Having a child to clothe, feed, and protect during a period of danger and deprivation must have placed a terrible responsibility and strain on the minds of my parents. Did they worry they wouldn’t be able to provide affection and comfort to me? And being separated from them, placed in a convent, and later in a camp nursery, in an atmosphere of collective discipline, maybe I felt I was being punished? And therefore maybe felt some sense of guilt? I wonder but don’t know where I might find the answers.
Am I venturing too far from my possible state of mind? What would be helpful would be some confirmation that other children shared my experiences. I have gleaned, here and there, from my interactions with other survivors and from my reading, some confirmation that such feelings might be real. But my gratitude and admiration remain for the courage and strength my parents deployed to save me and themselves.
I remember one event that changed my childhood: In 1945, France was liberated and its citizens who were in refugee camps in Switzerland were offered train tickets to return home. We went back to Nice and, soon after, I started school, probably in the first grade. My neighborhood elementary school was Saint Philippe, just up the hill from our apartment. There were no other Jewish children that I knew of. The neighborhood children came from working class and lower middle class families; many of them were descendants of Italian immigrants. The cultural diversity of the children helped to make me feel less visible, but what remained was my sense of being different because of my war experience and my Jewishness. And that made me feel lonely and isolated.
All of that changed in 1947 when, at the synagogue, I met a small group of children who were actively involved in the Jewish scouts movement, les Éclaireurs Israélites. It was a small, ragtag group, boys and girls together. One girl, Monique, said to me, “You have to come to our meetings.” I still can remember the astonishing feeling of happiness that came over me: I had been visible, I had been noticed, and I had been invited to be part of a group.
My participation intensified and became the most important part of my life. We met on school days off during the week, we met at services at the synagogue on Fridays and Saturdays, we sang in the choir, and on Sundays, we hiked on the hills around Nice. All the activities took place downtown, and starting at the age of seven, I would walk downtown to join my new friends. My parents were busy working, my grandparents helped watch over my younger sister, and I could be totally independent.
What made us such a tightly knit group of friends was the unspoken presence of the war and of the drama we had just experienced. Some of us had lost parents and relatives, but we did not talk about them. What we believed in was that we had a mission.
The presence of the war was strong in all our lives, and we read about the terrible losses Jewish communities all over Europe had suffered. Those readings were hard. They revealed physical suffering, separations, cruelty, and death, but also heroism, courage, and resistance. We all wondered: How would we have acted in the face of threats? Would we have been capable of such courage? Would we have broken down and revealed too much under torture? As teenagers, we all became militants for our Jewish heritage.
The plan was to try and meet as many young Jews as possible who were not participating in any Jewish activities and try to raise their awareness and invite them to join our group. We would hang out at many of the venues in the city where young people congregated and befriend them. In order to be more successful and fit in better, we decided to learn to dance. We contributed some of our own LPs; I remember I brought a recording of Der Rosenkavalier, which has a lovely waltz. (I never got my records back, and I still think about them.) In any case, we learned how to dance a bit but never fit in the club scene. The few young people we approached were not interested in stepping away from their comfortable lives. It was a naïve but determined attempt to reconstruct and strengthen Jewish life.
This episode was the first of a life of activism that took many forms and connects this drive to my experiences during the war.
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