The text that follows was written by invitation, with a view to publication in the proceedings of a colloquium devoted to Jews in the Resistance. It took the form of the multi-voiced, multi-layered act of remembrance that follows and, for various reasons, it was not published in the volume for which it had been solicited. It is nonetheless this original destination that explains why the persons evoked in it are evoked principally through a single moment of their lives: the moment when they were engaged in the ranks of the Resistance.
I remember the Łazienki Park in Warsaw. We are alone this morning; there is the smell of dead leaves in the damp of autumn; the ground is strewn with chestnuts. I gather them, like all the children of the world. My father gives me the summary of Book I of Capital. I ask him for a story from the time — still so close for him, still so far off for me — “when he was in the Resistance.” A story of bomb-layers in cafés packed with Germans, a story of train-derailers. He agrees, and it is better that way. For a kid of eight, those stories were easier to hear than the ones my mother told me: the one about my cousin Haim who, at the age of eleven, had jumped from the train that was carrying him to Treblinka, or again the one about our cousin Meir List. He was, within the MOI, one of those responsible for the Jewish combat group. He fell during the “great collapse.” Under torture, he did not talk. They shot him. She tells me that I bear his name. I doubt today that I would know how not to talk under torture.
I remember a night train; I am on it with my cousin Charles. He is the son of Jeanne List and Léon Pakin. Lying down, we ask once again for a story before sleeping. Like all the children of the world. At the top of our voices: “tell us a story from the time when you were in the Resistance.” There are other people in the compartment. My father refuses, firmly. I do not understand, not yet, that those stories are not meant to be told in front of all and sundry. That those stories are told only in the secrecy of a transmission, from father to son, from memory to memory.
I remember the day I asked my father: “Papa, how many Germans did you kill during the war?” I remember his silence, I remember the look with which he gunned me down in return, I remember that he managed to restrain himself from giving me a pair of slaps.
I remember a station platform in Paris. It is the moment of departure for Warsaw. My father has decided to go back there after the war; I am four years old. I am in my mother’s arms, my cousin Nina in her own mother’s arms, on the platform. We are crying, we cannot stop crying, we are certain we shall never see one another again. On the platform, a good part of the old guard of the MOI, come there to mark this departure. They spoke French with accents come from every corner of Europe, but for many of them, when the moment came to say true things, those things were said in Yiddish. Soon, instead of the train’s arrival, I would learn that this language, which my mother had begun to transmit to me, was once again under threat of death. This time on the grounds of a “proletarian internationalism” revisited to suit the taste of the era and the place, and because the so-called new Poland had kept toward the old one an antisemitic complicity firmly lodged in the body. My father accepted it, as an impeccable militant. My mother submitted to it with bad grace, and for all the rest of her life she set about defying the verdict through a body of work written in that language. This is another story of resistance.
It is a story of triangles. The clandestine MOI was organized into groups of three persons. Only one person from each triangle maintained contact with someone who served as the external link to all the triangles of a given set. A branching of triangles. Branching — tree — chestnut trees — smell of dead leaves in the damp of autumn — my father — MOI — me. The leading triangle comprised my father, Jacques Kaminski and Artur London. My father held the political direction of the whole, Kaminski made the link with the armed sector of the network, London directed the work of subversion aimed at the German soldiers. This triangle too had its external link. It was my father who maintained it. At the other end of the link, the clandestine leadership of the PCF. At the other end of the link, Jacques Duclos. Between the two, a liaison agent.
Entire days spent walking the streets of Paris, from clandestine rendezvous to two-person meetings held while going up the Boulevard. From contact to contact, from link to link. All those times when a contact met in the course of the day was followed and arrested shortly afterward. Why not him, when it was he who was being hunted? Was it because, in the eyes of some Gestapo flunky, with his height of 5’5” and his gait of small hurried steps, he simply did not look the part of a chief?
One of his three false and true-false identity cards of the period: Brok Alexandre, born 17 January 1904 in Sofia, department: Bulgaria. The date of birth is accurate, the rest is false. With his accent come from the East, it was better to present oneself as a naturalized Bulgarian than to try to pass for a Joseph Bernard or an Edouard Bertoletti on the strength of one of the two other cards. Height: 1m65, Hair: chestnut, Eyes: brown. There follows a most detailed description of his nose (bridge, base, dimension). In the box marked “Moustache,” someone had affixed a tiny sign in the shape of an x. An x like the most banal notation of the unknown in mathematical writing. But if this x figured the unknown in my father’s equation, it is clear that this unknown, at the time, obeyed no ordinary condition of stability or any other kind of regularity.
There were other clandestine rendezvous. My father was a rigorous mind and a perfectly disciplined militant. Choice qualities in the chief of a clandestine network. He tells me: “your mother was active in another sector of the organization; we were formally forbidden to see each other, even fleetingly; we of course contravened this order a certain number of times.”
My mother’s true-false identity card: Brok Maria (née Palow), born 31 December 1908 in Warsaw, department: Poland. The date of birth is accurate, the rest is false. But what is true is that the false Maria Brok is indeed the true wife of the false Alexandre Brok, and that had they been caught during one of their doubly clandestine rendezvous, they would not have been entirely wrong. The essential was true: that love in defiance of danger which drives the most disciplined of militants to indiscipline. The photograph of my mother that appears on this forgery is the one I love best of all. She is of a youthfulness in it that I had long since forgotten she possessed. I understand that my father should have succumbed to the allure of that strange gaze which seems to take endless fright at the strangeness of things. I tell myself that if I were to pass this stranger in the street without addressing a word to her, I would long remain regretting not having done so.
I look at their photographs on those forged papers of the period otherwise than usual, for this time it is because I have agreed to remember. I look at their photographs; they address me to remind me of a thing that often tends to slip from my memory: how young they were, once!
A main hideout in a house at Le Perreux, another at my aunt Thérèse’s, rue Georges Lardennois facing the Buttes-Chaumont, and Jeanne List who was there in support, always with a clean hideout at her disposal in case of a hard knock. Jeanne List, always in support, even though her child, Léon Pakin’s child, had been born not long before and even though she was engaged besides in the operations to rescue Jewish children. I do not know whether my father would have come through as well without her presence. She always had the right trick in reserve when the moment became critical. I remember how she wept, at the hospital, when it had become impossible to hide from oneself that in a few days he was going to die. Never in my life have I heard weeping so shameless, so sincere. She was there with him, to the very end. It fell out that way, and I let myself believe that had it been she who departed first, he would have been there too, to the very end. And perhaps he would have wept that day.
A hideout at Thérèse’s. I remember that he would come there; he had grown a little moustache, which changed him, made him very mysterious and important in my eyes. He would spend hours pacing the room and thinking in silence, and I wondered who this man was whom I knew and no longer knew, this man who, before all these things began, was quite simply my uncle. Of that, it is not I who remember. It is my cousin Daniel who, being already there, remembers it within the memory I keep of his memory. Just as I remember the day my mother arrived unexpectedly at Thérèse’s (did she have the right to?) to report what she had just heard on the airwaves of Radio London, whose broadcasts she used for the articles of the clandestine press she was in charge of: that piece of information which one day was broadcast, on the existence of the extermination camps, the gas chambers, the crematoria. I remember that no one had believed her and that everyone had begun to reason with her. Nor is it I who remember this; it is my cousin Nina, who holds it from the memory of Thérèse, her mother. And my memory here draws its warrant from the memory of that memory. And when I remember it, I think of Rosemary’s Baby, of that scene where Rosemary, having finally understood who these people are who are weaving a trap around her, confides it to others. And she is taken for a madwoman.
I remember the day my father came home from his work at the Central Committee of the PZPR saying: “London has been arrested in Prague, he is accused of being an agent of the Western secret services.” I remember his dismay, his incredulity at this charge. Just as he seemed to be incredulous at this very incredulity. For he was a perfectly disciplined militant. But also a sufficiently rigorous mind. Was he afraid? Perhaps. My mother was afraid, surely. Because her slightly lesser formal rigor allowed her to be less pitilessly disciplined and to have a more honed sense of danger. By extension, I too was afraid, without knowing exactly what there was to be afraid of. There was no “Warsaw trial” in those 1950s, and so I was able to remain with my papa. He would explain to me later that I owed this good fortune to another tragedy. The entire historic leadership of the KPP, of the old Polish Communist Party, had been exterminated in Moscow in 1938 by Stalin’s gunmen; then the party was dissolved and a great number of its militants disappeared in the “purges.” The PZPR was a very pale successor to the great KPP; it would nonetheless have had enough nerve to oppose a repetition of all that. That is how my father explained to me one day the good fortune I had had in keeping my papa with me.
I remember the Łazienki Park in Warsaw. I see two men walking side by side along the paths. The tone is animated, but they lower their voices, they take the least frequented paths and change the subject whenever they meet other strollers. This I see again and, when I think back on it today, I imagine them years before in occupied Paris, going from rendezvous to rendezvous and holding two-person conferences while going up the Boulevard. Accomplices of long standing who have kept old habits, for what they have to say to each other is not meant to be heard by the agents of the political police of those years. And yet they are old militants and have by no means “gone over to the enemy.” But they are today a little less disciplined and surely animated by a rigor finer than that of their younger years. And a little less incredulous at having become so. One of them is my father, the other is Jacques Kaminski.
I remember Léon Pakin. I never knew him, he was shot before I was born, but I have the feeling of having always remembered him. The two of them entered the shop of a Jewish furrier who, in those days, was obliged to produce for the Wehrmacht. They wanted to persuade him to do so no longer. Were they armed? Was I told that they were? The furrier took fright, but did not lack courage: he rushed outside shouting “help.” And since they were not the thugs pulling off a heist that he had taken them for, they did not pin him to the ground, did not grapple him or knock him out, and of course did not shoot. And yet Léon was no fool fresh off the boat; he had behind him the whole Spanish campaign of fighting against Franco’s armies. But that day they were caught and, shortly afterward, shot. I remember my father telling me more than once that he had disagreed with those actions, finding them “politically inappropriate.” But he let them go ahead, and I know that he kept within himself the regret of not having had the firmness to prevent them. I know that he took care of Léon’s son as of his own son; I know that he took care of my cousin Haim as of his own son. To the point of making me ferociously jealous. But to the point that I too, now, have some of my children who are not my own sons.
I remember Manouchian, from what my father told me of him, of course: “Manouchian was an experienced militant, a political man. He had been put at the head of the ‘Special Group’ with the idea that he would govern, from the height of his experience, the ardor of the others, younger, fearing nothing any longer, ready for anything.” I do not know how it went; there comes back to me only this remark by a former member of the Jewish combat group of the MOI: “I no longer fear much, now that I know I can no longer die young.”
There are so many memories still. Like the one of the sidewalk of the Avenue Aristide Briand near the exit of the Bagneux station. Every time I pass by there, I think of it, and when I am with T., with N., with E., A., J., M., O., or I., I tell them the memory of it. It is there that my father used to meet Leiba Trepper after the latter had lost all his transmitters and could no longer transmit to Moscow. So he did what had been strictly forbidden him: he made contact with the clandestine leadership of the PCF in order to be able to go on sending the intelligence by means of their own transmitters. He passed the information to my father, who had it conveyed to Duclos through their liaison agent. One day, Trepper was followed and, shortly afterward, arrested. He had noticed it and had found a way to slip to my father, who was approaching: “clear off, clear off.” They passed each other like two anonymous passersby. I read the story of it in Gilles Perrault, in L’Orchestre rouge (The Red Orchestra); Trepper spoke to me of it later, much later: after coming out of the Soviet gulag and taking up a new exile, across Poland, France, Israel. In what language had he told it to me? In French perhaps, in Polish according to my memory, but had this conversation taken place only in a dream, I am sure he would have spoken to me in Yiddish.
It is a witz [joke] that one finds told in one of the writings of Freud, who in matters of witz knew his business marvelously well. Two Jews meet on a station platform: - “But where are you off to like that,” says one. - “Why, I’m going to Cracow,” replies the other. - “Listen,” says the first, “you tell me you’re going to Cracow so that I’ll believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?!”
Is my memory like this Jew whom one makes out to be lying when he tells the truth, or who speaks true despite the fact that only the lie can be heard, without saying whether it knows or does not know that everything offered as true generates its share of the false — and this does not prevent it from speaking in an attempt to say what is? Is it like those Jews of whom a Yiddish proverb says: “tswei yid, drei meningen” (take two Jews and you’ll have three points of view)? I do not know. But there is also this:
“I am the descendant of a family of Ashkenazi Jews from Poland. My paternal grandfather arrived in France with my grandmother (… …) before the Second World War (… …) They came for the Resistance (… …) My grandfather was the leader of the MOI in France (… …) roughly the Resistance of foreigners in France. It is something I hold very dear. I won’t say it is a pride, because I don’t much like that word, but a strong heritage. My grandmother too was in the MOI.
My grandfather was born in 1904 at R. (… …) Very early on, he became a communist. In our family, on the paternal side, they were communists. I know he was in prison in Poland in the twenties. Afterward, he had to go into exile in France. He met my grandmother. She too was a communist. She came from a very conservative Jewish family (… …)
What is important to me is the framework within which my paternal family came to France, for a struggle and for values that truly matter to me today (… …). Do I have political commitments? Not necessarily political, but moral ones. The mixing of cultures, interreligious, interethnic, always. Whatever historical events may take place, never to fall into the closed-mindedness which to me is a burden for humanity. I’m using big words, but it’s the best way to express what I mean (… …). Sincerely, it is the finest heritage I have from my family (… …).”
It is not I who say this, and besides, my assiduous frequentation of the two Jews from Freud’s witz would prevent me from saying it with so much freshness and sincerity. This is said by my son Amiel in an interview given, at the age of nineteen, for a survey concerning the members of the “third generation.” It is fitting that the last word should go to the children.