The Sweetness of Forgetting

by Kristin Harmel

  This was once Mamie’s home, I think as we come in for a landing. How strange it must have been to leave all of this behind, never to return.

  On the ground, I breeze through the tubular glass halls of Charles de Gaulle International, go through customs, and wait in the line for taxis, which I’m surprised to realize are mostly luxury cars in France. I wait my turn, climb into a Mercedes, and hand the driver the address of the hotel I booked on Travelocity; I don’t trust myself to correctly pronounce it aloud.

  It takes us thirty minutes to emerge from a series of industrial suburbs into the outskirts of Paris itself. We pass by a huge sports complex, and I’m struck suddenly by the recollection of what I’d read online, about the massive roundup in 1942, where thousands of Jews were taken to a sports stadium before being deported to concentration camps. I doubt this is that stadium—it appears too modern—but the dark image stays with me as my driver weaves expertly around traffic, takes a harrowing left on a street called rue de la Verrerie, and screeches to a halt in front of a white building with big block letters identifying it as the Hôtel de Mille Etoiles. I look up at the wrought-iron balconies surrounding french doors on the second floor and smile. Somehow, Paris is exactly as I’d pictured it. I also have the sense that in this neighborhood at least, it hasn’t changed much in the last century. It makes me wonder whether Mamie ever walked by this same building, marveled at these same balconies, wished she could see through the wispy curtains draping the same french doors. It’s strange for me to think of her here, as a girl not much older than Annie.

  After checking in, I take a quick shower and throw on jeans, flat boots, and a sweater. Armed with directions from the concierge, I walk the few blocks toward rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, where I know the Mémorial de la Shoah is located.

  Paris in October is crisp and beautiful, I realize. I’ve never been here before, of course, so there’s little to compare it against, but the streets seem quiet and peaceful. I’m fascinated by the way the old mixes with the new here; cobblestone meets cement at some corners, and on others, stores selling electronics or high fashion inhabit buildings that look like they’re hundreds of years old. Having spent most of my life in Massachusetts, I’m accustomed to history being naturally interwoven with modern life, but it feels different here, perhaps because the history is much older, or perhaps because there’s so much more of it.

  I can smell baking bread, and changing autumnal leaves, and the faint odor of fire, as I walk along, and I breathe in deeply, because it’s a blend I’m not used to. Little arched doorways, bicycles propped against stone walls, and nearly hidden gated gardens remind me that I’m in a place foreign to me, but there’s something about Paris that feels very familiar. I wonder for the first time if a sense of place can be passed down through the blood. I dismiss the thought, but despite the fact that the streets are unfamiliar and winding, I easily find my way to the Holocaust museum.

  After going though a metal detector outside the stout, somber building, I cross through an open-air, gray courtyard, past a monument with the names of the concentration camps, beneath a metal Star of David, and enter the museum through the doors ahead. The woman at the front desk, who fortunately speaks English, suggests that I first try the computers opposite the desk, which are the first stop for guests seeking family members. On these too, as expected, I find the same information I found on the Internet. The names on my grandmother’s list, minus Alain.

  I return to the desk and explain to the woman that I’m looking for a person whose name doesn’t appear in the records, and for information about what actually happened to the people whose names I have found. She nods and directs me to the elevator down the hall.

  “Take that to the fourth level,” she says. “There, you will find a reading room. Ask at the desk for help.”

  I nod, thank her, and follow her directions upstairs.

  The reading room is home to computers and long tables on the lower level and rows of books and files on the second level, beneath a high ceiling that lets light pour in. I approach the desk, where a woman greets me in French and switches to English as soon as I ask, “Can you help me find some people, please?”

  “Of course, madame,” she says. “How can I help you?”

  I give her the names from Mamie’s list, along with their years of birth, and I explain that I can’t locate Alain. She nods and disappears for a few minutes. She returns with several pages of loose records.

  “Here is all we have on these people,” she says. “Like you said, we cannot find Alain on any list of the deported.”

  “What could that mean?” I ask.

  “There could be many reasons for this. As complete as our records are, there are occasionally people who have not been properly recorded, especially children. They were lost in the chaos.”

  She hands me the documents she has, and I sit down to read over them. For the next few minutes, I try to read the notations, some handwritten, some typed, all of them in French. It’s not until I flip to the third document she’s given me, a census page, that my eyes widen.

  There, in tilted handwriting, on a list stamped with the word recensement, is a 1936 listing of the Picard family of Paris, and among their children is a daughter, Rose, born 1925.

  As caught up as I’d been in finding out the fate of the names on Mamie’s list, and as much as I’d begun to believe that they were indeed her family, it’s not until I see my grandmother’s first name and her birth year scrawled in indelible ink that it finally sinks in.

  My heart pounds as I stare at the page.

  I read over the scant details. It appears that, like the deportation information I’d found online said, the man who may be Mamie’s father, Albert, was a doctor. His femme, his wife, Cecile, is listed sans profession. She must have stayed home with the children. The children—the fils and filles—including Rose, are listed, all but Danielle, the youngest, who wasn’t born until 1937, the year after the census. Alain’s name is on the list too. He was just as real as the rest of them.

  I go through all the documents, which take me a long time to read, both because my eyes keep tearing up and because I need to keep referring to the English-French dictionary I’ve brought with me. At the end, I’m no closer to finding out what happened to Alain than I was before, nor am I any closer to finding out what happened after the family was deported. None of the copies of deportation documents are annotated with any additional information. The last record of everyone in the family—except for Rose and Alain, for whom no records exist—is that they were all deported on convoys bound for Auschwitz.

  I take the documents back to the desk, where the woman who had helped me earlier looks up and smiles at me.

  “Did you have luck?”

  I nod and feel my eyes fill with tears. “I think it’s my grandmother’s family,” I say softly. “But I can’t tell what happened to them after they were deported.”

  She nods solemnly. “Of the seventy-six thousand taken in France, only two thousand survived. It is very likely that they perished, madame. I am sorry.”

  I nod, and it’s not until I draw in a deep breath that I realize I’m trembling.

  “Did you find the name you were looking for?” she asks after a moment.

  I shake my head. “Only on the census form. There’s no record of an Alain Picard being arrested or deported.”

  She chews her lip for a moment. “Alors. There is another person who may be able to help you. She is a researcher here, and she speaks some English. Let me see if she is available.”

  After a few brief phone calls in French, she tells me that Carole, from the research library, will help me in thirty minutes. She suggests waiting in the museum itself, where I’m welcome to browse the permanent exhibition.

  I walk down the stairs into the nearly deserted exhibit hall and am immediately struck by the number of photographs and documents lining the long, narrow room. In the middle of the room, a big screen plays a film in French, and as I listen to a
man’s voice talking about what I assume is the Holocaust, I drift to the first wall on the left and am heartened to realize that all the exhibits are captioned in English as well as French. At the end of the room, an eerie image of train tracks to nowhere is projected on a big, blank wall, and I’m reminded of the dream I had just after Mamie gave me the list.

  For a half hour, I’m lost in my own thoughts as I read testimony after testimony of the beginning of the war, the loss of Jewish rights in France and across Europe, and about the first deportations out of the country.

  Not only did these things happen in my grandmother’s lifetime, but they may very well have happened to the people she loved most in the world. I close my eyes and realize I’m breathing hard. My heart is still thudding double time in my chest when I hear a woman’s voice in front of me.

  “Madame McKenna-Smith?”

  I snap my eyes open. The woman standing there is about my age, with brown hair pulled into a bun, and blue eyes rimmed with expression lines. She’s wearing dark jeans and a white blouse.

  “Yes, that’s me,” I say. I hastily add, “Sorry, I mean, Oui, madame.”

  She smiles. “It is all right. I speak some English. I am Carole Didot. Would you like to come with me?”

  I nod and follow her through the rest of the exhibit, where we walk briskly past another series of videos, and more walls full of documents and information. She leads me out through a hall filled with photos of children; they go on as far as the eye can see. I stop and lean forward to read one of the captions at eye level.

  Rachel Fournier, 1937–1942, it reads. In the photograph, a dark-haired little girl grins into the camera, her hair done up in pigtails tied with ribbons. She’s clutching a big rubber ball and smiling directly at the camera.

  “These are the French children whose lives were lost,” Carole says softly.

  “My God,” I murmur. This hall hits me even harder than the chilling photographs of death I’d seen in the other room. As I gaze dazedly at the photos, I can’t help but think of my own daughter. Had fate placed us in a different country, in a different time, she could have been one of these little girls on the wall.

  “Nearly eleven thousand children from France died in the Shoah,” Carole said, reading my expression. “This hall always reminds me of all that could have been and never was.”

  Her words ring in my ears as I follow her to an elevator, where she pushes the button for the fourth floor. We ride up in silence as I think about Mamie’s family and all that was lost.

  Carole leads me into a modern office with two chairs facing a desk piled high in books and papers. Out the window, I can see a church tower over a series of apartments, and on the wall are pictures drawn by children that say Mama. Carole gestures to one of the chairs and takes a seat behind her computer.

  “So what makes you come all the way to Paris?” she asks as she jiggles her mouse and hits a few keys on her keyboard.

  I briefly tell her Mamie’s story and that I think the names she’s given me were family members who’d been lost in the Holocaust. I explain that I’ve found all but Alain, for whom no records seem to exist. I also explain that I can’t figure out what happened to my grandmother; there’s no record of a Rose Picard in the deportation documents either.

  “But your grandmother, you say she escaped Paris before arrest, no?” Carole asks.

  I nod. “Yes. I mean, I think so. She’s never explained. And now she has Alzheimer’s.”

  Carole shakes her head. “So the past, it is nearly lost for her.”

  I nod. “I just want to know what happened. She wanted me to find out what became of her family. If I go home without an answer about Alain, I’m afraid it will break her heart.”

  “I am sorry we cannot be more help, but if he is not in the records, he is not in the records.”

  My heart sinks. “So that’s it?” I ask in a small voice. “I may never find out what happened to him?”

  Carole hesitates. “There is one more chance,” she says.

  “There is?”

  “There is a man,” she says, but her voice trails off and she doesn’t finish her thought. Instead, she flips through an old-fashioned Rolodex, pauses, and picks up her handset to dial a number. After a moment, she says something in rapid French, glances at me, says something else, and then hangs up.

  “Voilà,” she says. She jots something down on a piece of paper. “Take this.”

  I take the piece of paper from her and glance down to see a name, an address, and a series of four numbers and the letter A.

  “This is Olivier Berr,” she says. She smiles slightly. “He is a legend.”

  I look at her questioningly.

  “He has ninety-three years,” she goes on. “He is a survivor of the Shoah, and he has made it his life’s work to make a listing of all the Jewish people of Paris who were lost, and all those who returned.”

  I stare in disbelief. “His lists are different than yours?”

  “Oui,” she replies. “They are from the people themselves, the people who were in the camps, the people who came to the synagogues after the war, the people who walk around still with the scars of loss. Our records are the official ones. His records are the verbal ones, which sometimes are more revealing.”

  “Olivier Berr,” I repeat softly.

  “He says you may come now. The number there is the code to his front door. He says to come in.”

  I nod, my heart thudding. “How do I get there?”

  She gives me walking directions, explaining that it may take less time to go there by foot than to find a taxi. “Plus, you will see the Louvre and cross the Seine at the Pont des Arts,” she says. “You should see some of Paris on your mission.”

  I smile at this, suddenly aware that I haven’t even bothered to look for the Eiffel Tower yet. “Thank you,” I say. I stand, not sure whether to feel disappointed about the lack of records here, or hopeful because this Olivier Berr might be able to help.

  “Bonne chance,” Carole says with a smile. She reaches out to shake my hand. “Good luck,” she says, looking me in the eye.

  Carole Didot’s walking directions take me through a few side streets, onto the crowded rue de Rivoli. I pass the Gothic facade of the Hôtel de Ville on my left and continue down a strip of storefronts—H&M, Zara, Celio, Etam—that would be at home on Newbury Street in Boston. Several French flags whisper in the breeze, their crisp red, white, and blue blocks of color saluting as I walk by. The few trees that dot the sidewalk have blushed deep red with the coming of autumn and have begun to drop their leaves on the sidewalks, where a steady stampede of people tramples them.

  I do as Carole directed and turn left just as I begin passing the enormous Louvre museum on my left. I emerge into a sprawling square surrounded on all four sides by the walls of the museum itself, and for a moment, I stop in my tracks, breathless. I don’t know much of the history of France, but I remember reading that the Louvre used to be a palace, and as I look around me, I can almost imagine a seventeenth-century monarch striding through the square, trailed by his attendants.

  Emerging on the other side, I see the pedestrian bridge Carole told me about. She had explained that the rails of the bridge are lined with padlocks, put there by lovers to declare the sealing of their relationships. It’s a romantic thought, but I know that padlock or not, relationships are temporary, even when you believe in them with all your heart.

  I look to the right as I cross the bridge and smile to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower soaring over rooftops in the distance on the other side of the river. I’ve seen it in photographs a thousand times, but seeing it in person for the first time that reminds me that I’m really, truly here, thousands of miles away, across an ocean from home. I miss Annie terribly at that moment.

  It’s not until I’m halfway across the wooden bridge that I’m struck with a sudden sense of déjà vu, as if I’ve been here before. It takes me a moment to realize why, and when I do, I stop in my tracks so abrup
tly that the woman behind me runs directly into me. She mumbles something in French, shoots me a withering glance, and makes an exaggerated, wide loop around me. I ignore her and turn in a slow circle, my eyes wide. To the right, beyond the glittering Seine, the tip of the Eiffel Tower slices through the blue of the sky in the distance. Behind me, the Louvre museum looms, palatial and enormous, on the river’s bank. To my left, I can see an island connected to two bridges. I quickly count the arches. Seven on the left bridge; five on the right bridge. And ahead, the building Carole had called the Institut de France looks a lot like a second palace, as if it and the Louvre were once halves of the same royal kingdom.

  My heart pounds, and I can hear Mamie’s voice in my ears, telling me the fairy tale she repeated so often that I knew it by heart by the time I was Annie’s age.

  “Every day, the prince walked across the wooden bridge of love to see his princess. The great palace lay behind him, and ahead of him was the domed castle at the entrance to the princess’s kingdom. He had to cross a great moat to get to his one true love, and to his left, there were two bridges leading to the heart of the city—one with seven arches, and one with five. To his right, a giant sword cut through the sky, warning him of the danger that lay ahead. Still, he came each day and braved that danger because he loved the princess. He said that all the danger in the world could not keep him away from her. Every day, the princess sat at her window and listened for his footsteps, because she knew he would never disappoint her. He loved her, and when he promised he would come for her, he always kept his word.”

  I’d always thought that Mamie’s stories were simply fairy tales she’d heard as a little girl, but for the first time, I find myself wondering whether she’d made them up herself and set them in her beloved Paris. I shake my head and begin walking again, but my knees feel wobbly beneath me. I imagine my grandmother as a teenage girl, walking across this same bridge, taking in the same buildings, the same current beneath her, imagining that a prince was coming for her one day. Had her footsteps fallen where mine fall now, in this very same place, some seventy years earlier? Had she stood on this bridge and looked for the stars to appear to the east, over the island in the middle of the Seine, the way she waits for them to appear now from her window each night? Had she regretted leaving it behind forever?