Perfectly Ordinary People(92)

Did you struggle with that decision – the decision not to tell him? Did you never consider that he maybe had a right to know about his heritage?

Oh, definitely. We always imagined we’d tell him one day. Well, I did, anyway. It seemed obvious. As you say, he had a right to know. That’s indisputable. But not at five. And not at ten, either. You can’t tell a ten-year-old that their entire family ended up in the gas chambers. Nor a fifteen-year-old, for that matter. And then, by twenty, or thirty . . . I don’t know . . . By the time they’re old enough to perhaps understand, and old enough to potentially take that kind of shock, they’re too old . . . the lie has been going on too long. It becomes almost impossible to say, ‘Hey, I’ve been lying to you your whole life and you’re not my son, and you’re Jewish, and you’re an orphan.’ So it’s a tough one. There’s never a right moment for that sort of thing.

Of course. I can understand that perfectly. Going back to the decision to keep Guillaume, it sounds like it was pretty much taken in Mulhouse, when it was confirmed that Christophe couldn’t find Leah?

Well, even then, we only knew we weren’t going to find her at that moment. But we didn’t know we would never find her. We didn’t know that until 1953 or so. But in a way you’re right. Because by the time we left Mulhouse I’d decided to at least try to keep him. That’s why we had to return to Le Mas.

Oh, you went back there? I’d assumed the next stop was London?

Well, we were heading for London, ultimately. But in those days, in the provinces, it was the police who issued passports. So if we’d asked for them in Mulhouse—

You’d have had to request them under your real identities.

Exactly. And Guillaume wouldn’t have been able to go on my passport either, because he was clearly not my son. So we had to request them in Le Mas, where no one knew who we really were. Or rather, where everyone knew us as the Solomas family.

Gosh. I see. And Christophe decided to come with you? I’m surprised by that.

Yes. It was a surprise for me too. But he was terribly upset by the way his parents had rejected him, and literally heartbroken by the disappearance of Johann and all of his other friends. He had nowhere to live in Mulhouse anymore, and no job either, because he’d worked in his father’s business before. I wouldn’t say he was particularly motivated by the idea of returning to Le Mas, and even less so of travelling to London. It was more the case that he felt at a loss to know what to do with his life, I think. So coming with me, with us . . . helping us do what I wanted . . . that provided him with some kind of purpose, albeit temporary. But he was surprisingly flippant about the whole thing. It was very much one of those ‘What the hell/why not?’ kind of decisions. I think the war had made everyone a little crazy and Christophe was no exception.

So you went back after all?

Yes. We had to. And the journey back to Le Mas that time was absolutely hellish. It had been pretty bad the first time, but this was just a nightmare.

The trains were all full again – the number of people criss-crossing the country was shocking – but one thing had changed and it made everything that much harder. That wartime solidarity of squeezing in to help others get onboard had vanished, and it was suddenly a case of every man for himself.

Why do you think that was?

You know, there was a lot of bad feeling after the war . . . Most people were grieving for someone, of course, but there were lots of other complex feelings too. People felt awful about the way their government – the Vichy government – had collaborated. The way they’d been ordered not to resist, and the way they’d obeyed that order. Others were ashamed about the fact that they’d had to be liberated by the Allies. Some hated their neighbours because they’d collaborated, and others neighbours who’d resisted . . . People resented family members who’d lost nothing, or they blamed someone else for the fact they’d lost everything . . . The country felt very fractured, very messed up, so perhaps that had something to do with it.

Whatever the cause, the end result was that for a while people weren’t that nice to each other. And we missed multiple trains because we simply couldn’t get in the door. Even when we tried to sleep on the same pile of railway sleepers we’d used five years earlier we got moved on by a grumpy station guard. The hotels we tried all seemed to be full, and so we spent that whole horrible night walking the streets of Lyon, sitting on benches, then being hassled and having to move on. Christophe almost got into a fight with a Lyon policeman at one point, and if I hadn’t intervened I think they would have come to blows.

Anyway, the end result of all these delays was that we arrived in Sigale not early Saturday morning, as planned, but on Sunday. And that meant that the grocer couldn’t take us to Le Mas because on Sundays he went in the opposite direction to sell his wares in a market in Roquestéron instead. There was no way we could walk there with Guillaume. It was about twenty kilometres to our place, as I recall.

By using little Guillaume to make the locals feel guilty, we at least found a bed for the night, and the next morning Christophe convinced a chap with horses to take us to Le Mas.

Twenty kilometres on horseback?

And I’d never ridden a horse before! Christophe convinced me it was easy – that all I had to do was sit down. As you’ll know if you’ve ever ridden a horse, that’s an absolute lie.