The Book

There were many times when, even if by good fortune I managed some work on this book, I did not know whether I would be delivered into the clutches of the Germans the very next day. Many times when I was forced … to bundle the papers up hastily so as not to put the Sisters of the Convent in serious danger. Many times when – to put it bluntly – the end seemed to be before me. In such circumstances you do not think in terms of creating literature out of all this material, or of having a ‘good story’ …

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‘Jew – perish!’ From the first day of the invasion, the ‘Comrades of the People’ started to put this programme into action … The door to the apartment of a well-respected Jewish family – parents and three children – who had ‘exterminated’ themselves, was decorated, before the funeral, with a placard bearing the following inscription from the hands of the Nazis: ‘Five Jews, who have killed themselves. Course of action highly recommended to others.’

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Paris in the last days before the Germans: a pale ghost on the brightest of days, in the midsummer sun…

Just peep round the corner and – one street further on – the illusion, this phantasm of an enchanted city, dissolves into the mad frenzy of the Exodus. … the Exodus – that dreadful convulsion of massed humanity in flight … a grotesque mish-mash of vehicles: luxury limousines alongside lorries; sports cars alongside farmers’ carts; removal vans, mail vans, caravans, three-wheelers, motorbikes – everything from the giant to the miniature. And all of them teeming with people using every possible available seat, standing-place or indeed crouching-place; all of them crammed full and piled high with the items that each person considered the most vital – from beds and ovens to chicken-cages and doll’s houses. … I can see a blanket, too, laid out in a meadow by the roadside – a brand new, white blanket. Beneath it, though, could be seen the contours of a body. A foot stuck out. It was the first death. For this man, the Exodus was over.

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Behind the barbed wire you can get to know a person better in the course of a few days than you would outside in a whole life … You learn the true nature – and the genuine, incredible value – of the word ‘comradeship’ …

On the other hand life behind barbed wire can also teach one how truly incorrigible the incorrigible truly are. …

Individuals such as Ernst Friedezky, Alois Stern, Dr Otto Seligman, the young Georg Pollak, gave me more than I can say. …

There were times when I said to myself that I was actually better off than my wife and Sláva, who were dying of anxiety over me, and who were so alone in that heartless, bestial Paris …

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‘All foreign Jews now would be best advised to hide.’

To hide … where? …. There was, of course, no question of sleep. Each of us lay there awake, silent, the same thoughts going round, endlessly, in all our minds. … And so we stayed silent – heartbeat after heartbeat, hour after hour. … If only this night would end …

Around four in the morning we heard a dog bark. My wife and I both leapt out of bed instantly and rushed to the window. In the pale light just before dawn, we could see a number of figures moving slowly, gingerly towards our door. ….

A contingent of seven heavily-armed men, against three women and myself.

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If I try, now, to put into words what we went through on that day, and what we had to witness, then every word I use seems to me terribly inadequate – and at the same time, not simple enough. One has a duty to bear witness. But if it were not for that, it would be best to say nothing. …

For the rest of my life I shall have before me the small children, playing together in between the sleeping spaces, happy, carefree, without malice. And for the rest of my life I shall see the look of inexpressible sorrow on the faces of their mothers …

Here, children playing, with their mothers. Over there, children playing, with their mothers. No more than a narrow street between us – no more than a couple of steps. Only, what was happening there was a beginning, and what was happening here was the end. That is all.

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When I think back to 12th November 1942, that cloudy, cold, wet late autumn day seems to me one of the most moving, and also one of the happiest, of my life …

And the Mother Superior actually apologized that she could not offer us anything better … We almost forgot that we were not in some holiday home, but in a clandestine location – in a hiding hole. I sometimes wondered if it was actually happening. We felt like human beings among other human beings, not like wild animals being hunted. …

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And finally the third miracle: Hélène Rispal - Hélène, who had the brainwave – in the middle of a sleepless night – to hide us here in Labarde.

A triple darkness had to descend on us, so that we could finally disappear under the protective darkness of the clandestine world. And it is only a short time ago that we had to hide ourselves still deeper: in our cavity behind the morgue. Yesterday it would still have been a possibility that the Germans might take us. And now we are assured that it is all over – we are free…

Try to understand me. Have patience with me. I have not yet absorbed the new reality. I feel like someone who has suffered from hunger too long to be able to take a proper meal, even one composed of the most tempting dishes. … And so I beg a little patience – a little time, yet, before we appear once more as human beings among others.

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To return … where? …

A little love and the little piece of daily bread: those are the true necessities of life. Nourishment for the soul and sustenance for the body … Everything else is deceit and illusion – sound and fury. If I did not know that before, it is a lesson that life has taught me since 10th March 1938. …

Well, I have found love. More love than I could measure. More than, in good times, I could even have dreamt of. More than I have deserved.

Will I be able to find the little bit of daily bread, too?