The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(14)

To pass as Christians, Danny’s mother and sister went to church on Sundays. Danny, now ten years old, returned to school, on the theory that he was less conspicuous there than hiding inside the chicken coop. The students at this new country school were even less able than the ones in Juan-les-Pins. The teacher was kind but forgettable. The only lesson Danny recalled was the one about the facts of life. He found the details so preposterous that he was sure the teacher had been mistaken. “I said, ‘That is absolutely impossible!’ I asked my mother about it. She said it was so.” Still, he didn’t really believe it until one night when he was in bed, with his mother sleeping beside him. Waking up and needing to use the outhouse, he climbed over her. She awakened to find her son on top of her. “And my mother is terrified. And I think, ‘It must be true after all!’”

Even as a child he had an almost theoretical interest in other people—why they thought what they thought, why they behaved as they did. His direct experience of them was limited. He attended school but avoided social contact with his teachers and classmates. He had no friends. Even acquaintances were life-threatening. On the other hand, he witnessed, from a certain distance, a lot of interesting behavior. Both his teacher and the owners of the local bar, he had to believe, couldn’t help but know that he was Jewish. Why else would this precocious ten-year-old city boy land in a schoolroom filled with country bumpkins? Why else would this clearly well-heeled family of four have piled into a chicken coop? Yet they gave him no sign they were anything but oblivious. His teacher gave him high marks and even invited Danny to his home, and Madame Andrieux, who owned the bar, asked him to help out, gave him tips (for which he had no use), and even tried to talk his mother into opening a brothel with her. A lot of other people quite obviously failed to see them for what they were. Danny remembered in particular the young French Nazi, a member of the Milice, who courted, without success, Danny’s sister. She was now nineteen, with movie star looks. (After the war, she took great pleasure in letting the Nazi know that he had fallen in love with a Jew.)

On the night of April 27, 1944—that date Danny remembered clearly—his father took him for a walk. He now had dark spots inside his mouth. Forty-nine years old, he looked much older. “He told me I might have to become responsible,” recalled Danny. “He told me to think of myself as the man of the family. He told me how to try to keep things under control with my mother—that I was sort of the sane one in the family. I had a book of poems I’d written. And I gave them to him. And he died that night.” Of his father’s death Danny had little memory except that his mother had made him spend the night with Monsieur and Madame Andrieux. There was another Jew hiding in their village. His mother had found him and he had helped remove his father’s body before Danny returned. She gave him a Jewish burial but didn’t invite Danny to attend, probably because it was so dangerous. “I was really angry about him dying,” said Danny. “He had been good. But he had not been strong.”

The Allies invaded Normandy six weeks later. Danny never saw any soldiers. No American tanks rolled through his village with GIs on top tossing candy to children. One day he woke up and there was a feeling of joy in the air and the Milice were being marched off to be shot or jailed, and a lot of women were walking around with shaved heads—punishment for having slept with a German. By December the Germans had been driven out of France, and Danny and his mother were free to travel to Paris to see what remained of their home and chattels. Danny kept a notebook, which he had titled “What I Write of What I Think.” (“I must have been intolerable.”) In Paris he read, in one of his sister’s schoolbooks, an essay by Pascal that inspired him to write in his notebook an essay of his own. The Germans were then launching their final counterattack to retake France, and Danny and his mother lived with the fear that they would break through: Danny wrote an essay that attempted to explain man’s need for religion. He began with a quote from Pascal, Faith is God made sensible to the heart, then added, “How true!” He followed this up with his own original line: “Cathedrals and organs are artificial ways of generating the same feeling.” He no longer thought of God as an entity to which he might pray. Later, when he looked back on his life, he remembered his childhood pretensions and was both proud of and embarrassed by them. His precocious essay writing, he thought, was “deeply linked in my mind with knowing that I was a Jew, with just a mind and no useful body, and that I would never fit in with other boys.”

In Paris, in their old prewar apartment, Danny and his mother found only two battered green chairs. Still, they stayed. For the first time in five years Danny attended school without having to disguise who he was. For years he carried a fond memory of the friendship he struck up there with a pair of tall, handsome Russian aristocrats. The memory was so insistent, perhaps, because he had gone so long without friends. Much later in life, he tested his memory by tracking down the aristocratic Russian brothers and sending them a note. One brother had become an architect, the other a doctor. The brothers wrote back to say that they remembered him, and sent him a picture of them all together. Danny wasn’t in the picture: They must have been thinking he was somebody else. His lone friendship was imagined, not real.

The Kahnemans no longer felt welcome in Europe and left in 1946. Danny’s father’s extended family had remained in Lithuania and, along with the six thousand or so other Jews in their city, had been slaughtered. Only Danny’s uncle, a rabbi, who happened to be out of the country when the Germans rolled in, had been spared. He, like Danny’s mother’s family, now lived in Palestine—and so to Palestine they moved. Their arrival was sufficiently momentous that someone filmed it (the film was lost), but all Danny would later say he remembered of it was the glass of milk his uncle brought him. “I still remember how white it was,” he said. “It was my first glass of milk in five years.” Danny and his mother and sister moved in with his mother’s family in Jerusalem. There, a year later, at the age of thirteen, Danny made his final decision about God. “I still remember where I was—the street in Jerusalem. I remember thinking that I could imagine there was a God, but not one who cared whether or not I masturbate. I reached the conclusion that there was no God. That was the end of my religious life.”