The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(13)

Danny’s father was released after six weeks, thanks to his association with Eugène Schueller. Schueller was the founder and head of the giant French cosmetics company L’Oréal, where Danny’s father worked as a chemist. Long after the war Schueller would be exposed as one of the architects of an organization to help the Nazis find and kill French Jews. Somehow he carved out in his mind a special exemption for his star chemist; he persuaded the Germans that Danny’s father was “central to the war effort,” and he was sent back to Paris. Danny recalled that day vividly. “We knew he was coming back so we went shopping. When we came back we rang the bell and he opened the door. And he was wearing his best suit. He weighed forty-five kilos [ninety-nine pounds]. He was skin and bones. And he hadn’t eaten. That is the thing that impressed me. He waited for us to eat.”

Seeing that even Schueller couldn’t keep them safe in Paris, Danny’s father took his family and fled. By 1942 the borders were closed, and there was no clear path to safety. Danny, his older sister, Ruth, and his parents, Ephraim and Rachel, made a run for the south, which the Vichy regime still nominally governed. Along the way there were close calls and complications. They hid in barns: Danny remembered those, along with the phony identity cards his father had somehow secured in Paris that contained a misspelling. Danny and his sister and mother were called “Cadet” while his father had been given the name “Godet.” To avoid detection Danny had been required to call his father “Uncle.” He also needed to do the speaking for his mother, as her first language was Yiddish, and she still spoke French with an accent. His mother on mute was a rare sight. She always had a great deal to say. She blamed her husband for their circumstances. They’d stayed in Paris only because he had allowed himself to be misguided by his memory of the Great War. The Germans hadn’t gotten to Paris then, he’d said, so they surely wouldn’t get to Paris now. She hadn’t agreed. “I do remember that my mother saw the horrors coming long before he did—she was the pessimist and the worrier, he was sunny and optimistic.” Danny sensed already that he was very like his mother and not at all like his father. His feelings about himself were complicated.

The approaching winter of 1942 found them in a coastal town called Juan-les-Pins, in a state of dread. They now had their own house, courtesy of the Nazi collaborator, with a chemistry lab in it, so that Danny’s father could continue to work. To blend into their new society, his parents sent Danny to school, with a warning to be careful not to say too much or seem too clever. “They were afraid I would be identified as Jewish.” For as long as he could remember he had thought of himself as precocious and bookish. His body he felt little connection to. He was so bad at sports he’d one day be referred to by classmates as The Living Corpse. A gym teacher would prevent him from being given academic honors on the grounds that “there are limits to everything.” His mind, however, was limber and muscular. From the moment he thought of what he might be when he grew up, he simply assumed he would be an intellectual. That was his image of himself: a brain without a body. He now had a new one: a rabbit in a rabbit hunt. The goal simply was to survive.

On November 10, 1942, the Germans moved into the south of France. German soldiers in black uniforms now pulled men off buses and stripped them to see if they were circumcised. “Anyone who was caught was dead,” recalled Danny. His father firmly did not believe in God: His loss of faith had led him, as a young man, to leave Lithuania, and the illustrious line of rabbis from which he descended, for Paris. Danny wasn’t ready to abandon the idea that the universe had some unseen caring force in it. “I was sleeping under the same mosquito net as my parents,” he said. “They were in a big bed. I was in a small bed. I was nine. And I would pray to God. And the prayer was: I know you are very busy and that this is a tough time and all that. I don’t want to ask for much but I want to ask for one more day.”

Again they fled for their lives, this time up the C?te d’Azur to Cagnes-sur-Mer, to a place owned by a colonel in the old French army. For the next few months Danny was confined to quarters. He passed the time with books. He read and reread Around the World in Eighty Days and fell in love with all things English and, especially, with Phileas Fogg. The French colonel had left behind a long shelf filled with accounts of the trench warfare at Verdun, and Danny read all of those, too—and became something of an expert on the subject. His father still worked in the house down the coast with the chemistry lab in it, traveling by bus to see his family on weekends. On Fridays Danny sat with his mother in the garden and watched her darn socks and waited for his father to arrive. “We lived on the hill and we could see the bus station. We never knew if he would come. I have hated waiting ever since.”

With help from the Vichy government and private bounty hunters, the Germans became more efficient at hunting Jews. Danny’s father suffered from diabetes, but it was now more dangerous for him to seek treatment for it than to live with it untreated. Once again they ran. First to hotels and then, finally, to the chicken coop. The chicken coop was behind a country bar in a small village outside Limoges. Here there were no German soldiers, only the Milice—the paramilitary force collaborating with the Germans to help them round up Jews and exterminate the French Resistance. How his father had found the place Danny didn’t know, but L’Oréal’s founder must have been involved, as the company continued to send packages of food. They erected a partition in the middle of the room so Danny’s sister might have some privacy, but the coop wasn’t really meant for anyone to live in. In winter it grew so cold the door froze shut. His sister tried to sleep on the stove and ended up with burn marks on her robe.