In October 1942, the Vichy government responded by arresting him. He was first imprisoned at Creusot, then Drancy, where his search document shows that 8,500 francs were taken from him. On 6 November 1942, he too was deported to Auschwitz and was sent straight to the gas chamber.
Immediately after arresting Michel Epstein, the police went to the village school to get Denise, but her schoolteacher hid her behind her bed. The police did not give up and continued their hunt. The Nemirovskys’ governess had the presence of mind to remove the Jewish star from their clothes and flee the village with the little girls. They spent the rest of the war moving between hiding places. The first was a Catholic boarding school, where two of the nuns knew the little girls were Jewish. There Denise was given a false name but she never managed to get used to it, so she was often scolded in class because she didn’t reply when she was called. But the French police—who it seems had little better to do than hunt down two children so they might share the same fate as their parents—picked up their trail. The girls were forced to leave the convent to hide out in a series of cellars in the region of Bordeaux. Whenever they boarded a train to move on, the governess would tell Denise to hide her nose. When Denise caught a chest infection, the people who were hiding her didn’t help her to see a doctor.
The war over, the two girls returned to Paris and went to their grandmother’s house to ask for help. Fanny had spent the war years in Nice, living in great comfort, but when the children rang the doorbell she refused to let them in, shouting through the closed door that if their parents were dead they should go to an orphanage. (Fanny died in 1972, in a large apartment in Paris on the avenue Président Wilson. The only things found in her safe were two books by her daughter: Jezebel and David Golder.) Each day, wearing a sign with their names written on it, Denise and Elisabeth would make their way to the platform of the Gare de l’Est, where trains carrying the survivors of the concentration camps were beginning to arrive. They would also go to the Hôtel Lutétia, which had been turned into a reception centre for returning deportees—once, Denise began to run down the street after a woman because she thought she recognised her mother—but eventually it became clear that their parents were not coming back.
That the manuscript of Suite Française should have survived in such circumstances is extraordinary. It was Denise who put it into a suitcase as she and her sister fled Issy l’Evêque. She had often watched her mother writing—in tiny handwriting to save ink and paper—in the large leatherbound notebook. She took it as a memento of her mother. The suitcase accompanied Denise and Elisabeth from one precarious hiding place to another. After the war, they couldn’t bring themselves to read the notebook—having it was enough. Once, Denise tried to look inside to see what was there, but it was too painful. Many years passed, and she and her sister, Elisabeth, who had become an editor in a publishing house under the name Elisabeth Gille, agreed they should entrust their mother’s notebook to the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, an organisation dedicated to documenting memories of the war, in order to preserve it. Before giving it up, Denise decided to type it out. With the help of a large magnifying glass, she began the long, difficult task of deciphering the minuscule handwriting. Soon she discovered that these were not simply notes or a private diary, as she had thought, but a violent masterpiece, a fresco of extraordinary lucidity, a vivid snapshot of France and the French—spineless, defeated and occupied: here was the exodus from Paris; villages invaded by exhausted, hungry women and children battling to find a place to sleep, if only a chair in a country inn; cars piled high with furniture, mattresses and pots and pans, running out of petrol and left abandoned in the roads; the rich trying to save their precious jewels; a German soldier falling in love with a French woman under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law; the simple dignity of a modest couple searching amidst the chaos of the convoys fleeing Paris for a trace of their wounded son . . .
Denise Epstein sent the manuscript to the publisher Denoël. Sixty-four years after Nemirovsky’s death, we are finally able to read the last work of a writer who had held a mirror up to France at its darkest hour.
When Denise Epstein entrusted the manuscript of Suite Française to the archives, she felt tremendous sadness that her sister Elisabeth Gille, who died in 1996, had not been able to read it. Elisabeth had, herself, written Le Mirador (The Watchtower): a magnificent imagined biography of the mother she never had the chance to know. She was only five years old when Irène Némirovsky died in Auschwitz.
—MYRIAM ANISSIMOV
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Translation copyright © 2006 by Sandra Smith
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
www.randomhouse.ca
Originally published in France as Suite Française by Denoël, Paris, in 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Éditions Denoël. License arranged by the French Publishers’ Agency in New York. This translation originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, London.
Endpapers: Double page of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, 1942. Fonds Irène Némirovsky/Imec.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Némirovsky, Irène, 1903–1942
[Suite française. English]
Suite française / by Irène Némirovsky ; translated by Sandra Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. World War, 1939–1945—France—Fiction. 2. France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945—Fiction. I. Smith, Sandra, 1949– II. Title.
PO2627.E4S8513 2006
843′ .912—dc22 2006003461
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Némirovsky, Irène, 1903–1942.
Suite française / Irène Némirovsky ; translated by Sandra Smith.
Translation from the French of the book by the same title.
I. Smith, Sandra. II. Title.
PQ2627.E53S8513 2006
843′.912 C2005-905425-5
This work (excluding appendices and ancillary material) is fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26475-6
v3.0
Suite Française Page 46