In friendly homage to Annie Stora, whose work on the questionnaires of the Republic inspired me for this article
My father, Jacques Ksiazenicer, born in Warsaw in 1925, died in 2018 in the small town in the Ardennes where he had spent most of his life — my native town. Having arrived from Poland in the early thirties, his parents had opened a small clothing shop, and my grandfather, whom I never knew, would make rounds through the surrounding countryside, at first with nothing more than a handcart. They were apparently already well integrated into local life when the war broke out. Their naturalization was very recent at that point, dating from 1939. My father, who still spoke Polish and Yiddish when he arrived, was by then a young adolescent who blended completely into the quiet life of a small town in eastern France, playing football and going to the cinema with his pals, riding his bike to swim in the region’s lakes, and retaining only very few memories of his native Poland.
Without being silent about the war years, my father rarely evoked more than a few of the episodes that had allowed the family to escape deportation. He always preferred to pass on the positive side of things — his youth, his hopes for a better life, the memory of a cycling excursion to Gérardmer just at the moment of the Vel d’Hiv roundup — and one had to dig past his natural reserve to glimpse his adolescent frustration at no longer being able to go to the cinema like the others because of Vichy’s antisemitic laws.
Of that capital period, only scraps of memory were passed on to me, wrapped around slightly more salient facts within a lacunary family memory: the crossing of the demarcation line with his sister Ida, a year younger than he, separately from their parents, who had no doubt feared betraying themselves by their accent and putting the children in danger. Refuge at Mont-Dore, in the Auvergne, then clandestine shelter on a farm in the Indre, with a former housekeeper, until the end of the war. There too, what dominated in my father were the happy memories of his youth — learning to ski, or tending the horses at the farm in exchange for daily sustenance and a relative shelter.
In the end, the four members of the family came through safe and sound and picked up the thread of their laborious existence in the Ardennes; the only true tragedy was the death of my grandfather, a few years later, at the age of 50, from a heart attack. His heart, according to the medical report, was completely worn out and resembled that of a very old man. Was it the trials of emigration, of the war, of his responsibility as head of family in such an anxiety-ridden context? No one can really say, but that was how my father felt it, and his attachment to his family seemed to want to compensate for this too-early loss of a father at the age of 25. It is this familial attachment that has always signified, for me, his Jewishness — alongside the savory accent of my grandmother and the Jewish dishes she cooked for us. Illiterate, speaking French poorly, she was scarcely in a position to give us precise information about the Polish past, apart from the few Yiddish words sprinkled through conversations, which attested to the link to the distant origin, alongside the family name that remained the touchstone of a form of otherness, and which was moreover often replaced by my grandfather’s Frenchified first name. I grew up with this discreet mark of difference, and it was only by learning Yiddish as an adult that I was able to nourish with images and life, through words, the absence of traces that, for me, constituted the Jewish origin of my paternal family.
My father’s death left me with few possibilities of filling these gaps; I found a few photos, a few identity papers, very little in the end, and the uncertainty of this non-knowledge seems rather to be heightened by the indecision of the proper names, always different from one official document to the next. Leizer, Lejzov, Lelev, Lejza, Lev — what, in the end, was my grandfather’s true first name, the man everyone simply called Monsieur Léon? And my grandmother, born apparently in Nadany, Poland, a name I can’t find on Google — perhaps it was distorted by the French administration, or perhaps it was too small a village to leave a trace on the internet, how can one know?
But this “invisibility” is perhaps only the obverse of a surplus of the visible, or the audible — such as the difficulty most people have in identifying or even pronouncing my family name, which is not “typically” Jewish, but is not entirely Polish either. The family had it that it was my grandfather who had had the original name Frenchified, and I long believed this, until I found my name, just as it is, on the internet, evidently borne by Argentinians; if it was modified deliberately, my grandfather was therefore not the sole party responsible.
It is this indecision between visible and invisible, between an assumed strategy of integration on the part of a “country Jew” (dorfsyid in Yiddish, a character one often finds in shtetl literature, designating an isolated member of the community living in close contact with the surrounding society) and the maintenance of a discreet but inalienable difference, that was passed down to me as my only passport to my origins; but it appeared to me in a new light when I found, among my father’s rare papers, the photocopy of an official document from the sub-prefecture, dated 20 January 1942 and addressed to the mayor of the commune. Its subject is that of “naturalizations” — in fact, the denaturalization of Jews of foreign origin, as I discovered when reading the document.
The first page, typewritten, comes from the sub-prefect; the two following pages, handwritten with a few crossings-out, are the mayor’s response. This document, for me overwhelming, was found in the city archives and then passed on to my father. I knew of its existence, but it was in rereading it after his death that it took on, in my eyes, its full importance.
Here is the transcription of the official page:
The Prefect of the Ardennes informs me that the Commission for the Review of Naturalizations has expressed the desire to obtain supplementary information concerning the persons named KSIAZENICER Lejzov, born 23 May 1901 in Warsaw (Poland); and Hammer Héna, wife of KSIAZENICER, born 8 August 1901 in Nadany (Poland), residing at VOUZIERS, previously at 27 rue Chanzy.
Consequently, I would be obliged if you would kindly:
Provide me with all indications regarding the conduct, morality, associations, manner of living and occupations of the persons concerned;
Produce all supporting documents concerning the military service performed by Mr. KSIAZENICER, in the Foreign Legion or the Allied Armies;
Inform me of the attitude of the persons concerned from the national point of view and toward our institutions.
Indicate whether they are subject to suspicions or judicial proceedings; if so, following what facts (specify these);
Make known to me your reasoned opinion on the maintenance or withdrawal of French nationality.
The mayor’s response is of course oriented by the questionnaire and tends to “exonerate” my family of all the implicit suspicions of the prefectoral request. It therefore entails an overexposure of “racial” questions, which tends to render invisible a family manifestly well integrated into local life — and, in fact, to remove them, at least momentarily, from persecution. In so doing, it doubtless in part saved my grandparents’ lives, but paradoxically it denies them at the same time the anonymity they claimed as their freedom as recent immigrants, anxious to blend into the delicate social fabric of a small French town.
It gives the date of their naturalization, 21 September 1939, obtained no doubt in response to the danger that the status of “foreign Jew” already represented at that time, which is in itself already a proof of their fairly successful attempt at integration. It also certifies their date of settlement in the commune (in 1932), but I believe I know that they resided for some time with members of the family already arrived in France, before settling separately in the Ardennes, and so I do not know exactly at what age my father arrived in France — sometimes he would say at 2, other times at 4. In fact he may not have known himself.
The mayor’s defense is a precise tracing of the antisemitic injunctions of the period; their visibility is dazzling through these lines that strike me with all their force, like a flash of lightning emanating directly from the past, rendering their factuality blinding and wounding. I understand why my father tried so obstinately to render himself invisible, to make himself “similar,” all while affirming himself as Jewish in his deepest self.
“At Lejzov’s (called Léon) and Héna’s (called Françoise), the Jewish type seems to be an accident, for neither one nor the other has the usual physiognomy one encounters among Israelites. It took the various ordinances of the Occupying Army for the inhabitants of Vouziers to learn that Léon and his wife were of the Jewish religion. Their character, their ways of living, their manner of doing business have nothing Jewish about them. Even the meticulous cleanliness in the order of their dwelling, on their persons, on their two children — who could be set as models to many — everything, in a word, indicates that they are not, either one of them, Jewish in the sense very often given by the French language.”
If such is the “defense” of the foreigner, one wonders how the accusation would be expressed if, by misfortune, some other family had not been so scrupulously attached to a neat appearance! (And in fact, in the photos, my grandparents, my father, his sister are rather “elegant”.)
In seeking to render them invisible, the administrative document also lets the dangerous Jewish “visibility” come through, in this period that saw the intensification of racial persecution — the decisive turning point of the year 1942, recently illustrated by a remarkable documentary on Arte.
The second point, that of “morality,” is treated with the same brutality, full of “good intentions”: “living as a family without dubious associations. Both children work regularly.” In fact, my father had stopped school after the certificat d’études because of the war, and he never took it up again afterwards. He worked all his life at the shop, but at that moment, my grandparents had had to leave their dwelling and their business, and I wonder how they survived.
A little further on, the letter underscores that Léon “looked for work, for, having lost everything (100% disaster victim), nothing remained to him, and the Decrees taken against the Jews had prevented him from re-establishing himself. He found nothing, prospective employers having no doubt feared governmental reprisals.” What is “visible” here is clearly the responsibility of the French government, alongside the previous mention of the Occupying Army. History becomes embodied in the archive, and its visibility passes through the rendering-invisible of the sacrificial victim; its making explicit testifies to a mixture of routine acceptance of the state of exception and arbitrary desire to remove an occasional figure from it. If my family escaped the worst, it was not so for two other Jewish families of the commune, who were, for their part, deported. Perhaps they did not know how to react in time to the threat and flee, but perhaps too they did not enjoy the same “benevolence” on the part of the communal authorities. In my native town, a nursery school today bears the name of Dora Levi, that of another young Jewish resident of 14 deported to Auschwitz with her parents.
The letter then reaffirms the harmless and apolitical character of the family’s activities, and positively underscores, in contrast, the family head’s investment in the Commercial Union and the sports club, in particular the football association “which cost him appreciable financial sacrifices”: an obviously clumsy way of countering the stereotype of the “rapacious” Jew and of underscoring his social engagement alongside members of the community, but which paradoxically opens onto a new visibility. My father inherited this concern for social insertion and always claimed this form of “notability” within professional or philanthropic associations. The letter goes on to conclude that “their merchant colleagues in the town have maintained (italics mine) with them the most cordial relations.” And to round it all off, the mention — too good to be true — that the portrait of Marshal Pétain sits enthroned in the family living room, in the small house where the family was rehoused upon return from the exodus (the Ardennes at the time was a “forbidden zone”)! There again, it is a “response” directly traced on the questionnaire and the political demands of the period “from the national point of view.”
And the letter ends, in very affirmative fashion (but one shudders to imagine other options): “In conclusion, and in response to your last request, I consider that French nationality can be maintained for this family, which could be given as an example to many French families. The withdrawal of this French nationality, which they have awaited with hope for many years, would cause, I am persuaded, to both one and the other, an infinite pain.”
Beyond the fact that one may find this almost flowery administrative style quite astonishing, one is struck by the indecision of the markers and the conjoined strategies of visibility and invisibilization in the perverted context of the time. A family that asks only to be confounded with the other inhabitants of the small town suddenly finds itself brought to light in a brutal and clumsy way, set as an example yet at the same time threatened with the worst, and escaping it only by a hair — perhaps precisely because the mayor knew and appreciated my grandfather, this Jew who had known how to find the path to a certain understanding with his French surroundings, but who nonetheless could not escape the marking and stigmatization of the era.
This letter, even if it really taught me nothing on the historical plane, and even if it delivers to me an image of my family only filtered (and of course distorted) by the utterances of the period (like those commentaries on news events, with voices so recognizable, that we used to listen to long ago at the cinema), confronted me very head-on with the ignominy of the period, which my father had transmitted to me only in deliberately euphemized form. I realized, in reading it, that invisibilization, in the sense of oppression and refusal of difference, reverses itself perversely into a precarious back-and-forth between visible and invisible. For my grandfather, on whom fell the responsibility of saving his family, it took skill and ruse to escape the multiple traps laid by the historical situation: disguising himself and his wife as fisherman and peasant woman to cross the demarcation line, not going to register as Jews upon arriving in the unoccupied zone, fleeing in time, both from the Ardennes and from Mont-Dore, often with information gleaned from small local civil servants, even from a German soldier probably already aware of the fate of the Jews in the East. The luck was that they looked more Polish than Jewish, and that the children raised in France had no accent. Their very degree of assimilation could be a favorable factor, as testified by the paradoxical “eulogy” of what a successful assimilation was supposed to look like, produced by the author of the document. Yet we are still only in January 1942. We know today that very quickly no distinction would any longer be made between the different ways of being Jewish, and that even the most “French” among them would soon no longer have any chance.