The Violinist of Auschwitz

Prologue

Cologne, summer 1958

The sky is grey, streaked with mustard yellow. It’s the colour of my nightmares. It is a nightmare. There are thousands of us huddled, naked and crowded against each other on an esplanade with no limits. Although out in the open air, a continuous wail among thousands of cries seems to be reflected by the polished walls of a huge bathroom. You’re right behind me, within earshot: the only reassuring presence in my proximity. You don’t speak to me; you look all around you, crazily. Maybe you don’t even know that I’m here? A thrust exerted from who knows where pushes us en masse towards a metal portico, overlooking a staircase. Still huddled together, we go up, step by step, jostling with each other and shouting even more. As we ascend, my anxiety increases. The cries reach a deafening level. We advance down a corridor that leads to the void. Those who were before me have disappeared; you must have disappeared too. I have to launch myself into this emptiness and I see that the whole metallic structure we’ve climbed is nothing more than a gigantic diving board. Below is a swimming pool, tiled in white earthenware, with blue lines marking the swimmers’ lanes. The colours are crisp, the lines are sharp. There’s no water in the basin. We have to throw ourselves into it; we throw ourselves into it to kill ourselves …

I wake up out of breath. I’m alone, you’re at work.

As a child, this dream was the first representation of mass destruction, our destruction by Nazism. This vision of disaster, as I’d built it, having no other details than those I’d gleaned from you, in my search for contact with you. You’d chosen not to tell me anything about what you’d suffered a few years before I was born. I had a lot of imagination at the time, but from what I felt through you, I already knew that this horror wasn’t made up of horned demons, flying dragons or wolves frothing at the mouth: all the usual swarms that populate childish imaginations. Deep down, I knew that this disaster must’ve been a foolish, technological, anonymous and hygienic nightmare, just like the massacre and those who planned it.

Loyal to you down to the last fibre of my being, I realized that your inability to pay me any attention was creating a chasm between us over time. The interior destruction that you’d suffered was so complete that you didn’t even have the words to think it, and a fortiori to tell me.

You’d witnessed it, you still bore the scars: a five-digit number, underlined by a downward-pointing triangle, tattooed on the outside of your left arm, 10 centimetres from the elbow joint. The blue-black number was quite small, but each stroke that made it was a cut containing unspeakable offences.

Also striking were the bad dreams that woke you up screaming, hallucinating, and that left my father powerless to calm you down. I knew we shouldn’t talk about it. I had to wait a long time to understand that what allowed you to magically keep these nightmares away was sometimes the evening kiss that I gave you, whatever it cost me, whatever had happened between us during the day. Another factor that cemented our bond were the migraines that left you helpless and made you push anyone who tried to approach you as far away as possible. I couldn’t get over this, so I suffered the same ailments: it was the only thing I could take from you without risking becoming too weak.

I’d known for a long time that you couldn’t always be present and constantly available to me. I knew it would’ve been inappropriate to ask you for more than you gave me. From your behaviour and through what was tacitly implied around us, I clearly understood that I had no right to be frustrated. In light of what you’d suffered, my needs were paltry.

* * *

At that time we lived in a small detached house, the whole family together. The eyes of other family members – what I’ve always called your family – wanted to protect you and had the effect of separating us even more. Why? What right did they have to come between us, the three of us first, then the two of us later, after your divorce? Why did they have an opinion on us, and why did you allow them to have one? My expectations as a small child, no doubt a bit precocious, were too demanding, my pain too sharp for you to be able to do anything other than alternate between passivity and explosions of anger. Others, therefore, took care of me when you were too busy…

Not enough warmth and comfort when I needed it, not enough words to justify or explain. My childhood questions were obstinately refused, making your past and my origins taboo.

As far back as I can remember, I have the feeling of having been constantly on the alert, awaiting a vague catastrophe which, in the most benign of cases, would leave us separated from each other, and, in the worst case scenario, both of us dead. It was an event that couldn’t be spoken of, and the weight of which you carried with you even before I came along.

I called for you and you didn’t answer, or at least not enough. This frustration, so unsuitable and so well-hidden from those around us – weren’t you a saint? – has undoubtedly marked me for my whole existence.

* * *

To this silence where you let me grow were added a few details of a standard 1950s interior: a portrait of a child and some books. Drawn in red chalk and pastel on craft paper, the portrait was of a 3-year-old child, Lydia, standing at the edge of a beach in Knokke [Belgium]. The little girl is wearing a grey outfit. Her face shows full, red cheeks, framed by blonde hair cut in the style of the 1920s. She has the roundness of those little girls approaching the end of infancy. The artist was fairly unknown, but the painting was supposedly won by Lydia after being elected ‘the most beautiful child on the beach’ in the summer at the end of the Belle Époque. Duly framed, it hung in the living room, along with the out-of-tune piano and the abominable more-or-less Flemish Still Life with Pheasant painting on the back wall, always in shadow. It was a room one only passed through ‘so as not to damage anything’.

We also had about thirty novels: Alexandre Dumas’ Musketeers trilogy, Louis Amédée Achard’s Les Coups d ‘épée de Monsieur de la Guerche and Belle-Rose, the complete works of the Comtesse de Ségur. Covered with blue or brown paper, the titles of the volumes were carefully inked on schoolboy labels in pen, making them look like loved and then neglected books. Unlike the portrait, they weren’t kept in the living room, but had been stored in the back of a wooden cabinet that occupied an entire wall of the kitchen. These were Aunt Lydia’s books. I read them greedily, and treated them like relics. They were relics, but I didn’t know it at the time.

So I had a portrait of a little girl, the books of a pre-adolescent girl, and the grown-up name, Aunt Lydia. Three distinct ages for an otherwise mysterious person. She was very young to be anyone’s aunt, and no one, you least of all, wanted to tell me who or where she was.

I couldn’t make the link between Lydia and this opaque past until much later. I would first have to go through a series of particular disasters, and let a moment infuse the cataclysm that was affecting all of us, without my knowing it.

* * *

Forgive me for telling you so bluntly, you who suffered both, but the explosion of our family was as intense for me as the Nazi massacres. In the childish universe of which I was the uncertain centre, you and my father formed the retaining arc. It still wavered, the three of us weren’t very strong, and your separation destroyed the little internal security I had left.

At the time I had nightmares full of fractures, ruptures and tears. In my dreams I looked for the two of you in burning cities, in ruins, and in permanently devastated landscapes. Your departure to Germany scattered what was left of me to the four winds. For that, just as for your separation, I wasn’t prepared. You left as if you were fleeing something, while I was elsewhere, as they used to say, in a camp. It was at a children’s home – for Jewish children – on the Channel coast, where I encountered the notion of the Second World War for the first time. It was also the first time that I found myself alone.

I spent two months there in the fog, terrorized. My body was out of sorts: I was peeing in bed as if my life depended on it. I lost or had all my possessions stolen whenever I didn’t give them to someone who asked for it nicely. I wondered when and by what chance I would see you again. The Germany you had joined, for you, for us, wasn’t neutral, and vibrated in me harmonics of indefinite suffering. Yours, no doubt.

Your departure evoked exile too much. Our separation realized my recurring anxiety: a train carrying you away, and me with dangling arms, unable to escape, left behind on the platform forever.

I was able to start thinking about growing up again when it became clear I would regularly come to visit you in Cologne, where you had opened a cosmetic salon. To be alternately with my father and then with you forced me to live in two exclusive contexts. When I was 9 I had to cross half of Europe on my own to be with you. Nevertheless, I managed to find a little place to develop, and also gained the possibility of losing neither of you… As long as you were there at the station or at the airport to collect me, although I was never certain this would be the case.

Seeing the twin steeples of Cologne Cathedral approach, a sign that the journey’s end was in sight, always brought me back to the same absurd question: ‘Will she be there when I arrive? And if not, who’ll help me get my suitcase off the luggage rack?’ It was a little by this yardstick that I measured my height: there came a time when I was able to get off and carry this unfortunate suitcase by myself. My father provided me with a ticket before each trip on which was written in German: My name is Jean-Jacques, my mother lives in Habsburgerring 18-20, her phone number is 23 22 01. Thus fermenting the idea it was possible that you might not be there when I arrived…

Leaving for Cologne.

It all came to light from a marble plaque at the entrance to my school and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. The plaque had been put up in memory of the pupils and their teachers who’d been deported in 1942, and from which no one had returned. In a family like ours, it was impossible for me not to have heard this simple word, deportation. Admittedly, a silent pact had been implicitly concluded between all of you on the maternal side of the family. We weren’t supposed to talk about before, the people before, or what had happened to them, but that didn’t stop the word from resurfacing now and again. Much later, I deduced that we probably concluded the pact when you, Elsa-the-survivor, returned from Belsen, while neither your father, nor Lydia, her parents Rosa (my grandmother’s older sister) and David, had returned from Auschwitz. Beyond the fact that it allowed you to rebuild your lives, which wasn’t easy, this pact was also intended to protect me, the first to be born after. Caught like the others in the family compact, I would gladly close my ears as soon as the word came up.

However, sometimes at family reunions I’d suddenly hear ten adults murmuring like children exchanging slightly dirty secrets. It was there that the word circulated and the names of Lydia and Rosa were whispered – never that of David, never that of your father. That was when I was sent to read elsewhere.

As the word gradually took over – deportation, where we never came back – snippets of these conversations I’d heard in spite of their efforts to hide them also began to take on meaning. I intuitively understood what had happened to this Aunt Lydia. She was known to me as Aunt, not because she was an adult, and that as such I owed her respect, but because this eternally young little Lydia could’ve been an adult to whom I could’ve owed respect. I didn’t know in detail how the promises carried by such a short life had been dashed. This little girl, who’d died without trace, symbolized the axe blow inflicted by Nazism on our history, the gaping hole in the story of our lineage. There was clearly a void that nothing could fill, a wound all the more painful in than it had never been spoken of.

The Great Dictator came out in Paris. Perhaps you’ll take this as a simple posthumous tribute to the genius of Chaplin, but I have to say this: in my head he managed to make Tomania’s Hynkel the real one, while Hitler was the caricature. It was hard for me to see the swastika as a symbol of Nazism rather than the two crosses in a white circle worn on the armbands in Chaplin’s film. Hynkel perfectly personified the man who screamed hatred and murder, and his Germanic belching failed to make me laugh. That film – which came out before the facts! – was for me the first documentary representation of the mechanisms of the Holocaust.

* * *

André Schwartz-Bart had just won the Goncourt prize for The Last of the Just, and our head teacher read us the final chapter of the book, the one where everyone is killed, men, women, children, in a gas chamber masquerading as a shower room. The description of their death in the darkness for all those people, all ages and sexes alike, was startling, and was the source of new nightmares for me. These were more vivid, more clinical, but they were no less scary.

At roughly the same time, a classmate, Didier, constantly spoke of a place he’d heard about in his family, the Chvitz. He talked about it in the courtyard, at dinner, in class. We listened to some of it, fascinated. People died there after unspeakable tortures, and it was located neither in space nor time. Nevertheless, this ‘Chvitz’ existed somewhere. If this place was more real than Ali Baba’s cave, Pitchipoi,¹ or the cyclops’ lair in The Odyssey – Didier seemed to know what he was talking about – it was not so much what was said, but the memories it awakened in me. Memories that had been imbued at the same time as I was rocked by similar terrors.

Rather than telling my father about it, I waited to see you in Cologne to ask if you knew about this Chvitz. A Belgian friend hearing me ask you the question made a well-known gesture: the thumbnail passing over the throat, and added a sickening sound from his mouth. ‘Shhh!’ you said, quickly and without question, thus confirming by default what my friend had said about it.

Imperceptibly, incomplete explanations were stuck end to end in a totally anarchic fashion; from Lydia to deportation, and from deportation to Chvitz. I was beginning to grasp a detail you had passed on to me that made me a suspended death row inmate: I was Jewish.

I can tell you now that for a long time it was a dangerous weight on me: a trait to hide as much as possible. I still see myself in the streets of Cologne, a group of children trying to force me into a church, and me wondering if I should admit why I had no business there… Without knowing directly, I thus endorsed the threadbare defrocking of the ghetto Jew who, outside the walls, bowed his head under the insults, and arched his back under the blows.

In this contradictory and agonizing muddle, I still had to face the moment when world history and our family history collided. Of course, this happened in Germany.

* * *

I still have trouble understanding your return to that country today. You were out of place. We often went there on vacation, of course, but as for settling there… You worked like a beast of burden. After all, launching a beauty salon called Paris-Beauté in Cologne was a difficult gamble. As time went on, I noticed an increasingly strong French accent in the German you spoke with your clients. You sprinkled your conversations with them with ‘eh?’ and ‘non!’. I don’t know if this was a deliberate and commercial choice on your part, or if you were marking some sort of distance between yourself and those to whom you were speaking.

Your only friends were French people, or at least French speakers. There was a profound ambiguity in your situation in Cologne. You were a long way away from your family, which must have been quite liberating as you could lead your life as you saw fit, without being judged by your relatives on your possible escapades. However, you didn’t succeed in creating sufficient ties to the place in order to feel at home there. I knew this very position, both involved and distanced, was the same one you had towards me, and it is the one that I often had myself.

Paris-Beauté prospered honourably: the little Frenchwoman was beginning to be known in Cologne. While at first you lived there for economy’s sake, or to be at work sooner – you slept on the baby blue sofa that was used in the waiting room during the day – you later had decent accommodation: accommodation where I could stay on my own and read when you were working. You didn’t know how to introduce me to children my own age, and I didn’t know how to make friends: I wasn’t shy, I was almost wild. At first, I spent my days in the salon, bored, unable to do anything but try to grab you, even when you had to take care of a client. Since then, the soft and violently fragrant atmospheres of hair salons have depressed me: I still see myself, the only boy in the harem, vaguely disturbed by this languid femininity, too young to interest anyone, too foreign to exchange more than ‘Guten Tag’ or ‘Danke schön’ with fat ladies who came to be pampered.

Among your friends there is one, Ruth, who was very important to me. A German Jew, she had spent the war in hiding and was completely bilingual. With the possible exception of your friends from Belgium, Helene