For nearly two years Labarde was our hiding place, out of which we could not dare to stray. Even to go down to that wooden signpost in the valley–even this would have been an adventure of the most foolhardy kind. If we had been noticed by a gendarme who had happened to be there–or even by a casual passer-by–it could have had the most disastrous consequences. Any encounter could have sealed our fate. We were at the mercy of any random individual that we might come across.
Well–since the day of the Libération, we may come and go as we please. Nothing was to stop us leaving Labarde–with all the pain and infirmity that it hides within itself–that very day. And yet we have remained. And every time that we return from a trip ‘outside’, and find ourselves once more at the wooden signpost, we glance at that half-eroded inscription, with a look of tenderness and gratitude. A look that pauses for a moment and says: ‘How good to be back.’
We have remained in Labarde. Not just because it would have seemed to us ungrateful–treacherous, even–to turn our backs on the place that offered us refuge, as soon as it had served its purpose. Not just because we would have been unable to repress a feeling of shame, as if we were betraying a friend who had shown us unconditional loyalty in times of trouble. Not just because we wanted to avoid giving the impression that our humble lodging here was suddenly not good enough for us, when we had for so long found there what the most spacious and magnificent palace could not have given us: protection and warmth. So much warmth. In Labarde Hélène Rispal had found an ‘asylum’ for our cold, homeless spirits, too.
But it is not just because of such scruples as these that we have stayed. For, ever since the Libération, every time that we have returned to Labarde, and taken that turning off from the main road, we have felt a kind of inner bond with the house on top of the hill–a house which probably seems so grim and forbidding to many. A house of mental derangement and of sorrow, but also of light and compassion.
As soon as they see us in the distance, they run–limp, hobble, stagger–towards us, our ‘poor in spirit’. Our enfants. They gesticulate, wave, cry, laugh, stammer. For anyone seeing them for the first time it would be a grotesque crowd of madwomen, provoking feelings more of revulsion than of sympathy.
Are these creatures really so revolting, though, in their ugliness, their disfigurement–with their grimaces, their atrophied, deformed limbs? To us it is not so clear. Not any more. We no longer see the face, the outward appearance of these ‘weak-minded’, these ‘cripples’, these misshapen creatures. We only see their dependence, their need of affection, expressing itself laboriously through the babbling of their spirit. We understand their language. It is the eternal language of the creature who requires a little love–requires to receive it, and to give it.
And here again are our nuns, too, in their brown Franciscan habit with the white-edged black wimples.
Not once in all the time that we had to hide here did they make us feel that they were our benefactors, that they were offering asylum to outcasts. Not once–even when the Germans were in the immediate vicinity of Labarde–did they indicate to us even by the slightest hint that our presence was putting them in serious danger. Even at the most critical moments they never attempted to get rid of us, although this would have been humanly quite understandable. On the contrary: the Mother Superior wished under no circumstances to allow us to leave the house.
And now, every time that we go away from Labarde, even for a couple of days, we are always welcomed back with such warmth that we feel like people returning after a long voyage.
There she is, our dear Soeur de l’Annonciation, with her strict, and yet terribly delicate, expression. She always takes advantage of her first free moment to come to us, and to sit for a while with us in our room. Soeur de l’Annonciation does not say much; she is a woman of few words, who does not like to show her feelings. The strength of her friendship is felt in her silence, though–a friendship in which she has been our faithful companion and in which she shares everything with us, our freedom, now, as much as our oppression, then. We think of the time that the Sister found us that hollow behind the morgue…
Soeur de l’Annonciation, who speaks so little, once told us that she prays for us a lot. It is not necessary to have faith oneself to feel that, for this Christian woman, her prayers have been a path to God.
It is now the seventh year that we have been without a home; and we do not know where destiny may yet drive us, before we are finally received by that earth which will no longer be foreign to us, wherever it may be, as it is the mother of all the dead. But every day in the present is a good day, as long as we know that, even apart from our nearest and dearest, there is one door which is always open to us–even if it is the door of a house of the sick.
Asile de Labarde. To us this was a place, too, where in the past the nights brought dreams of choking panic in which we imagined ourselves back in the clutches of the Germans. We started out of our sleep in horror. What relief, what a release, then, to realise, to be able to say: ‘Thank God, it was only a nightmare; we are here in our Labarde, all three of us–here in our room, here in our beds.’
At moments like that, the house of the sick was a veritable paradise…
There is another reason, too, that we are happy whenever we return from outside, and find ourselves back within the confines of our convent.
Outside–there is the world. Not yet the post-War world; but at least the post-Liberation world. It is already possible to draw certain conclusions from one’s experience of it; it is already necessary to abandon certain illusions. Already. The portion of the world outside that comes within our vision is a very small one; it is nonetheless big enough for us to recognise the whole. And the whole is not how one might have hoped it would be.
I am sometimes tempted to pose the question: What would have had to happen to the human race to make it change a little? What further kind of trials would there have to be to make it stop for a moment–to make it pause for thought–to make it better, more human, in reality and not just in empty phrases? You would think that what had already happened would be enough. You would think that it would be a thousand times more than enough.
After more than four years, we are finally free of the Germans. The terrible consequences of their actions remain, and are everywhere to be seen. But they themselves are gone. Their potential for wrongdoing is gone.
It honestly seems that many do not fully realise what this means. It seems as though many do not deserve this miracle. Otherwise they would have other thoughts in their head than those which stem from a monstrous selfishness; from greed, from vanity, from ambition. Otherwise they would think of something other than haggling, of ducking and weaving, of intrigues and partisan battles. Activities which are all too often carried on by people who make a tremendous show of their patriotism–a patriotism which, however, waited cautiously for the removal of the Germans before becoming visible. Otherwise, too, so many would not have to starve; mothers would not have to see their children waste away, while at the same time anything can be had on the black market by those who can afford to pay for it, and while racketeers and spivs of every variety parade their wealth shamelessly for all to see. Otherwise so many honest individuals would not see all their efforts come to nothing. Otherwise so many who cheerfully risked their lives in the heroic days of the Resistance and the Insurrection would not now be so disheartened and sickened as to give up the struggle against the enemy within–against those whose only use for the holy flame was to cook themselves some soup with it.
The épuration, or cleansing, which is spoken of more and more the less it is put into practice, ought to be carried out by many people first and foremost upon themselves. Then France would–after the glorious beginning that she has made–have the power to rediscover her inner greatness, and not just her superficial prestige.
Much could be said, too, about the systematic work of subversion, the malicious pleasure taken by Hitler’s French followers (who cleverly manage
d to slip the net of épuration) in thwarting and sabotaging the great project of reconstruction of their country.
But it is better to return to Labarde.
Here in Labarde we scarcely hear or see anything of what goes on ‘outside’. It is a situation which can sometimes feel extraordinarily beneficial–like the unpolluted air that we breathe up here on our hilltop.
Our ‘poor in spirit’ are not bothered by the ‘outside’; their very infirmity protects them from that. Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. And within the walls of the convent our nuns are able to remove themselves from anything which does not immediately affect the microcosm in which they move.
Life lived in the convent is admittedly not free of imperfections and weaknesses; it has its ups and its downs–its ‘human, all-too-human’. But this life, dedicated to renunciation, to self-denial, to the cheerful performance of tasks which bring no thanks and no earthly reward; this life is a life that still involves faith; it reverently follows the dictates of a higher power–as if they were the eternal harmonies of a heavenly music; it still discerns the voice of a God within a Godless age–an age which remains horribly deaf, empty, desolate in the face of the murderous sound and fury that afflict it, in the face of all the suffering and tears, in the face of all the vows and fine words.
Up until the Liberation our room in Labarde was a hiding place. Now, when we return there from outside, it sometimes seems to us like an island–a tiny islet in the middle of a turbulent, hostile sea. And one day, sooner or later, we shall have to set out upon that sea.
That day is not yet upon us. Yet I should like to take my leave of Labarde before that becomes too hard for me–before the actual hour of our parting. Because when that day comes, when I walk down the hill for the last time, on that path that leads to the main road, then I shall carry straight on, quickly, without turning my head, without looking again at that sign down there in the valley, with its worn-away letters that spell LABARDE.
Labarde, March 1945
Afterword
THIS BOOK WAS COMPLETED in March of this year. Since then we have seen the collapse of the Third Reich, the apparent death of Hitler, the cessation of hostilities, and the day of the official declaration of victory. The post-War period has begun.
Much of what appears in this book may perhaps seem not merely superseded, but actually out of date. Life has moved on in the meantime, with all the superficial process of change, of washing away; life in its eternal as well as its transitory nature; life with its wonders and its horrors. And even now, a survivor already tends to be regarded as the remnant of a past age.
Nonetheless, I did not want either to alter or to add to a single sentence of this book. Any such revision would have seemed false. All I have done is to delete certain statements that have already proved to be groundless or excessively naive.
I know that I run the risk of appearing as a defeatist in spite of the victory, and of arousing the displeasure of many who had looked on a happy end to the War as synonymous with an end to the evil that preceded the War, as well as to its causes. These enviable optimists regard the past as dead and buried, while they ignore the present and build for the future.
For one who saw the end of the War because, one might say, he survived the past against all probability, things do not appear so simple. Many things which should have been automatic consequences of the victory have not happened, and, conversely, much has taken place that one would not have believed possible. The dead are dead, and the living distance themselves from them with a haste, sometimes, that lacks even the slightest modicum of decency. And it is these living for whom those dead died.
The places where the Germans constructed the most famous of their torture-hells will, sooner or later, become a lucrative part of the tourist industry–attractions marked with stars in the guidebook. In Weimar the Germans will be able to point, not just to Goethe’s house, but also to the temple of a quite different spirit: the Extermination Camp of Buchenwald.
It is true: the dead ride fast. But the living ride even faster. Everything else is just politics–politics as politics always has been. Business is business and politics is politics. All the dead in the world–all the persecuted–cannot alter the fact that politics remains so dreadfully alive. That it remains politics.
The victory has been celebrated everywhere in the appropriate manner. Everywhere there has been the march past, the parties, drinking and dancing. People everywhere have been impressed by festivities and by beautiful speeches. All the time, though, one has had the feeling that something was not quite right. There were too many who had to mourn alone, for their dead or for themselves. There were too many who were already too busily engaged in exploiting the economic opportunities provided by the victory to find time to interrupt their business for the historic event. There were, finally, too many who had believed that they were contributing to an ideal, and were forced to realise somewhere along the way that they were only there to allow cleverer individuals to profit by their contribution.
The victory over Hitler’s Germany was achieved at the cost of unprecedented sacrifices and sufferings. To be worthy of this victory, however; to be able to celebrate a victory which–alongside all the political and diplomatic measures, alongside the reconstruction and restarting of the destroyed buildings and industries–might bring with it another kind of reconstruction, might lead to the unveiling of a better, a purer world… the celebration of that victory may, perhaps, be the lot of the generation to come. If, that is, they do not actually find themselves engaged in a new war, against a new Third Reich.
Labarde, July 1945
The Sisters of the Convent of Labarde, c.1945.
The Rispals: Gabriel (top); and, below, Hélène (left) with Grete and her son Konrad, after the War, in Belvès.
Translator’s epilogue
Moriz Scheyer’s wish ‘not to have to part from these human beings, who reached out their hand to me in my hour of need’ was granted; he did, indeed, ‘find some corner warmed by the fire of their affection… right to the end’.
At some point after the War he, Grete and Sláva moved into the ‘maisonette’ (as it was known to us on family visits), a house outside the centre of Belvès, with a garden sloping down steeply towards the valley below. The house belonged to Hélène Rispal and it was given to them as their home for the rest of their lives. Another spectacular act of generosity on the part of Hélène. Soon after the War, too, Grete learned the fate of the nineteen members or family who had perished, mostly in Auschwitz.16
Moriz Scheyer never returned to Vienna, though he did acquire a new Austrian passport. He had suffered from a chronic heart condition even before the events related above; he died in 1949.
Sláva Kolářová died in 1948. She had returned briefly to her Czech homeland, suffered a stroke and returned to Belvès to be looked after by the Scheyers at the end.
The ‘Maisonette’ in Belvès given to the Scheyers by Hélène Rispal; and, below, Sláva (left) and Grete (right) reunited there, after the War, with Grete’s son Konrad, and his first wife Jutta.
The other main protagonists in Moriz Scheyer’s narrative survived much longer. Gabriel Rispal died in 1970. Grete died in the summer of 1977; Hélène just over a year later, in 1979. Jacques Rispal, who lived in the ‘maisonette’ for some time after Grete’s death, followed them in 1986.
Moriz and Margarethe Scheyer are buried in the Rispal family grave, alongside Gabriel, Hélène and Jacques Rispal; Sláva Kolářová is buried in the same graveyard, though in a different plot. It seems that after the War Grete formally converted to Catholicism, possibly in fulfilment of a promise she had made to one of the Sisters of the Convent.
Memories of Konrad Singer: the years up to 1938
Before discovery of Moriz Scheyer’s manuscript, in the early 2000s, I had begun to interview my father, Konrad Singer (Grete’s son, Moriz’s stepson), wanting to preserve a record of his memories of his early life; he had by this time produced a brief
written memoir too. When the manuscript came to light, there were some further interviews: I was keen, now, to fill out Moriz Scheyer’s written account–frustratingly brief, on certain persons and events–with whatever my father could remember of them after the passage of more than sixty years.
I give here a brief summary of those memories, communicated in both written and interview form, inasfar as they add to the picture of Moriz, of Grete and of Sláva, of the family’s life more broadly, and of the dramatic events of 1938.
My father’s earliest memories were of Salzburg, where he and his elder brother Stefan lived with his parents–Grete and her first husband, Dr Bernhard Schwarzwald–and his nanny ‘Veili’, the Sláva of this book; and also of Jindřichův Hradec, a picturesque town in southern Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), where Grete’s father, a successful businessman, lived with a large extended family. The Czech side of the family had made the transition, within living memory, from the status of Pinkeljude–a humble door-to-door salesman with a bag of goods–to that of successful industrialists: Sigmund Singer, Grete’s father, owned two factories producing textiles.17 He was head of the Jewish community in the town, and prided himself on his position in the synagogue; at the same time, the family were assimilated Jews, Czech-speaking and regarding themselves as Czechs.
The Singer family textile factories in Bohemia and Moravia, 1921.
Summer holidays–as well as the first two years of my father’s life, before the move to Salzburg–were spent at his grandfather’s house with this extended family (about whose eccentricities there were a number of family legends). From the earliest years onward, my father was largely brought up by Sláva, whom he remembered with great tenderness, and to whom he was much closer than to his actual parents.
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