Volume 15d

Rachel Phillipson-Levy

Memoir: An Odyssey Revisited

It is often difficult to decide at which point to start a story, as all the ramifications leading up to the beginning are parallel and of equal importance. I shall start my story on a summer day in Berlin in the late nineteen twenties. A young couple (Serge and Sophie) is strolling through a park when two German "Brownshirts" walking towards them on the sidewalk push the young woman aside saying Juden, hinunter. Indignant, the young husband does not even take the time to absorb the scene before announcing: "I am not staying one minute longer. We are leaving."

The young couple, my mother and father, leave Berlin some time later and land in Paris, quite penniless but very optimistic. They love France and everything French, my father especially. Henri Orbach, my mother's oldest brother, has been living in Paris for some time and is the owner of a small hat factory, Les Modes Modernes, rue du Temple. His business is relatively prosperous. My parents' beginnings are quite difficult but, three or four years later Les Modes Modernes has developed sufficiently for Henri to invite his brother-in-law Serge to join the firm.

Our life improves considerably. We move to a nicer apartment in a better neighbourhood. I go to an elegant private school, Cours Louise de Bettigny, and the following year to the Lyc�e Racine. My mother's mother, recently widowed, who is also living in Paris, comes to live with us. The future looks bright. For our family, the year 1935 is fateful.

One day,  Les Modes Modernes is visited by an Irish delegation: a Deputy Minister accompanied by a well-known business man, Senator McEllin, and an Austrian business man, Marcus Witztum. They are looking for industries interested in establishing factories in the West of Ireland to give jobs to the thousands of young Irish who emigrate every year because of the high unemployment so prevalent in Ireland. Would Les Modes Modernes be interested? Indeed, the partners think it could be an excellent business proposition and the junior partner Serge, my father, is sent on a reconnaissance mission. He returns to Paris full of enthusiasm, the proposal offers endless possibilities and the prospects in Galway, on the Irish West Coast, are most promising. After many weeks of discussion, it is decided that Serge will be "exiled" and put in charge of the new project on behalf of the Paris group, since he is the youngest partner and the last one to join the firm. It is the opportunity of a lifetime.

His departure is difficult. My mother has decided not to go with him and the plan is that he will spend one week out of every month in Paris, that we shall spend all our holidays in Galway, and that within five years, he'll come back to live in Paris when the Galway  factory reaches the point where it can be run by an Irish manager. In July 1938, the factory is finished and we all go to Galway to attend the opening of the Irish &nbspModes Modernes, which has gained the full support of the Irish government and the Bishop of Galway. During his Sunday sermons, the Bishop even asks his lady parishioners to wear hats only to church, not scarves. My mother and I spend two months in Galway and return to Paris in time for the first day of school.

Meanwhile, in Central Europe, the situation is getting worse and worse. Most members of both families, maternal and paternal, live in Germany. One of my father's brothers, Reuben (Robert) has been living in Paris since 1934. He is married to Choura (a Russian intellectual who came to France after the Russian revolution and who speaks seven languages fluently). The other brothers would like to come, but France grants visas most begrudgingly. In 1938, the situation of the Jews in Germany has become unbearable. My mother's sister Ella manages to get the necessary papers to join us with her husband Ernest and daughter Ruth. Two of my father's brothers, Sino and Joe, get to London after a short stay in Nice; their 24 year old sister Esther stays in Nice as she has a boyfriend there. She then comes to join us when he leaves for South America. He survives, she does not. At the beginning of 1939, my father's parents, his oldest sister Sala and her little daughter, four year-old Myriam--the family baby--are still in Berlin. During that summer, the grandparents go to Poland, accompanied by their daughter and granddaughter, although Sala�s husband and son end up in London. (Some of this is incomprehensible).

In June 1939, my father spends a week in Paris. He really wants my mother to come to Ireland, but she cannot decide to leave her mother who has never learned French, and her sister who has been quite hysterical since her arrival in France a few months earlier. In any case, she is convinced, as are millions of others, that there will never be war but even if there were, it could not last as the Germans could never manage to get across the Maginot Line!!!

That year, 1939, we spend our holidays at Le Touquet-Paris-Plage with the rest of the family. Paris-Plage is close to the Belgian-German border and, around mid-August Henri, whose son (my cousin St�phane) is with us, decides that because of all the war rumours, we must immediately move away from the border. The family splits up. My mother, St�phane, myself, my father's 24 year old sister Esther, and a few others go to Cabourg in Normandy, the rest of the family moves to N�ris-les-Bains in central France.

We are in Cabourg when the sirens announce the beginning of the war on September 3rd, 1939. Things are dramatic in the small hotel where we are living. The men, including my Uncle Henri who has come from Paris to join us, are immediately called up and prepare to join the army. Couples are hugging, women are crying, everyone is carrying the gas-masks that were distributed a few months earlier.

We realize that it is unwise to return to Paris which may be bombed, and rent a small house where a great many people squeeze in. St�phane and I are registered at the local Coll�ge. He is 11 years old, I am 9.

The 1939-40 winter is one of the coldest on record. A thick layer of snow blankets the beach and we are freezing in our unheated house. St�phane and I are in charge of finding wood to burn as there is none for sale and we pick everything, including the tiniest twigs, to burn them. When the twigs are burnt, we start on the furniture, at first old furniture that is stored in the cellar, then less old pieces like our dining-room chairs (cold as we were, we never had the nerve to break up the table!). The cold is really unbearable, we have one cold after another and the children have chilblains.

During that time, communication with Ireland becomes more and more difficult, the Channel is mined, air transport is reserved for the war effort but we still receive occasional letters from Serge through the Red Cross or via Switzerland and write to him regularly. I found those letters in 1988, after my father's death, and they are now in my possession and at the Montreal Holocaust Museum, but I haven't really reread them in depth, as reading them is hard.

Of course, the Germans walk in north and south of the Ligne Maginot, invade France with incredible speed, and simultaneously Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. As they move into France, towards the end of winter 1940, the Cabourg contingent decide that it is safer to join the N�ris-les-Bains group in central France. At that time, there was in N�ris my mother, St�phane and myself, as well as my mother's sister Ella and her daughter Ruth, exactly my age and my best friend, (Uncle Ernest has been interned in Lisieux as a German national), my grandmother, my father's youngest sister Esther, his brother Robert and Russian wife Choura, and a few friends from Paris. N�ris is a charming spa, the children go to the local school doing extremely well, it is springtime, and we have a small garden in which we grow vegetables. (As an aside, half a century later I found it fascinating to read Saul Friedlander's  When Memory Comes, as we went to the same school in N�ris at the same time. I spoke to him a few months later in Tel-Aviv where he is a well-known historian and author). But then comes June, the collapse of France, the Armistice and the exode.

Henri is demobilized, he returns to Paris for a short time and then joins the family in N�ris. He takes on the financial responsibility for everyone. Luckily, he has the means to do it since he was not only the owner of  Les Modes Modernes, but has invested in an important stamp collection and other valuables.

Shortly after the occupation of France, the country is divided into two sectors, occupied France in the North, la zone libre in the South. At the end of summer we leave N�ris and, along with hundreds of thousands of French, we go further South. After spending two days and two nights in unbelievably crowded waiting rooms and trains, we land in S�te on the Mediterranean Coast in a tropical heat wave. We live in a tiny hotel for a few weeks, food is scarce, and we then move to the Pyr�n�es and Cauterets, where my father's brother Robert and his wife Choura have been settled for a short time.

This brings us to August-September 1940. We rent a few apartments in a pleasant building (chez madame No�b�s, rue Richelieu), once more the children are registered at the local school and life in a village, perched one thousand meters high in the mountains, starts at a new pace: long walks, excursions, mountain climbing, blueberry picking. In fact, we are quite close to the Spanish border which we could have crossed many times had my grandmother been able to accompany us. But it is impossible to abandon an elderly woman in a small French village where no one speaks a word other than the Patois they speak in the Pyr�n�es. The mountain climate is new to us, we are pretty well snowed in from November to March. We learn skiing (no relationship to skiing in the 80s and 90s), go sledding, and befriend the gym teacher, an Austrian called M. Alix, who teaches us trapeze, parallel bars and what to do in case of a poisonous snake bite (they abound in the mountains). My memories of Cauterets are pleasant and warm. I get my certificat d'�tudes in 1941 in Argel�s-Gazost. To pass singing, I am required to sing (out of tune) Les Trois Rois Mages from Bizet's L'Arl�sienne.

Family relationships are tense though, people have nothing to do all day and the men must have been incredibly bored, everyone is out of kilter. I have a wonderful relationship with my mother and with my cousin Ruth who is my best friend.

In 1940, Henri and St�phane leave the Pyr�n�es for the C�te d'Azur, as Henri could not survive the one thousand meters altitude because of his asthma.

Here I must go back to another ramification of the story. Henri has been married to Suzanne, St�phane's mother, since 192?. Henri and Suzanne (who was Jewish on her father's side, Catholic on her mother's - St�phane called his grandmother N�n�) have always been incompatible and have led separate lives for many years. He has been totally absorbed in his business, stamp collecting, horse races. She spends a lot of time writing, is involved in politics and journalism. For several years, she has been carrying on an affair with journalist-author Jean Goldschild-Golsky and has been doing her own thing, which does not involve being a mother. No one has time for St�phane who, at the age of five, is shipped off to a fancy boarding school in M�g�ve. Except for N�n� who adores him; the happiest days of St�phane's childhood are spent at the small country house of N�n�'s companion, an Egyptian Jew, Monsieur Benjamin - called by St�phane and everyone else P'ssieur. The house is in Les Essards-le-Roi just outside Paris.

When she left Paris at the beginning of the war, Suzanne went with Jean Goldschild to Juan-les-Pins and together, they run a tiny pension. They have a child, Jean-Claude, called Monsieur C�. Jean has another son, Michel, who also lives with them. His daughter, who is approximately my age, lives in Switzerland.

In 1940, Henri, St�phane and N�n� settle down in the H�tel Victoria, rue d'Antibes in Cannes. St�phane goes to Lyc�e Carnot. Henri carries on business as he needs a lot of money to support his expensive lifestyle and the whole family. We are in constant communication and several times, they come to visit us in Cauterets. In fact, in September 1941, St�phane celebrates his Bar Mitzvah in Cauterets. It must have been quite a makeshift affair, with no synagogue, no rabbi, probably no Hebrew. My cousin remembers this day much more clearly than I do.

Uncle Ernest, my mother's sister Ella's husband, has been transfered from Lisieux to Algeria. In the winter of 1941, he and his German Jewish comrades are liberated and he decides to join his wife and daughter in Cauterets (this decision costs him his life). In 1941, the Allies land in North Africa, the Germans reach Stalingrad and gradually, we start hearing rumours about the concentration camps. At first, it is said that the rumours are allied propaganda, that such monstrous happenings cannot take place in a country like Germany where everybody is so correct. We are also beginning to hear about a certain G�n�ral de Gaulle and the French resistance, the Maquis, the Forces fran�aises de l'int�rieur (FFI), and the Communist faction of the resistance, the Francs-Tireurs Partisans (FTP). Frequently, we listen to the BBC but it's dangerous, the French Police are watchful and it is forbidden to listen to that station. In the school yard, we sing "Mar�chal, nous voil�," except that the kids mutter "De Gaulle, nous voil�."

Through the Red Cross, we write to my grandparents in the ghetto of Otwock, in Poland. They are there with my father's oldest sister Sala and little Myriam, aged 4 or 5. We know that they  have nothing and send food parcels, also through the Red Cross. Even as we send these parcels, we are aware that they will probably never get to their destination, but it's better than doing nothing.

And so it gets to be August 1942. One evening, a friend of the family, M. Kleinman appears in Cauterets and warns us that there will be a huge roundup of Jews on August 25-26, and that all Jews who entered France after 1933 will be arrested and deported. This includes almost everyone in the family, except for my mother, my grandmother, Henri and St�phane, myself, and Robert�s Russian wife Choura. There is a major council to figure out what to do. Some decide to stay put and not to run away, a few friends decide to go into hiding in the mountains. They all survived. They leave during the night, St�phane and I bring them food for the next two days and, after the milice have left, they come down from the mountains and go to another town. In the meantime, Ella, Ernest, Ruth, Robert and Esther are arrested by the French local police, gathered in the school yard, piled into buses and transfered to Gurs, the camp de rassemblement in South-West France. Saying good-bye is hard and, in fact, it is a last good-bye. None of them ever came back. But this we did not know at the time, of course. Robert's wife Choura is quite hysterical. Not without reason.

We remain in Cauterets until the beginning of 1943. At that point, Henri decides that for us to live in Cauterets is too expensive for his waning means and it is decided that we shall leave for Maubourguet, also in the Pyr�n�es. It's a nice enough village but I have to cycle 20 km to the next town twice a day in the height of winter to go to school and immediately get pneumonia as I often stay all day in very wet clothes. My memories are quite blurred there, but in April 1943, we go to Cannes to join Henri and the gang. We live in H�tel Victoria, my mother, grandmother and myself in one room, Henri and St�phane in another, and N�n� in a tiny one. Once more I start a new school, the Coll�ge de jeunes filles, I am in 5� (grade 7), but have missed so much and changed school so often that I am behind in most subjects, and this is a great source of distress for me.

The C�te d'Azur is occupied by the Italians who play football on the beach. When asked what they would do should the Allies land on these beaches, they claim that they would immediately surrender and spend the rest of the war as prisoners. St�phane and I go to school, cycle all over and spend time on the beach. St�phane's pals are loathe to accept me into their &nbspclub des scarab�es as I am only a girl. On July 15th, I have my 13th birthday party. In 1995, I gave Krisha Starker, Director of the Montreal Holocaust Centre (who has since become my friend) a red belt my mother gave me for my birthday.          

The Allied troops are now creeping up the Italian boot and a few days after my birthday, the Germans occupy the Riviera, replacing their ineffectual Italian counterparts. Our situation now changes radically, all Jews are under constant threat of deportation and, by now, we know of Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and Buchenwald. Members of the French Resistance are shot right, left and center and there is a general feeling of panic. We go to Nice to stay with a friend of Henri, M. Taube, and when this is no longer viable, M. Borello, Director of H�tel Victoria, a great friend of Henri, proposes to hide him, my mother and grandmother.

It is therefore decided that the two children and N�n� will return to Maubourguet where the Russian aunt Choura lives, as well as Sonia Galinsky a friend of my mother's and her two children Raymond and Guy (many many years later, Raymond became one of the heads of the French Communist Party), and the friends (the Knopfs, who in the meantime have become M. et Mme Bouton), who had escaped to the mountains in Cauterets on the day of the big roundup. In Maubourguet, there is also a family of lawyers from Sarrebruck, the L�vis, whose children we had befriended during our first stay in that village the previous year. Therefore, we are not alone there.

On September 13th, 1943, I say a last good-bye to my mother in the station in Nice. It will be St�phane's 15th birthday the next day, and my mother and I give him an Atlas before parting at the station - it is in fact the last time we see each other.

Once more we settle down in Maubourguet and rent an apartment in a large house. Once more there is no high school. By now, the roads have become too dangerous to cycle from village to village (and, we have no bicycles). St�phane and I spend our days making maps, writing a play on Hannibal, drawing geometric shapes with a compass and reading. We spend a lot of time with Judith and Bernard L�vi, who are a little older than we are. N�n� is doing her utmost to keep us comfortable, she adores St�phane and is very nice to me. The Russian aunt tries to exert some authority but we show a strong resistance to being told what to do. We eat well and a few months go by. With my J3 food card, I am entitled to 50 gr of chocolate per month. I put it all aside, at great sacrifice, to send it to my mother for her birthday on December 5th, along with a photograph of St�phane and I which now hangs in the Montreal Holocaust Museum. We look somehow like beaten dogs.

Henri sends us money regularly. In order to do this, he must sell stamps and whatever, and therefore, he must have contact with the outside world. He is at that time in constant contact with his wife Suzanne, from whom he is separated but not divorced. She lives in Juan-les-Pins, close to Nice. In January 1944, the three (Henri, Sophie and their mother) are denounced by unknown persons, and arrested. We know that they are transferred to Marseille and, in the train which takes them to Drancy, (the major camp de rassemblement near Paris) my mother throws a postcard out of the window addressed to me, via a third party. I receive this card in Maubourguet one week later and this is how we find out that they have been arrested. We have no money, N�n� has no resources and the L�vis advise us to contact Suzanne and Jean Goldschild in Juan-les-Pins. A few days later, Jean arrives in Maubourguet and this is the beginning of the next saga.

It is decided that I shall assume the name and the papers of Jean's daughter as she is in Switzerland. We are about the same age and her name is Jacqueline. All my life, I have been called Lali, which could easily be short for Jacqueline and it will be harder for me to make a mistake. Jean and I leave the same day to return to Juan, N�n� and St�phane follow two days later. We are afraid that the police and the Gestapo may be after us if they found our whereabouts when they arrested Henri and Sophie, and we are most careful to avoid attracting attention. Jean is a journalist and in the Resistance and, up to then, the tiny hotel in Juan has been a safe haven. When we get there, I sense immediately that Suzanne is far from happy to have three extra mouths to feed, and I think that St�phane and N�n� are a source of embarrassment for her. In the South of France, food is extremely hard to come by, our financial resources are meagre, she already has to worry about Jean-Claude who is about 3 and Michel who is about 9 or 10. It's not easy for anybody.

I hardly remember this stay in Juan-les-Pins. I only remember nice sunny weather and although it is January, we eat on the terrace, under the mimosa and lemon trees. It is naturally impossible to go to school, which distresses St�phane and me enormously. Then Jean decides to move closer to the core of the Resistance in the Vercors, as he is involved in the publication of the resistance newspaper Le Maquis.

In April 1944, we leave Juan-les-Pins by train and land in St-�tienne-de-St-Geoirs (Is�re). After 2 or 3 night in a hotel, we settle down in a farm located a few kilometres from the village.

The farm is uncomfortable, primitive, cold and dirty. There is no water except at the well, and I am put in charge of washing dishes which I do at the well in freezing water scraping with sand as there is no soap. We eat only vegetables, Suzanne keeps the few items received with food coupons (a little sugar, oil and butter for Jean, Jean-Claude and herself). They always find a good reason to eat their meals separately. St�phane's frustration is supreme. From time to time, when neighbours kill a pig, we get some meat. We also raise chickens, ducks and rabbits that end up on the table. For me, raised in the big city, this is disgusting and I mostly refuse to partake in these meals.

Jean is particularly nice to me, particularly hard on St�phane, and particularly contemptuous of N�n�. Suzanne is unpleasant to everyone. There are no schools of course, and Jean teaches me history while we criss-cross the countryside on foot to visit his resistance contacts, sometimes 30 or 40 km a day. With my old Cauterets ski boots, my feet are covered in blisters. St�phane and I pick nettles to feed the rabbits, gather wood for the stove, snails for eating (surely not me!), we are in charge of the vegetable garden and have no contact with the world. One of our neighbours, Mme Belahg, who has named her two pigs Goering and Goebels, appears to be aware of our story. Jean talks constantly about the Resistance, about the newspaper Le Maquis, and he is locked up in his room most of the time writing.

At the beginning of summer 1944, St�phane is sent as apprentice to a blacksmith in order to "teach him what life is all about". Of course, he hates it. Suzanne has become more and more nasty and especially to Michel who now sleeps in the barn and who is constantly being punished and deprived of basic food. St�phane and I bring him food at night, he is incontinent, dressed in rags, it's scandalous. (God knows what happened to him). She is also nasty to St�phane, constantly criticizing him but for some incomprehensible reason, less so to me.

No news from our parents, not from my father in Ireland either. But we are optimistic and sure we will soon be together.

The Allied armies continue their progress and start to invade and free the South of France. In the Is�re, we are liberated in summer 1944. The first troops to reach St-Štienne are Canadian and Senegalese. A soldier from St-Boniface speaks some strange  French, and tells me how big and beautiful Canada is. All I know of Canada is Maria Chapdelaine, Indians, igloos and the two cities colonized by the  French, Qu�bec and Montr�al. I wash this soldier's socks in the well and he gives me a chocolate bar. I haven't seen chocolate for the longest time and I rush to St�phane to share this treasure with him and no one else.

Paris is liberated in August 1944. A short time later, N�n� returns to Paris to try and get back her apartment in rue des Archives, and to see what happened to Henri's and to our flat. The rue des Archives flat has survived, the other two were occupied by strangers and the contents have more or less disappeared. St�phane and I are now alone under the watchful eye of Suzanne and Jean and all St�phane dreams about is joining his grandmother in Paris. He is still an apprentice at the blacksmith and he now starts to make plans to run away, alone or with me. In the end, he runs away to Paris and I stay.

In the meantime, I have written to my father in Ireland and he answers through diplomatic channels. He has many friends in the diplomatic service and is trying to get the necessary papers for me to travel. He would like me to join him immediately but for now, it's impossible. He is horrified at the idea of all that has happened to his family, he already knows that his parents, his sister Sala and her little daughter Myriam have been exterminated but nobody seems to have any precise information regarding the concentration camps, which are liberated in January 1945. The fate of his wife, his daughter, his brother, his sisters, his brother-in-law Henri who was such a good friend, has completely worn him down. Everyone is incredulous at being confronted with so much horror, he and we in France equally.

During the fall-winter 1944, we leave St-�tienne to move to a village North of Lyon, Pol�mieux-sur-Sa�ne. I think it is so that Jean can be closer to Lyon, where he now has to be everyday at his newspaper, Le Maquis.

In principle, we have been liberated but war continues on many fronts, even in Northern and Eastern France. In Pol�mieux, once more no school and I am panic-stricken when I think of the time that has been wasted in my education. St�phane writes that he has started at Lyc�e Charlemagne in Paris. Winter drags on and I continue to correspond with my father.

One day, I go to the Polish Consulate in Lyon since my father had a Polish passport before the war and my name was registered in it. I am sitting in the waiting-room, dressed in wooden shoes and doubtful clothes, with a mass of long messy curls. A man is also waiting. When the receptionnist calls "Philipson", we both stand up, look at her, look at each other, I do not recognize him but after looking at me, he asks "Rachel"? It is my father's Uncle Shaja who, with his wife and two sons, escaped from Belgium and spent the war in Switzerland and in France. They invite me to their flat, get me some decent clothes, shoes, a haircut and, above all, offer some real food, among which fried potatoes which I can never forget. They are trying to get back to Belgium and are going to help me get the necessary papers to go to Ireland.

This move to Ireland fills me with profound apprehension. I am very anxious to stay in France to greet my mother when she gets back and, moreover, I am very attached to my "adopted father" who is pressuring me not to go. I am a communist and an atheist (like most French adolescents of the day). My heroes are Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Saint-Exup�ry. I haven't seen my father for six years and I don't speak English.

My father carries out all the necessary steps to get me to Ireland and his friend, the French Commercial Counsellor in Dublin, M. Lestocquoy, goes to Paris to bring me back or at least to see to it that I come to Paris so that I am ready to go to Ireland at the first opportunity. I arrive at rue des Archives but there is so little room that I move to the Knopf-Boutons, the friends who had gone into hiding in the Cauterets mountains in August 1942 and who have an apartment facing the Gare du Nord. Their two sons have just returned from concentration camp, where they survived because they were young, skilful, strong and smart. I spend many weeks with them, running from one rescue organization to the next to try and get some news through camp survivors.

One week before my projected departure for Ireland, I receive a telegram from Jean saying that some survivors from Auschwitz had met my mother and were bringing news. My trip is therefore delayed to June 14th but this date is final. I have no excuse not to go and, in the end, there is no news from my mother at all.

I cross the Channel on a stormy sea thickly covered with clouds of jelly fish. Luckily the crossing is short. The train brings me to Victoria Station where a most emotional delegation of relatives is waiting for me: my two uncles whom I had only met once or twice before the war, my aunt whom I did not know at all, Sino and Ruth�s 9-month old daughter Judy. I am very conscious of my doubtful clothes and my wooden soled shoes.

I am greeted with a warmth and love I had not known since my separation from my mother. My aunt has made me a pale blue, very grown-up linen suit which is beautiful. For the first time in five years, I take a bath in a tub filled with hot water and bubbles. They don't know what to do for me. I spend two days in London and start off on the second leg of the journey to Dublin.

Just as this story has no specific beginning, it has no specific end since it is so closely intertwined with the rest of my life. In fact, I don't know where to stop as this is not an autobiography.

My father is waiting for me at the boat. He is holding a bouquet of small pink roses. Emotion runs high. The last time we saw each other, I was 9 years old. I am aware of his discomfort when he faces an adolescent who is taller than he. He drives me in his own car (what a miracle) to his own house (also a miracle) which appears to me more luxurious than Versailles. I have a marvellous room, with a view on a charming garden and a stream. In the wardrobe, I find a red cashmere sweater and a raspberry angora cardigan which he has bought for me. Knowing what a chocolate freak I am, there are boxes of chocolate everywhere. His friends have sent me all sorts of gifts: books, flowers, silver objects.           

One more anecdote. I was married in 1951, have four sons and have been living in Montr�al since 1954. In 1970, I registered in a translation course at Universit� de Montr�al. On the first evening, a lady keeps staring at me, to the point where during recess I ask her if she knows me. �No�, she says, �but I have known someone who looked very much like you. Obviously, it could not be you since that person would be close to 70 by now�. In any case, she met this person in France, after she was arrested and taken by train from Marseille to Drancy. "Was it January 1944?" I ask her. She is astonished. The fact is that she had met my mother, whom I resemble strongly and, without ever knowing her name, she had never forgotten the face.

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