The Sweetness of Forgetting (42)

“What about your family?” I ask.

“All of them, dead.” His voice is flat. “My wife. My son. Mother. Father. Sisters. Brother. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Grandparents. Everyone. When I came home to Paris, I came home to nothing. To no one.”

“I’m so sorry,” I murmur. The enormity of it begins to hit me. I’ve never met a concentration camp survivor before, and as the images from the Mémorial de la Shoah play themselves over again in my mind, I blink a few times, feeling numb. The atrocities in the pictures had actually happened to this kind man before me. I can feel tears in my eyes. I blink them away before he notices.

He waves a hand, dismissing my words. “It is the past. Not for you to be sorry about, mademoiselle. The world you live in today is very different, and I am glad.” He shuffles a little farther and regards his wall of books solemnly. He touches a gnarled finger to one book spine, then another. “The only place I knew to go when I returned was to the synagogue I had attended as a boy. But it had been destroyed. It was a shell, no longer a place.”

I’m frozen as I watch him scan the books. He pulls one out, reads something inside, and then returns it to the shelf.

“When I realized that the ones I loved were never coming home, I began to think about the great tragedy, not just of their deaths but of the loss of their legacies,” he continues. “For when you take away an entire family, and they all perish, who will tell their stories?”

“No one,” I murmur.

“Précisément. And when that occurs, it is as if their lives have been lost twice over. That is when I began creating my own records.” He reaches for another book, and this time, his eyes light up and he smiles. He flips through a few pages and stops at one. He’s silent for a moment as he reads.

“Your own records?” I ask.

He nods and shows me the page he’s stopped on. I see a cursive scrawl across neat, lined pages that are yellowed at the edges. “My lists of the lost.” He smiles and adds, “And of the found. And of the stories that go with them.”

I take a step back and look in awe at his bookshelves. “All of these books are your lists?”

“Yes.”

“You compiled them yourself?” I look around in disbelief.

“It filled my time in those early days,” he says. “It was how I stopped living in the sadness. I began visiting synagogues every day, looking at their records, talking to every person I could meet.”

“But how did you put together so much information?”

“To everyone I met, I asked them for the names of anyone they knew who had been lost, and anyone they knew who had survived. Family, friends, neighbors, it did not matter. No piece of information was small or insignifiant. Each one represented a life lost or a life saved. Over the years, I have written and rewritten their memories, organized them into volumes, followed the leads they gave me, and sought out the people who survived.”

“My God,” I murmur.

“Each person who survived a camp,” he continues, “has many stories to tell. Those people are often the key to who was lost, and how. For others, the only key we have is that they never returned. But their names are here, and what details we do know.”

“But why aren’t these lists in the Mémorial de la Shoah?” I ask.

“These are not the kind of records they keep,” he says. “They keep official records, the ones made by the governments. These are not official. And for now, I want my lists with me, because I am always finding new names, and it is important to keep up my life’s work. When I die, these books will go to the memorial. It is my hope that they too will keep them alive and, in doing so, keep the people who live in these pages alive forever.”

“This is amazing, Monsieur Berr,” I say.

He nods, smiles slightly. “It is not so amazing. Amazing would be to live in a world where there was no need to make lists of the dead.” Before I can reply, he puts a finger on the page of his open book and says calmly, “I have found them.”

I look at him, confused.

“Your family,” he clarifies.

My eyes widen. “Wait, you found the names? Already?”

He chuckles. “I have lived inside these lists for many years, madame. I know my way.” He closes his eyes for a moment and then focuses on the page before him. “The Picard family,” he says. “Dix, rue du Général Camou, septième arrondissement.”

“What does that mean?”

“It was your grandmother’s address,” he says. “Number ten on the street of Général Camou. I tried to include addresses wherever I could.” He smiles slightly and adds, “Your grandmother, she must have lived in a nice place, in the shadow of the Tour Eiffel.”

I swallow hard. “What else does it say?”

He reads ahead for a moment before speaking. “The parents were Albert and Cecile. Albert, he was a doctor. The children were Helene, Rose, Claude, Alain, David, Danielle.”

“Rose is my grandmother,” I whisper.

He looks up from the book with a smile. “Then I will have to change my list.”

“Why?”

“She is listed as presumed dead, the fifteenth of July, 1942, in Paris.” He squints at something on the page. “She went out that night and never returned, according to my notations. The next day, her family was all taken.”