The Sweetness of Forgetting (47)



Alain looks at me for a long moment and sighs. “Rose Durand is probably the identity she escaped under. To have gotten out of France at that time, she would have had to get new identity papers, probably in unoccupied France. And to get new papers, she likely would have had to claim to be someone else. She probably had help from the résistance. They would have given her false papers.”

“False papers that listed her as a Christian? That listed her as Rose Durand instead of Rose Picard?”

“Much easier to escape as a Catholic than as a Jew, of course, during the war.” Alain nods slowly. “If she believed she had lost all of us, perhaps she wanted to forget. Perhaps she lost herself in her new identity, because it was the only way to maintain her santé d’esprit. Her sanity.”

“But why would she think you were dead?” I ask.

“After the liberation, everything was very confused,” Alain says. “Those of us who were left came to the H?tel Lutetia on the boulevard Raspail. It was where all the survivors came after. Some to heal, to receive medical care. For the rest of us, it was the place to find each other. To seek our families that had been lost.”

“You went there?” I ask.

He nods. “I was never deported,” he says softly. “After the war, I came to the H?tel Lutetia to find my family. I wanted so badly to believe they had survived, Hope. We would arrive and put the names of the family members on a board. ‘I am looking for Cecile Picard. Mother. Age forty-four. Arrested July 16, 1942. Taken to Vel’ d’Hiv.’ People would come to you and tell you, ‘I knew your mother at Auschwitz. She died in her third month, of pneumonia.’ Or, ‘I worked with your father in the crematorium at Auschwitz. He became sick and was sent to the gas chamber, just before the liberation of the camp.’ ”

I stare at him. “You found out that they all died.”

“All of them,” Alain whispers. “Grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles. Rose was listed as dead too. Two people swore they had seen her shot in the streets during the roundup. I left without giving my name, because there was no one left to find me. That is what I believed. It is why there is no record of me. I wanted only to disappear.”

“How did you escape being captured?”

“I was eleven years old when they came for us. My parents, they did not believe all the rumors we were hearing. But Rose believed. She could not convince my parents. They thought that she was crazy, that she was a fool for accepting the predictions of Jacob, whom they viewed as a young rebel who knew nothing.”

There it was again. That name. “You never told me who Jacob is.”

Alain searches my face for a moment. “Jacob was everything,” he says simply. “Jacob was the one who told me to run if the police came. Jacob was the one who told me to try to convince my family. Jacob was the one who saved me, for when the police came for us, to take us away, I climbed out the back window, fell to the ground from three floors above, and ran.”

He looks down at his hands for a long moment. They’re gnarled and scarred. Finally, he draws a deep breath and continues. “I let my family die, because I was scared,” he says. He looks up at me and there are tears in his eyes. “I did not try hard enough to persuade them. I did not take Danielle and David, the younger ones, with me. I was frightened, very frightened, and because of that, they are all gone.”

A tear runs down his cheek. Before I can even consider what I’m doing, I’ve crossed the room to hug him. He stiffens for a moment, and then I feel his arms encircle my shoulders. His whole body is shaking. “You were eleven,” I murmur. “You are not to blame.”

I pull away, and he sighs. “No matter who holds the blame, my family was all murdered, and I am still here, seventy years later. I have lived with that all my life. It is heavy in my heart.”

I can feel tears in my own eyes as I sit back down. “How did this Jacob know? How did he know to tell you to run?”

“He was part of an underground movement against the Nazis,” Alain says. “He believed the rumors of the death camps. He believed they were exterminating us systematically. He was in the minority. But Rose believed him. And Jacob was my hero, so I believed him too. He must have saved her.”

“How?” I ask softly.

Alain looks at me for a long moment. “I do not know. But she was the love of his life. He would have done anything to protect her. Anything.”

I blink. “She loved him too?”

He nods. “With a strength I’d never known she had,” he says. He looks off into the distance for a long time. “That is why, for all these years, I’ve always firmly believed that she died. For if she had lived, I know she would have come back for him.”

“She must have believed that he was dead too,” I murmur. “Was his name at the H?tel Lutetia?”

Alain looks perplexed. “Yes, it was,” he says. “He was hoping beyond hope that she had made it out, that she had survived, despite the rumors we had heard. His name was always there, so if she came back, she would find him.”

“But my grandfather came back,” I tell him. “In 1949. To find out what happened to her family. That’s what my grandmother said.”

“There were no records of me,” Alain says. “That is surely why he did not find me. But Jacob did everything to be listed, just in case Rose had somehow survived.”

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