House of Glass Page 19

  Most of the men spent their days working on local farms, but Pithiviers itself was not a labour camp. No one had to work, and they did so for free, purely to relieve their boredom. There was also cultural life in the camp: many of the men played chess and there was even a Yiddish theatre troupe. Guards encouraged all this because they considered it important to maintaining morale. Decades later, I found a remnant of this cultural life inside the shoebox in my grandmother’s closet: on a yellowed piece of paper, mounted on a slab of cardboard, someone by the name of Arthur Weisz had made a pencil portrait of Jacques, round glasses on his face. It is dated 22 June 1941, and above the date Weisz wrote ‘Camp de Pithiviers’.

  Weisz was another prisoner in Pithiviers and he made many portraits of the inhabitants, who would then send them back to their families as keepsakes. When I made the trip to Pithiviers with other descendants, two of the people on the bus said they had their own Weisz drawings. For one of them, Weisz’s portrait was the only likeness they’d ever seen of their father. Jacques, on the other hand, was well photographed, so I know for certain how accurate Weisz’s portrait is, and it is amazingly close. He gave Jacques an air of gravitas that he often lacked in photos, due to his shyness and occasional nervous giggle in front of a camera’s lens. Weisz captures his calmness, which Alex and Henri saw as passivity, and his gentleness, which too often came across as weakness. Jacques’s arms are thin, a sign of wartime deprivation, but his face is handsome. It is, in truth, the kindest likeness that exists of Jacques and a testament both to Jacques’s likeability and to Weisz’s generosity. (Weisz was later killed by the Nazis in an unlisted concentration camp, but probably Auschwitz.)

  This is not the only image I have of Jacques in Pithiviers. Also in my grandmother’s shoebox were two black and white photos, both stamped on the back: ‘12 Avril 1942, Camp d’Hérbergement de Pithivier LE GESTIONNAIRE’. One photo shows eight men and the other shows nine, and many of the same men, including Jacques, appear in both photos. Both pictures are rather oddly posed: in one, a man is sitting in a bucket and his friends are either holding him in it or pretending to pour water on his head from watering cans. In the other, they are all arranged awkwardly on a ladder in one of the barracks. Photos like these, showing the men larking around and having a merry old time, were often staged by the camp guards and sent home to the prisoners’ families for propaganda purposes: see, everything’s fine here! It’s basically a holiday camp! But the forced larking was unnecessary because the men are their own propaganda. They look strikingly healthy after almost a year of living at Pithiviers, and they look happy, making smiles too genuine to be forced. The former is proof of how relatively well they were treated in the camp, and the latter a sign of their complete lack of anxiety about the very near future.

  These men all worked in the management (gestionnaire) office, a more suitable place for weedy, unathletic Jacques than the fields. Arthur Weisz stressed in his portrait of him that that’s where Jacques worked in Pithiviers, taking particular care over his armband on which he drew a little circle and wrote: ‘Pithiviers Camp d’Internement LE GESTION’. Jacques was probably quite good at helping in administrative affairs, keeping track of which prisoner was in which barrack, punching holes in paper as his time drifted away, drawing up the records I would later use to write his story. But it might have also cost him his life.

  When he was in Cambrai in 1940, Jacques went out every day to work on nearby farms, and this is almost certainly how he escaped from that POW camp. Dozens of people from Pithiviers took advantage of the camp’s similar lack of security, running away in their early months of incarceration when they went out to work as farmhands. The local police soon put a stop to that and tightened security, but it’s entirely possible that, had Jacques been going out to work instead of staying in the camp, he would have run away too. Maybe his success in escaping from Cambrai would have emboldened him to try again. Maybe he would have sneaked back to Paris, met up with Mila and gone into hiding with her, with Sonia and Henri’s assistance. Or maybe this could never have happened, even if he’d spent all day hoeing potatoes instead of filing papers. Maybe he always would have gone back to the camp instead of grabbing his chance. After all, he chose to stay in the camp, sitting at a desk and following orders, instead of working outside and then running towards the sunset. Stay where you are, don’t question things, put your life in the hands of others, just trust – those were Jacques’s natural tendencies, and they were how he always felt, whereas his brothers never felt like that. One brother in particular.

  Jacques is at the back, partially obscured by a bucket handle (above) and on the far left (below).

  According to Alex’s memoir, one day in 1941 he went to Pithiviers, determined to get his older brother out. Alex describes a dramatic encounter with a guard who, on realising he was Jacques’s brother, threatened to put him in Pithiviers, too.

  ‘I put my hand in my jacket pocket. It was a bluff. I was completely unarmed, not even a pocket knife. But I had my hands and I could strangle him. I was ready to take action and that was obvious,’ Alex writes.

  Having scared off the guard, Alex finds Jacques and tells him he’s come to save him.

  But Jacques won’t leave. He’s French, he says. He has nothing to fear. He’s here under the protection of French policemen. He has confidence in them.

  ‘“I’m a French soldier.” These were his only thoughts. French, blind patriot. One could weep with rage to see him thus, submissive, obedient, confident,’ Alex writes.

  Whether this scene ever actually happened is impossible to prove. Certainly there’s no record of Alex going to Pithiviers, although if he broke in and scared off a guard there wouldn’t be. It’s possible that Alex was giving a little showman’s pizzazz to a slightly different story that instead Henri and Sonia told their daughter, their nephews and me, and Alex also corroborated.

  When Jacques was arrested, Mila was two months pregnant. In late December 1941 she gave birth to their daughter, Lily. Jacques was granted leave on 30 December in order to see his wife and daughter. This was the story my family always told and yet the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed. Why would Jacques be given leave from the camp? I suspected this to be some souped-up lore. Until one day I was in the Shoah Memorial in Paris, looking up Jacques’s records in Pithiviers, and there it was, in unarguable black and white: ‘Permis à deux jours du 30 au 31 [Décembre] inclus, rentre 1ère Janvier 1942.’ He really had left the camp.

  ‘But Glass,’ the guards said to him before he got on the train to Paris, according to what Jacques then told his family, ‘if you don’t return, we will kill all your friends here, and we will track you down, and we will find you, and we will kill you, too.’

  The birth of a child was, according to Pithiviers’ rules, insufficient reason for a prisoner to be granted home leave. So according to Jacques’s records he had to go home because ‘femme gravement malade’. But he’d have had to produce medical notes proving Mila was at death’s door, and even then he probably wouldn’t have been allowed to go. So quite how Jacques pulled off this home visit is a mystery. Perhaps Alex really did bully a guard into letting him out. Perhaps – and this strikes me as the most likely scenario – the guards just liked Jacques and knew him well enough to trust him to come back. However it happened, Nathalie Grenon, the director of CERCIL (Le Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur les camps d’Internement dans le Loiret et la Déportation Juive), who helped me with my research into Pithiviers, described Jacques’s two-day excursion from the camp as ‘plus exceptionnelle’. It was to be Jacques’s greatest piece of luck, and his last.

  Jacques arrived at Mila’s bedside to find Henri, Sonia and Alex all waiting for him, along with his newborn daughter. According to Sonia and Alex, this is what happened and what was said.

  Run, they told him. This is the chance of a lifetime! You’ve never had any good luck, Jacques, but this is the luckiest break a man like you could have. We can help you. We
will hide you. You will never get another chance like this. We are your family. They will kill you. We know what we are talking about. Listen to us. Run.

  Jacques held his tiny daughter and looked at his brothers – his brothers, with whom he’d run through the forests of Chrzanow, with whom he’d lain beside while listening to the pogroms, who had always helped him fight off bullies in school and then fight off bailiffs who nearly destroyed his business before he had even started. He had relied on his brothers all his life. But Jacques had always relied on someone else more. First it was his mother, to whom he invariably deferred, and then it was his wife. He had registered his name and address in 1940 when she told him to do so, which was how Vichy knew where to send the billet vert condemning him to Pithiviers, and he would do what she advised now. They all looked at Mila. She was lying in bed, listening, her eyes shut.

  ‘Mila?’ Jacques asked.

  She opened her eyes and looked around, like a queen preparing to make a regal pronouncement.

  ‘Mon Jacques a donné sa parole,’ she said.

  My Jacques gave his word. He must go back.

  Alex started shouting at her: ‘You stupid woman! You’re going to kill my brother and I’m going to kill you!’ For once, Henri and Sonia didn’t try to hold him back. Instead, they just looked at her aghast.

  ‘Mila, please, see sense, if he goes back they will kill him!’ Sonia said.

  Even Henri, quiet measured Henri, joined in: ‘For God’s sake, they’re killing Jews. We can help all three of you. Think of your daughter!’

  But Mila was implacable, as certain of her decision as a cow is sure that life on the farm will always be good. Realising that there was no point reasoning with her, Henri, Sonia and Alex turned to Jacques.

  ‘If you go back they will kill you, your stupid wife and your baby daughter. What kind of man are you? Stay and protect your family, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Jacques, please, we can help you. I will get you fake ID, you’ll be safe here.’

  ‘If you go back on the train, Jacques, you’ll never see your daughter again.’

  But they knew it was no use. Jacques never listened to them when Chaya or Mila was around, and he’d never had their drive, their determination to make it, to succeed, or even just to survive. He was already looking out the window, holding Lily, planning his departure.

  And so, on New Year’s Day 1942, Jacques got the train back to Pithiviers. He walked back into the freezing camp, his footprints in the snow the only part of him left outside in the free world. He was checked off by the guards who either laughed at his passivity or simply took it for granted, and the gates closed behind him. They would never open for him again. His brothers were right: he had missed his chance.

  Mila and Lily.

  Was Jacques simply a fool for returning? For so long I thought so. On the bus ride back from Pithiviers I talked with the other descendants, some of whom remembered going to the camp as a child to visit their relatives. One woman spoke to me about how all the children of the prisoners knew each other, and all the men knew one another’s children.

  I told her about Jacques going back to the camp after his home leave to visit Mila and I rolled my eyes – wasn’t that just absurd? What an unforgivable waste of an opportunity. Surely her father would never have done that. But she reprimanded me for my callousness.

  ‘There was a real sense of camaraderie at the camp after all that time,’ she told me. ‘It’s hard for you to believe now, I know, but there was. And that’s why he returned. He would never have abandoned his friends.’

  Jacques always had bad timing, but his decision to return to Pithiviers could not have been timed worse. Less than three weeks after he walked back to the camp the Wannsee Conference was held in Germany, at which plans were formalised for the implementation of the Final Solution: the killing of all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. As early as March 1942 more than 1,000 Jews were shipped out on one train from France to Auschwitz. In early summer, German and French officials met to plan more mass deportations.

  The men in Pithiviers heard the rumours from home. But on 14 July, Bastille Day, they were reassured, again, by the Préfecture of Orléans that they would be protected, because they were French, and they were told not to listen to rumours. Less than twenty-four hours later they were told to pack their bags. The next day women and children prisoners suddenly arrived at the camp, and that’s when the men really started to worry, but it was too late.

  On 17 July 1942 Jacques was ordered onto a cattle train by the French police, along with 928 other prisoners from Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. This was Convoi 6 and among Jacques’s fellow prisoners on the train were ninety-six women and twenty-four children.[9] One of the women was Irène Némirovsky, author of Suite Française, a series of novels about life in occupied France that was finally published in 2004, having been saved and preserved by her daughter during the war and in the decades afterwards. Némirovsky had planned to write five novels in her series, but she had only finished two when she was arrested. When the police arrived to take her to Pithiviers, she told her young daughters, ‘I am going on a journey now.’ It was one from which neither she nor Jacques would ever return. They were both thirty-nine years old.

  There were a hundred prisoners in each wagon, standing pressed up against one another in the airless train.

  ‘They won’t eat us, they’re just taking us somewhere to work,’ the prisoners muttered to one another reassuringly.

  ‘Maybe to Drancy?’ another suggested, as they’d heard about another French internment camp that had recently been opened.

  In fact, the reason Jacques and the rest of the prisoners were shipped out so suddenly was that Vichy was now going after the Jews so relentlessly that they needed the space in the French camps for the new arrests. The day before Jacques’s train left for Auschwitz, French police completed the now infamous Vel d’Hiv round-up, in which more than 13,000 Jews, including 4,000 children, were arrested, with most held at an indoor cycle track in Paris before being sent to the camps. French police had tracked them down using the 1940 Jewish census, and the man who helped to plan the round-up was René Bousquet, secretary-general of the police and close associate of Colonel Perré, Alex’s friend. According to US diplomatic papers, Pierre Laval – by now the head of government – met with a group of American Quakers at this time and told them that ‘these foreign Jews had always been a problem in France, and the French government was glad that a change in the German attitude towards them gave France an opportunity to get rid of them.’ Laval, the papers add, ‘made no mention of any German pressure’.[10] By the end of 1942, the French government deported almost 40,000 Jews.[11]

  For three days and nights, in the stifling July heat, Jacques and his fellow prisoners travelled in the train. There was only a tiny window, no room to sit – certainly none to lie down – no food and no water. The only toilet was a small scrap of hay in the corner of the wagon. The smell quickly became so bad people were throwing up where they stood, worsening the stench and the misery. There was hardly even any air. Some people literally dropped dead where they stood for lack of water. At a certain point – the French/German border, it turned out – the French guards and drivers got off and were replaced with Germans. Seeing they were at a station the prisoners cried out the window, ‘Water, please water!’

  ‘None for you, Jews!’ came the response, in German, from the civilians nearby. ‘This is hell,’ the prisoners wept, but it was not, because hell was still to come.

  They knew now they were in Germany. And Germany, they said anxiously to one another, was a civilised country, right? Surely they were just here to work.

  They arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the evening. ‘Raus! Schnell! Schnell!’ yelled the guards, hurrying them off the train, beating them with truncheons.

  A LOT IS KNOWN ABOUT Convoi 6, more than most deportation trains because a relatively high number of people who travelled on it were still alive when the war ended – 9
1 out of 928, and many of the details I’ve given above come from the survivors’ testimonies kept at the Shoah Memorial in Paris. It was still so early in the war that the Nazis needed the prisoners to help construct Auschwitz-Birkenau, so there was no selection process when the prisoners arrived in Poland – everyone entered the camp and none were sent to the gas chambers, at least not immediately. As a result, there are only two associations for descendants and relatives of victims of a specific deportation train, and one of them is that for Convoi 6. It was with this association that I visited Pithiviers in 2012. The year before, 928 trees were planted in Israel in the name of Convoi 6, one for every adult and child who travelled on that train.

  The tree feels like an apt memorial for Jacques, the boy who once ran through Chrzanow’s silver birch tree forest and was then sent as a man to Birkenau, a camp whose name derives from the German for ‘birch tree’. Did Jacques realise, as he walked into the death camp, he was only 18 kilometres from where he was born? Had he spotted the thin Galician birch trees through the tiny window in the train, and did they look familiar to him? Did they make him think of his brothers and the Ornstein cousins and how they used to hide in the forests? And of his father, buried in the shadow of birch trees only kilometres away from where he was now? Did he wonder why he, alone among his siblings, hadn’t risked anything to stay alive? Why he was the passive one among them and how this was the conclusion to that story? Did he think about the weird irony of his life, how he had always wanted to stay still, but was forced to travel so far, and yet ended up right back where he began? Perhaps he thought, No matter how hard a Jewish man tries, even if he fights for another country, he will still get sent back to the place of his father’s grave instead of enjoying his daughter in her cot – always the past for the Jew, never the future. Never forget who you are and where you’re from, because no one else around you will, and they will send you back. During all that deprivation and degradation on the train, it had felt like the world was ending. Instead, Jakob Glahs walked out to find he was simply back home. Like waking from a bad dream, but the nightmare continues in real life. It had always been thus, the threat just beneath the surface. He simply hadn’t wanted to see it. He had crossed a continent and he hadn’t seen it. But now he was back to where he started and he could see it. At last, he saw it. Once again, his brothers had been right.