Telling my story, verbally or in writing, is part of my attempt to describe the impact the Holocaust had on my parents and on me. It affected our security and made our survival precarious, but it also affected our relationships, our state of mind, and our outlook on the world.
From August 1940 to August 1943, I believe I had a normal childhood in Nice, southern France, with my parents, my grandparents, and aunt nearby. The photographs I found show me as a baby smiling in the arms of my proud father. A bit later, I appear as a toddler in a carriage, with my mother smiling, too. I found a booklet delivered to all new mothers at the clinic where my mother gave birth, which showed how conscientious she was about recording my weight, my diet, and my progress.
But everyone in my family looks worried in these photographs. They had all lost a lot of weight, and from what I was told later, food was scarce, and feeding me meant daily trips to local small farms in search of carrots, which were my main source of nourishment. Milk was practically unavailable.
The difficulties of managing day-to-day living conditions show clearly in my family’s faces. But I can only imagine and make educated guesses about how these tensions and this stress affected me.
In 1943, life changed radically. Because the Nazis had replaced the Italian occupiers and raids to catch Jews occurred daily, a very distressing decision had to be made. My parents brought me to a convent in our neighborhood that had already taken in some Jewish children. It was an institution dedicated to the care of deaf, blind, and special needs children. How they found the place was not clear. Was it through the synagogue and its networks? Was it through the Marcel Network run by Moussa Abadi and Odette Rosenstock? I never asked, and I might never know. The moment they left was, of course, so wrenching that they were both in tears as they walked back to their apartment. I know because that walk led to an encounter in the neighborhood that changed the life of our family and helped to save my parents. They met the person who would then hide them in a shed for a few months until my parents reunited with me and together we fled to Switzerland. My grandparents and aunt fled to safer regions in France.
That initial separation made me deeply afraid that I would be permanently separated from my parents. And because of that fear, I had to summon my courage to hold myself up and hide that fear. I became brave out of necessity. But the fear also held me back in many ways: avoiding competition and challenges, refusing success, and also looking for situations that were challenging as well as uncomfortable.
Another consequence of my wartime situation was that I lived in a collective environment for a year and a half. I was first placed in a convent where caretakers were busy meeting basic needs such as housing and food. There was little personalized attention. The children’s physical impairments meant that there were limited interactions among them as well.
Second, in the children’s section of the refugee camp in Switzerland, where even though my mother helped take care of the children, there was little individual attention and few expressions of affection. Probably the environment helped turn me inward and contributed to my feeling of being alone: the feeling of being blank, of being unfinished, stayed with me into adulthood.
I searched to find my place in the world, to find recognition, acceptance, and comfort, but I was not looking for pity.
© 2025, Suzanne Tarica. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this website are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.