Certain dates remain etched in people’s memory. Apart from anniversaries, births, and deaths, “a preposterous jumble of marvelous moments and aggravations,” as Roger Martin du Gard has one of the characters of his masterpiece Les Thibault (The Thibaults) put it.
Two events marked me deeply. I shall never forget them. The first is the landing of June 6, 1944, which marked the beginning of the deliverance of Western Europe, a decisive turning point for hundreds of millions of human beings. And the second is the appalling attack on the World Trade Center in New York, on September 11, 2001, beginning at 9:41 a.m., which caused the atrocious death of 2,983 people in those two towers, symbols of the power of the United States that Islamist fanatics—those kamikazes of our time—knowingly murdered.
June 6, 1944, the day of the Allied landing
How could I forget June 6, 1944? On that day, I was living in Paris under a false identity, that of Raymond-Adrien Thibaud, an electrician supposedly residing at Cormeilles in the Eure. I was working at Pierro et Cie, 13 rue Pascal, in the 5th arrondissement, as a decorator’s apprentice, for an hourly wage of 8 francs, and that sometimes at night because of the power cuts. That is, 50 to 55 hours a week, after a ten-month stay in 1942 in a sanatorium. This hideout saved my life for the second time and allowed me to escape the daily roundups.
It was a workshop where they made old-style frames bearing paintings by Raphael, Fra Angelico, and other pious kitsch. A line of work that, as it happens, greatly influenced my love of the painters of the Italian Renaissance, even though I detested this trade imposed by circumstances. But what would I not have done to escape the cops, the police inspectors, the militia, or the Gestapo?
I left for work early in the morning, and so I learned that the proletariat existed, that the class struggle was not an empty slogan. On the first floor of the firm, an Italian foreman named Labati had taught me the rudiments of Marxism. He had me read a few clandestine pamphlets published by the communists. But the dictatorship of the proletariat hardly inspired confidence in me. I preferred the socialists, all the more so as a neighbor in our “lodging” (a cubbyhole in the 19th arrondissement where I lived in hiding with my mother, thanks to a woman worker employed by one of my cousins, whose own mother was a concierge)—a next-door neighbor, then, a baker by trade, named Latourte, completed my education by giving me other readings. Then I joined the Libération Nord movement.
In that “outfit,” I struck up a friendship with Marcel Sauvaire, who had demonstrated against the wearing of the yellow star and had spent several weeks at Drancy. As well as with Roland Beaugnier, who one day asked me to be the godfather, at the church, of his newborn daughter. And I swallowed the host like a good Christian.
So, on June 6, 1944, after a day during which several air-raid alerts over Paris, the sirens, and the anti-aircraft fire had not kept us from working, I was in the lavatory when an apprentice like myself shouted: “They’ve landed!” It was an extraordinary day! The boss granted us a half-hour break. And Labati went down to confront Pierro, speaking to him in French and Italian. “You’ve seen, Mussolini is dead, the Americans have landed in Sicily, they’ve taken your city, Salerno. Soon we’ll be liberated. And you, Pierro, you’re a collaborator!”
Back home, there was wild joy. Two days later, Mother and I went to the cinema to see Les Misérables with Harry Baur. One had to be completely mad, all the more so as inspectors were checking papers at the end of the show. We had the luck to slip through.
In any case, we now had the hope of recovering our freedom, and the last two months were intense on the militant front. I trembled every day for the Americans. Each passing day was a day in which despair and hope were intertwined. I marked the advance or the stalling of the Allies against the Wehrmacht with a special sign on a map of Western France that I had made, fancying myself a good cartographer. That map I handed over to a person who assured me I could prepare for the entrance examination to the Army’s Geographic Service (now the IGN). I never saw that person again, nor my map, which made me puff out my chest, so proud of it was I.
At the end of July ’44, the Allied offensive was crowned with success. From August 18, I took some small part in the liberation of Paris. On August 24, I occupied a shop of the Doriotist PPF in order to create and install there the 19th section of the SFIO Socialist Youth. On the 25th, the Leclerc division entered the capital. A few weeks later, on the advice of my friend Samy Zoberman, I went up to 110 rue Vieille du Temple, to the premises of the great family of the Bund, and became a Jewish socialist. Since the autumn of 1944, it has been my “parish.”
September 11, 2001
If June 6, 1944, has remained etched in my memory, September 11, 2001, was a thunderbolt. On that day, my American friends, the Baronoffs, had come to Paris, to our home, to spend their holidays. She, of French origin, and he, a native of New York who had done his military service at Orléans. We had been friends for a good half-century. Both Jewish.
They had gone out for a walk. In the meantime, we learned what had happened. Before their return, we were warned by their two sons, who were supposed to be working in the twin towers, that they were safe and sound. When my friends came back, they knew nothing. They were informed, then reassured.
Ten years have gone by, but the thoughts I express today are no different from those I expressed ten years ago:
I owe my life to the GIs who landed on June 6, 1944, inaugurating a first term to the Second World War. I think of the Americans and of those who died to deliver us. I shall never forget the entry of the American tanks behind the armor of the 2nd Leclerc division into Paris, any more than I shall forget the aid provided by the Joint and the Jewish Labor Committee to our mutilated and distressed community. I shall never forget my American cousin. Despite the financial disorders that so many American speculators inflict upon the world, and despite a crisis without precedent, not even in 1929, my gratitude to the Americans is without limit.
I went to the Trocadéro on September 11, 2011, to commune with the crowd before two cubes 25 meters high on which were inscribed the following words: French will never forget. This event illuminates my existence. First my adolescence, and then, today, my old age.
But this slaughter remains etched within me: children, parents, spouses, friends who will never again see the light of day. Hundreds of faces and smiles, the flesh of our people. May oblivion not overtake us.
From now on, Ground Zero is covered with 400 oaks planted over 6.5 hectares surrounding two immense square fountains 10 meters deep, which symbolize the “footprints” of the World Trade Center. It will be surrounded by several towers still under construction, the principal of which will rise to 541 meters (1,776 feet, a reference to the date of American independence) over 102 floors, at the end of 2012. The whole will be completed in 2016. If I am still alive at that date, I promise myself to go to the United States to meditate once more at this place. Just as, for the inauguration of the Museum of the Jews of Poland, I intend to travel to Warsaw, in April 2013, the date of the 65th anniversary of the uprising of a handful of men and women against the most powerful army of the time.
But that is another matter, and in any case, I feel solidarity at once with the dead of New York and with the Jewish fighters of the birthplace of my parents and of my family.
What more is there to say?
I come back to my personal trauma. My brother and my son recently sent me a list of the members of my family who perished in Poland, in Warsaw, in Lvov (Lviv), during the Second World War. More than thirty of them, who died in the ghettos, at Auschwitz, at Treblinka, dead of hunger or gassed. What were their last moments? I shall never know.
What more is there to say? What can I add to these lines? As for the present situation, I am hardly optimistic. Islamists of every stripe are going to strangle, little by little, this so-called “Arab Spring,” and it seems to me that democracy in these regions of the world is not for tomorrow.
The 20th century ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 21st century began with the fall of the two twin towers of New York in 2001…
Are there reasons to hope?