police immediately told their wives, sisters, mothers and children who accompanied them to go back home and pack suitcases for their male relatives, and then return to the Caserne as quickly as possible. This was why the men had been told to bring someone with them: so they could be sent back to fetch their belongings. This was not specified on the billet vert because it would have raised suspicions, and fewer men would have come.

  After the women and children handed over the suitcases, they were each given a card telling them when and where they could visit the men, and then their names and addresses were taken down by the French policemen who would use them in later round-ups. (As well as being right about what would happen to Jacques, Henri was proven correct in his refusal to accompany his brother.)[1] Meanwhile the men were herded onto Parisian buses – the same buses that once took them to work – and driven to Austerlitz train station. They were then put on specially requisitioned trains and sent to either Pithiviers or Beaune-la-Rolande, or what the French newspapers openly described as ‘concentration camps’.

  This was the ‘rafle du billet vert’ (green card round-up), the first official round-up of Jews in France under the Vichy regime. Jacques’s bad star was certainly blighting him now, because not only did he get summoned in the very first round-up, but he fell victim to it: of the 6,694 foreign Jewish men who had received a summons on a green postcard, 40 per cent refused to obey, either ignoring the instructions or running away. Jacques, obedient to the end, was among the more than 3,700 Jewish and primarily Polish men who believed France could never harm them, and so he did as he was told.[2]

  The Glass family took no photos, but I know exactly what Jacques was wearing, carrying and how he looked. One day I was in a library in Paris, leafing through a book about the rafle du billet vert and there, in a photo of men walking along the Austerlitz train station platform, was the unmistakable figure of my great-uncle Jacques. It was the spectacles that caught my eye first: those round wire spectacles that he wore in every single photograph I have of him. But it was his clothes that proved this was Jacques. While most of the other Jews around him are, like him, poor immigrants, and so wearing workman’s clothes, Jacques is so smart he looks fresh from the tailor’s. He’s wearing a neat white button-down shirt, its collar so starched it’s almost pointing ahead, dark trousers and shoes, and a trench coat with only its middle button done up, the way fashion followers today still wear it. The only item that gives away his social class is his luggage, and that’s because it was gathered together by Mila, who did not share the Glass siblings’ fastidious aesthetics: he is carrying a battered suitcase, a dirty cloth bag and some rolled-up sheets, clearly gathered together in a frantic hurry. He is walking alongside the parked train, already filled with men peering through the windows; he looks focused, not even glancing at the photographer, and he looks scared.

  The process that led to Jacques’s arrest began eight months earlier, on 4 October 1940, when Vichy passed a law ordering the internment of all foreign Jews in what they called ‘special camps’. More than 40,000 Jews were interned and the French papers covered the arrests, including the rafle du billet vert, enthusiastically. ‘These arrests have been carried out in the most correct way,’ La Dépêche du Monde reported the day after the rafle du billet vert. L’Écho de Pithiviers, the only local newspaper in its area, was less restrained in its joy. In a front-page editorial headlined ‘Israël dans le Loiret!’, columnist Jean de Nibelle crowed that Jews would now be:

  behind barbed wire, rather than at the head of our city halls and our great places, as they were previously under the regime of Blume, of Zay, of the Levys and the flea-ridden Semites they brought with them … Today the rule of the Jews is over. France, finally, is protecting herself from them. Thus, the wheel turns! And the Jews, yesterday, all-powerful, are today merely miserable animals of concentration camps! After having betrayed and ruined us, here they are reduced themselves, impotent and almost deserving of pity![3]

  Few people had lived lives with less power than the Jews who were arrested in the rafle du billet vert. Along with the 3,430 Polish Jews and 157 Czech Jews there were 123 Jewish men officially classified as ‘stateless’. These were poor immigrants who had come to France for a better life than the terrible ones they’d had at home, and whom the Vichy government had gone after because they were easy targets. Jacques was typical of the men who were caught: foreign, ostensibly unemployed and basically broke thanks to Vichy’s increasingly impossible regulations regarding foreign Jewish employment. Jean de Nibelle, in his Écho de Pithiviers column, makes the still popular anti-Semitic reference to Rothschild, as though the men coming to the camps were fat bankers as opposed to men who lived in basements and often went without breakfast and lunch in order to give their children supper.[4]

 
A police report made soon after the rafle du billet vert read that ‘among certain French Aryan circles, it does not seem that the new rules receive full approval.’[5] But these particular French circles were less concerned about anti-Semitism than about the drain on French resources: ‘It is estimated that these measures all too often reach married men and fathers with families who will be left destitute, and consequently, the children and women will be left in the care of the French government,’ the report continued.

  This reaction to the mass deportation of thousands of men was heartless, but prescient. Without their husbands and sons working, the women struggled. Jacques Biélinky was a Jewish journalist who had come to France in 1909 as a political refugee after surviving the pogroms in Russia. Between 1940 and 1942 he kept a diary, but it wasn’t until the rafle du billet vert that Biélinky really started to notice – or at least write about – Jewish persecution in France. Two days after the round-up he writes about the plight of the women left behind: ‘Huge emotion among the Jewish community because of the mass arrests. Thousands of women with children left without support are worried about starvation. Many women have gone to the police commissioners to beg for food.’

  Terrified, Jews in Paris went into hiding. Many left the homes in which they were registered, and synagogues, especially those that had been the centre of Polish Jewish life, were now almost empty out of fear the police would arrest anyone they found there. Jewish aid organisations relied on donations to feed the families of the prisoners.[6]

  Despite all he had been through, and everything he saw in front of him, Biélinky remained optimistic. On 20 May he writes: ‘Among Jewish circles, it is thought there will be no more arrests and mass internments in camps. A social worker has gone to visit the camps and plead for the sick.’

  Whatever the social worker did, it wasn’t enough for the Jews in France, including Biélinky: in 1943 he was arrested, deported and killed in Sobibor.

  Mila was luckier. She was able to stay in her apartment for another year and a half, largely thanks to Jacques Revillon. Revillon was Jacques’s administrateur provisoire, who had been put in charge of Jacques’s business affairs when it became illegal for Jews to run a business, and he was extraordinarily kind to Mila. He wrote numerous letters to the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ), urging them to let her stay in the flat, describing the situation as ‘plus critique’. Given the atmosphere in occupied Paris at the time, Revillon’s kindness to Mila, a very Polish, very Jewish woman, and not an especially easy-going one at that, seems remarkable. And Revillon, it quickly turned out, was an admirable man, in that even though he earned money from looking after Jacques’s business, either his conscience or his business sense could not allow him to continue. Eight months after Jacques’s arrest, in January 1942 – still relatively early in the war – Revillon wrote to the CGQJ saying he could no longer look after ‘les affaires Israélites’ (Jewish businesses) because doing this work risked ‘discrediting my company and causing problems with our American customers … This is a very serious imminent threat.’ Revillon made it sound like the problem was working with Jews, so he was officially relieved of his duties. But the truth was he didn’t want to be associated with Vichy. He continued to help Mila throughout the war, writing letters on her behalf to the government about Jacques and allowing her to stay in the apartment for as long as it was safe.

  The other person who helped Mila was Sonia. She looked after her throughout her pregnancy and made sure she had plenty of food, holding her hand when she was crying with fear. She also helped Mila make sense of the card she’d been given telling her when she could visit Jacques, and how to get there. Sonia’s role was to protect Mila and, between her and Revillon, they did an amazingly good job.

  Once Jacques rejected Henri’s advice and was on the train at Austerlitz, no one could look after him. The journey to the Loiret in north-central France from Paris is a pretty easy one, taking only a few hours, and Pithiviers is less than 100 kilometres from Paris. But it was not a pleasant trip for Jacques. Thousands of men all crammed together on the train, confused and fidgety because no one was giving them any answers, all they could do was try to squeeze into a place by a window and watch the countryside roll by.

  Eventually they were told that half of them would go to the camp at Beaune-la-Rolande and half to Pithiviers. Jacques was assigned to the latter, and when they finally reached the train station he got off among 1,700 rag-tag men,[7] and marched through the little town with the police. The men all carried their rolled-up bags for what they thought would be a mere few nights’ stay while the townspeople watched them silently, uncertain if they were watching a funny parade or a mournful spectacle.

  When the men reached the camp, they walked in through the gates and, as ordered, quietly queued up. They registered their names with the black-booted French guards who were sitting at a small wooden table, recording everyone’s information in notebooks. Each prisoner was given a number – Jacques was 470 – and assigned to one of eleven barracks. After that, they walked towards what was now their new house.

  I went to Pithiviers on a hot July day in 2012 with a group of about thirty other people, on a trip marking the seventieth anniversary of when our ancestors had been deported from the camp. We met in the Marais, near the Shoah museum, and boarded a bus, in a pale and presumably unintentional echo of the rafle du billet vert. It was a lovely drive from Paris to Pithiviers, past fields of wildflowers and sunflowers, home-made roadside advertisements for foie gras and colourful houses with red slate roofs. The views became lovelier the closer we got to the camp. There was almost a sense of excitement among the group, as if we were making an important pilgrimage. But it turned out we were making a pilgrimage to nowhere: if it weren’t for a stone memorial, its former location would look like just another French suburban street. All signs of the French concentration camp had vanished, hastily erased after the war when France tried to pretend that what had happened had not. We milled around pointlessly on the side of the road and then, with much less excitement, reboarded the bus. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Pithiviers had vanished off the earth, but I was, and I felt a vague sense of pointless anger on the drive back to Paris, like I’d been duped by France’s post-war subterfuge here, setting aside a day to pay my respects to something that no longer existed. (Five years after I visited, in 2017, it was announced that the long-abandoned Pithiviers train station, where the Jews arrived before being taken to the camp, would be turned into a museum about the French deportations. France’s attitude towards its past is, at last, starting to evolve.)[8]

  But even if Pithiviers itself no longer exists, the records, carefully compiled by the black-booted guards, remain. So while it might not be possible to walk among the original barracks with tour groups taking photos, as you can at Auschwitz, it’s very easy to get a clear picture of what Jacques’s daily life there was like.

  Pithiviers had originally been built for German prisoners of war, but when France became occupied there wasn’t any demand for German prisons any more, only Jewish ones – foreign Jews, that is: no French Jews ever stayed in Pithiviers. The entrance was on a normal pedestrian road – no need to hide the fact that France was interning Jewish immigrants simply for being Jewish immigrants – and conveniently near the railway station so that more prisoners could be brought in with efficient speed. After signing in on that first day in May, Jacques and the other men were directed to the right, towards a row of narrow, regularly spaced barracks; Jacques was originally assigned to barrack 7, then, after more barracks were built to accommodate the growing numbers of incarcerated men, 11 and then 18. He slept in his barrack, washed there, watched the time go by there. Three times a day he’d walk a short distance to the dining hall, which was next to the infirmary. Management offices were also close by, as was a large vegetable garden. Menus were posted weekly telling the men what they would eat every day. ‘Monday,’ read the menu of 22–29 December 1941, ‘Breakfast – coffee; Lun
ch – vegetable soup, glazed carrots and cheese; Supper – vegetable soup, mashed potatoes and cheese.’ Never any meat or fish, just vegetables from the garden mashed, puréed or sugared.

  But as prisons went, Pithiviers was not so bad. Family members came to visit twice a month and there was even a place where the Jews could worship on Shabbos and the High Holy Days. Many of the men there already knew one another from home or through the Foreign Legion – Jacques knew several men in the camp from his regiment. Most important, the French guards didn’t beat the inhabitants, and while that was a pretty low bar for describing a place as not bad, it was a crucial one. That the guards were not cruel to them, sometimes even friendly, confirmed to Jacques and the other inhabitants of the camp that they didn’t need to be scared. Nothing bad would happen to them in Pithiviers – they were only there because they didn’t have the right identity papers, and they needed to be kept there during the war for the sake of the economy. They were safe. It was all OK. Everything was fine.