House of Glass Page 24

  In November 1944 Sara finally got the news that Alex, Henri and Sonia had expected. She received a letter from the Red Cross, signed by a Mrs Ethel Karp, confirming that Jacques had been killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Mrs Karp apologised for ‘the distressing news contained in the report’. Sara had dearly loved her gentlest brother, the one who was most like her adored father and who she most resembled, physically. She tucked the letter into her shoebox of keepsakes, alongside the photos and drawing Jacques had sent her from Pithiviers, and his plaque from Cambrai. She never spoke about these mementos to her husband or even her beloved sons, but she kept them close to her for the rest of her life, carefully bringing them with her through multiple house moves, hiding them in the darkness at the back of her closet.

  Compared with other families, the Glasses came through the war pretty well: they had lost Jacques, and almost all of their cousins, but most of the immediate family survived. Even Chaya was fine; when Alex brought her back to Paris she was still faithfully keeping kosher, still only talking in Polish and Yiddish.

  But emotionally they were in as much of a mess as Paris itself. They were deeply traumatised by the betrayal of a country they thought they could trust and in deep grief for those they had lost – Jacques, mainly. But there was no way of talking about such things then, and who had the time anyway? Everyone had suffered through the war – talking about your suffering was indulgent and unhelpful, was the general attitude. Yet trauma resists repression.

  Sara knew that her mother and two brothers had survived the war, but it would be another four years before she was able to sail to France to see them. So the Freimans moved back to their home in Farmingdale, and she busied herself by sending packages and letters to Sonia, Henri and Alex. Because it was against the law to send food to private citizens in France, she sent them via a young soldier, called Bob Spencer, the son of her Farmingdale neighbours who happened to be stationed in Paris near Henri and Sonia’s home. Every time he received a parcel for them, he personally took it over to their house. Until the end of her life, Sonia talked reverently about Bob Spencer and how he had saved their lives, and it’s very possible that he did, because Henri and Sonia were never in greater need of food than after the war: on D-Day, 6 June 1944, their daughter Danièle was born. Henri was forty-three and Sonia forty-one, almost unimaginably old at that time to be first-time parents. But they hadn’t been able to conceive before and Danièle was like the physical manifestation of relief, or just a release: after so many years of anxiety, and four long years of living in a shadowy existence, Henri and Sonia were free at last. And as soon as they could relax, out came little Danièle, their only child.

  Henri, not long after the war.

  Only children started to run in my family at that point. Henri had Danièle, Jacques had Lily and, in the 1950s, Roger and Renée Goldberg, the Glasses’ cousins who almost certainly were involved in the Resistance movement, had one child, Anne-Laurence. Armand Ornstein, the little boy who was hidden in the woods after his parents were shot while crossing the river, had one child, Philippe. Even Alex, who never married, eventually had a child, an only daughter.[fn1] Given that the previous generation had multiple children – there were five Glass children originally (Mindel died as a child) and seven Ornsteins – this was a marked shift and the sharp change in the shape of the family tree is a visual representation of what fear does to the human spirit. ‘They never really believed they were safe again, and if they weren’t, they couldn’t bear to put their children through what they had been through. One child was all they would risk,’ was how Anne-Laurence Goldberg explained it to me. The sole Glass sibling who dared to have more than one child was Sara, the only one living in a country that had never tried to kill her.

  Sara’s brothers were able to write to her, thanks to Bob Spencer who posted their letters via the US Army postal service, and the surviving letters show they were responding to their post-war life in characteristic form. For Alex, that meant a combination of exuberance and fury. Ecstatic at having improbably survived the war, he was more determined than ever to seize life. In January 1945, less than two years after he escaped from the train that was taking him to death, Alex sent a joyful postcard to his sister from the French ski slopes: ‘The weather is magnificent, the sun is splendid, and the snow is great. I’m preparing my new collection for the summer season. One hundred kisses to you, Alex.’

  Alex’s ambition was even greater after the war. As soon as he got back to Paris, he seized his fashion business from Paquin, who had tormented Alex and the CGQJ by demanding Alex not be allowed to work down in the south. But Alex definitively won that argument: on 24 July 1945, as the punishments against collaborators were really starting to bite, Paquin killed himself. He left behind an apartment full of fancy trinkets bought with the money he made from running the seized businesses of Jewish designers, and little else.

  Alex did not pause to gloat, and he doesn’t even bother to mention Paquin’s suicide in his memoir. Instead, he desperately scrabbled around to rebuild his salon by whatever means necessary. He regularly updated Sara on his progress.

  ‘My dear little sister,’ Alex wrote to her on 8 June 1945. ‘I once again take advantage of Mr Bob Spencer to send you this letter. I hope you now have the press clippings that I sent you and that you like them. I’m also sending you some photographs, and I would be happy if you could have them published in American fashion magazines. I’m counting on you.’

  After asking his sister, a housewife on Long Island, to get his photos into US Vogue, Alex had another request for her: ‘I must ask you to seriously look into the matter of finding Émile Best. He did much evil in France during the occupation [and] he’s hiding now in New York. He was a dealer in drawings and he was intending twelve bullets for me. I would be very happy for him to receive the fate that he was planning for me.’

  It’s hard to say if Alex truly intended my grandmother to stalk through New York with a Smith & Wesson, hunting a collaborationist who had escaped to the United States. But he was certainly serious when he turned his attention to Sonia, whom he loathed almost as much as he did the Nazis:

  I have told you not to include the food packages for Mila and Lily in Sonia’s parcels. But you recently did so again, even though you know that Mila and Lily only receive what [Sonia] doesn’t want. Please address the packages separately to Mila, this way we will know she gets them intact. I’m sorry to have to tell you this but you know the mentality of your sister-in-law of whom I am ashamed.

  Alex’s loathing of Sonia outweighed his hatred of Mila, even though Sonia had saved Henri during the war thanks to her black market contacts and excellent German, whereas Mila had sent Jacques back to the concentration camp. But Sonia was smart; this meant Alex couldn’t merely dismiss her as an idiot, as he did with Mila. Instead, he had to hate her personally for being unworthy of his brother. That Alex’s feelings about her remained so implacably unchanged, even after all they had been through during the war, proved – as Sonia’s relatives also confirmed a few years earlier, complaining bitterly about one another while in the shadows of the Nazis – that not even war can alter familial relationships.

  As for Henri and Sonia, few letters from them in the immediate post-war period have survived. Instead, what has lasted are the many, many photos Henri sent to his sister of his new baby daughter. At last, he had a new photographic muse. In one photo, Danièle, plump and round-eyed like a Renaissance cherub, sits on his knee while Henri, looking about a decade older than his forty-three years, gazes at her with almost dopey love. In another, Sonia, with characteristic frankness, looks straight at the camera while holding a tightly swaddled Danièle in a park in what must have been the winter after Paris was liberated. They had, against all odds, survived the war and, more than that, they had reproduced. As a statement of their survival, Danièle was the final word. As an expression of their love, she was the much-longed-for completion of their family.

  For Sara, the end of the war had mea
nt a reluctant move back to Long Island, but there was another change, too. For reasons I’ve never understood and no one alive now can explain, at some point towards the mid-1940s my grandmother’s adopted French name unmoored itself and slipped back to its Polish roots. She started being referred to again as Sala, both in her correspondence and on official documents. This was probably because she, like Jacques, never officially changed her name, so it just got too complicated in America having two different names, one of which didn’t match her documentation. The result was that, by the end of the war, she was Sala Freiman and when she was finally able to travel to France in 1948 with her sons, her name on the passenger list appears as ‘Sala Freiman, h’wife’. The ‘Sara Ryfka Glass, draftsman’ who first went to America nine years earlier was long gone.

  Alex met her and her two sons at the train station in Paris. Someone, probably Henri, took a photo of this meeting, and it shows Sala looking even more glamorous than usual, in a bell-sleeved fur coat made by Alex, and a hat that moulded itself around her perfectly coiffured hair and tied under her chin with an attached crocheted scarf. She had dressed her boys carefully for their arrival in Paris: both are in matching coats and hats, Ronald in a smart light grey pea coat and coordinated cap, Richard in a looser checked one and checked cap. What’s striking is how much the boys look like Glasses: serious Ronald is like a young Henri, while Richard has Alex’s pouchy cheeks and his mother’s bright eyes. They all look happy and excited, Alex most of all, clutching little Richard in his arms. But if Sala thought this meant he would help her, she would soon be disabused of that notion.

  Alex welcoming Sala, Ronald and Richard to Paris.

  Before the war broke out, Sala wrote to Alex that she wanted to leave Bill and come back to Paris. Would he, she asked, support her and her then only son? The war temporarily stopped that conversation but, according to family lore passed down by Alex and Sonia, Alex made his answer very clear on this trip, and the answer was no. There was, he said, nothing for her here: France was destroyed and America was thriving. He was trying to build his business, plus he had to look after Chaya, and Henri had a new baby to look after. Sonia, for once, was in agreement with her brother-in-law: as soon as you had the second boy, she told Sala, ‘c’est fini’ – game over.

  BUT THIS WAS not true. Alex, Henri and Sonia loved Sala very deeply, and they could have supported her and the boys. Alex always found a way to do something he wanted and, yes, Sonia had a new baby, but she had managed to hide Mila and Lily during the war – looking after Sala, Ronald and Richard in peacetime would hardly have tasked her abilities. Part of their resistance to her return stemmed from their very conservative background and the time in which they lived: they believed that the mother of two boys belonged with their father, and a wife’s responsibility was to her husband. But even more than that, they didn’t want her to come back because they thought she was safer where she was. Even aside from France’s current political and financial turmoil, Alex, Henri and Sonia could still feel the past’s hot breath on their necks. The war was over, but the memories of how their countrymen had tried, and nearly succeeded in killing them all were very fresh. None of them felt safe in France, and they never really would again, even after they all, eventually, became French citizens. By telling Sala to stay in New York with Bill, they were trying to protect her, just as they’d protected her by sending her to New York to marry him in 1937. It was their way of expressing love for her, but to her it must have felt like another cold rejection.

  For years Sala had quietly nursed the dream that it was just the war that was keeping her from her home. But she now realised she would never live in France again, at least not while Bill was alive. Perhaps because of this, while on this trip she sent a photo to Bill of Ron and Rich in Paris, looking up at her from the street while she was apparently leaning out of a window. She wrote on it, in slightly wobbly English: ‘This was taken [she crossed out the word “talking”, having written that initially instead of “taken”] from the 6th floor from Alex’s window, and these two little Frenchmen are your sons’. This could be read as either a fond message or a pointed one, a proud assertion of her children’s French identity despite their American father. It was probably a mix of both. Her family would not help her if she left him, and she couldn’t live without their help. So she resigned herself to wait until he died, and this was the grandmother I would forty years later meet as a child: one who was still waiting, in her seventies, for her real life to begin. And when she boarded the ship back to New York a month later with her sons, she and her brothers made what they could of their post-war lives.

  FOR HENRI, this meant continuing to build Photosia with Marc Haenel while looking after Sonia and Danièle. The company was even busier after the war than it was before, and one of its first big jobs came in 1948 when the French government hired the company to microfilm the Marshall Plan, the US initiative to help Western Europe rebuild after the war. This commission gave Henri particular pride. Before that, he was asked to do another job: ‘At the end of the war, the Ministry of Prisoners and War Deportees entrusted us with the task of microfilming the concentration camp archives in Germany and in Poland,’ he wrote in Photosia’s meticulous record book. Nowhere does he mention seeing – or looking for – Jacques’s name in the archives.

  Over the next decade and a half, Henri and Haenel built up an extraordinarily successful business, and their clients included some of the biggest companies in the world, including BP, Esso, IBM and Renault, as well as nearly every branch of the French government. By the end of the 1960s, Photosia was worth millions. To a very large degree this was thanks to Henri’s technical ingenuity, but it was also because Henri and Haenel made the perfect team: Henri the quiet but brilliant engineer, Haenel the extrovert salesman. Henri was suddenly able to keep his wife and daughter in the kind of comfort he could never have imagined during the war when he and Sonia were half-starved and fearfully skulking in the dark.

  Henri and Sonia almost never spoke about what they had been through, but they were marked by the experience like a block of clay is by a firm fingerprint. Henri became even more withdrawn, and he turned prematurely grey. Sonia seemed outwardly unchanged, as loud and forthright as ever. (When her nephew Ronald met her in Paris at the age of seven, he wrote to his father Bill: ‘Aunt Sonia is like fire.’) But rather than clinging proudly to their Judaism after their persecution, both she and Henri were more desirous than ever of blending in. Being Jewish was something to be endured, never flaunted. They were naturalised soon after the war, delighted to be accepted at last by the country that had tried to kill them, and they barely raised their daughter Jewish at all, never taking her to synagogue or giving her a bat mitzvah. They observed the Jewish holidays, but to those around them it seemed like this was done out of an inner compulsion that they couldn’t control.

  They did their best to protect the next generations from it. Danièle later had children of her own, Alexandre and Natasha de Betak, whom Henri and Sonia adored and often looked after. But they would shoo their grandchildren out of the house when they lit Friday night candles: ‘You don’t need to see this, go outside,’ they would say, shutting the door behind them. If Alexandre or Natasha asked about Judaism, decades after the war ended, Sonia would put her fingers to her lips and say sharply, ‘Better not.’ ‘Don’t tell people you’re Jewish,’ they instructed Alexandre – a sad echo of their late Ornstein cousins, Maurice and Giselle, trying to protect their little son Armand when they hid him in the woods. They just wanted to be French, and for their daughter and grandchildren to be seen as purely French, because to be French was to be safe. Even after being naturalised Henri never entirely believed he was safe and for the rest of his life he would do anything to avoid conflict or drawing attention to himself.

  Dinner with Henri and Sonia. Renée Goldberg is smiling at the camera, her daughter, Anne-Laurence, on her lap.

  So when Haenel came up with a plan in 1960, he knew he’d be able to get Henri
to agree.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ he said to Henri one day. ‘My wife, she’s giving me a hard time. She says I really run the company and you’re just the engineer, and so the company should really be mine. I know, I know, but you know women, right? So could you just write a letter saying that you’re signing the company over to me? It won’t mean anything and it will give me more peace at home. Be a friend.’

  One of the ironies of Henri’s life is that after the war he became increasingly like the one member of this family whom the Nazis had managed to murder. He adopted some of the tendencies of Jacques that had so infuriated the rest of his family when he was alive and, ultimately, helped to get him killed. It was as if he were paying some kind of homage to Jacques, keeping his closest brother alive by re-enacting him, or it might be simpler than that: Henri’s nervousness was a reaction to how utterly traumatised he had been by the war. It had depleted muscles and pared him back to the bare Glass bones, becoming increasingly like his gentle father. So he didn’t laugh in Haenel’s face, as most people would have done. Instead he agreed to sign the letter. Sonia understood her husband and she also knew she had to protect him. So she said to Henri, ‘Fine, tell him you’ll sign the letter, but only if he signs another letter saying that the other letter is meaningless.’

  Haenel agreed to this rather bizarre plan, but when he signed the second letter he crammed his signature into the bottom right corner of the letter, and made it so small it could hardly be seen by the naked eye.