Perfectly Ordinary People(91)

‘So if your mother’s Jewish you’re Jewish,’ I said, speaking quickly, ‘but if only your father’s Jewish then you’re not?’

‘I think that’s how it works,’ Dan said. ‘But—’ And then the line cut out.





Cassette #5

ML: Marie Lefebvre, interviewing Genevieve Schmitt, cassette number five, third day.

We’re doing well today, Genevieve!

GS: Yes. But I’m realising that we’re still not going to finish, are we? Not even today! And I hope you’re not spending too much on all these tapes?

Oh, they’re only ￡2.99 for three. I buy them in multipacks at Woolworth’s. But I may have to buy another set if you carry on chatting like this!

Aren’t you concerned about how you’re going to use all of this? Aren’t you worried about the length? Because it’s got to be much too long for your magazine, hasn’t it?

Oh, I’m not even thinking about that anymore. I’m just enjoying the story. So we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Oh, please don’t think that I’m not going to use it. I’ll definitely do something with it, even if it ends up being a much shorter piece. Even if I have to edit it down.

I’m not worried about that at all. Use it or don’t use it . . . It’s honestly all the same to me. As long as you’re finding it interesting.

I am. It’s incredibly interesting.

Good. So where were we?

Mulhouse, 1945.

Yes.

I was wondering . . . It’s just that in Mulhouse you still had Guillaume with you . . . So I’m left wondering if you’d decided to keep him by then? I mean, clearly, you had. But at what point was the actual decision made?

I’m not sure there ever was a specific decision. Things were never that clear-cut. I was very torn about Guillaume the whole time. We both were.

If I’m honest, I’d have to say that I tried very hard to avoid thinking about all the reasons we might have to give him up. He was so very much my child by then – our child. He’d spent the first five years of his life with us. I’d breastfed him. We’d taught him to walk and talk and . . . I don’t know . . . We’d toilet-trained him . . . everything, really. I loved him so much. That bond was incredibly powerful by the time we got back to Mulhouse.

So the idea of losing him was unthinkable. And yet, at the back of my mind, I knew it was still a possibility. I knew he wasn’t mine, and that if we found Leah I’d almost certainly have no choice but to hand him over.

So how hard did you try to find Leah? Honestly.

<Laughs> Well, you’ve said it all really, haven’t you? Not very hard. Not very hard at all. Because finding her, for me, would have been a disaster. Luckily Christophe’s a much more moral person than I am, and he was far more diligent about looking for Leah than I would have been. He spent days searching high and low for any remaining members of Leah’s family.

Does that mean you think he was less attached to Guillaume than you were?

No, I wouldn’t say that at all. He loved him to bits. But in a way – and I’m sure he would admit this if you asked him – I don’t think he saw Guillaume as quite such a permanent feature of his life as I did, if that makes sense. He was more rational, in that way that men so often are. He knew Guillaume wasn’t ours. I don’t think he ever let himself forget that. And I wasn’t ever planning for it to be permanent either. In my case it was simply that I’d come to a point where I couldn’t imagine the future without him. Do you understand what I mean? When I pictured the future, any kind of future, Guillaume was in it.

But anyway, like I said, Christophe looked for Leah. He looked really hard. He asked everyone he could find in the Jewish quarter and not a single member of Leah’s family had returned. I tried again to track her down much later, in ’53, and—

Why? Sorry, but why in ’53?

Oh, it was because Pierre’s father died. Oh gosh, I’ve gone back to calling him Pierre again, haven’t I? It’s whenever I talk about Mulhouse. Anyway, he was really grief-stricken about his father’s death. Despite everything that had happened between them, he was absolutely wiped out by it. And that made me think even more than usual about Leah, I suppose, and about her grief. It made me think about the fact that if she had survived the horror of the camps, then she needed to know her baby had survived too. I wasn’t sure how, or when or even if I’d get in touch with her, but I did set things in motion by contacting the Red Cross and the Jewish Relief Unit and, eventually, they found them in the records. The Nazis kept very detailed records – shockingly detailed. Did you know they recorded how many grammes or calories or whatever of food they gave each prisoner? They wanted to work out the absolute minimum they could give them before they keeled over and died. Death was a shockingly scientific business for the Nazis. But anyway, the news was all horrific.

Because the whole family had died?

Yes. They’d all died in the camps – or rather had been murdered. I hate the way people say they died . . . It makes it sound like it was an accident, don’t you think? But yes, they’d all been slaughtered by the Nazis except for Joshua, that’s Leah’s brother, but he was living in America. So I went from trying to find them to wanting to protect Guillaume from ever having to know about all that horror instead.