In 1932 the Ewenczyks moved to Paris and found an apartment in the heart of a right-bank wholesale district on Rue Poissoniere. Sweater-making was an emerging trade in the neighborhood. The entire family worked together in a sweater shop, and with Yankel's instinct for trade and all five of them working, the little business prospered even in the difficult 1930s.
In 1940 all three sons, having become naturalized French citizens, were called into service in the French army for what would be a forty-six-day war with Germany. Oscar was among the thousands of prisoners of war taken near the Belgian border and deported to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Emmanuel's unit was captured in Orleans. The rest of the family fled to Grenoble.
Even then, as a prisoner of war, Emmanuel thought only of getting back to the shop on Rue Bleue which would now be full of fall merchandise. In all the chaos, he realized, other shops would not be producing goods. Emmanuel reasoned that the market would be hungry for his family's stock. It could all be liquidated at top prices—if only he could get back.
There were more prisoners than the Germans could handle. Emmanuel found himself in a column of two thousand French prisoners, guarded by a handful of Germans, being marched one hundred miles to Beauvais, north of Paris. There they would be questioned and sent to a distribution camp at Drancy and from there to Germany. Later, Drancy was to become a central transit point for shipping Jews to Auschwitz, but this was 1940, long before Emmanuel ever heard the word Auschwitz. He was just one of thousands of French prisoners of war.
At one point, a truck with a French crew came to distribute food to the prisoners. Emmanuel took off his army coat and, looking remarkably like a civilian, started helping the French crew distribute the food as if he were one of them. After everyone had eaten, the crew—including Emmanuel—got back on the truck and drove off. Simply by trying to get back to his shop, Emmanuel had probably saved his life.
Paris had been left undefended and possessed by what was called “the great fear.” Shops and apartments were abandoned, and the banks stripped of deposits. The streets were littered with jettisoned belongings. The main boulevards were crammed with cars, trucks, hand carts, and bicycles—and scared people clutching the most precious belongings that were portable and heading south. On June 14 the German Eighteenth Army entered the city and hoisted a red swastika on the Eiffel Tower.
But while other Parisians, especially Jews, were fleeing, Emmanuel wanted to go home to Rue Bleue. By the time he got there, the exodus was over. The shop and apartment were deserted except for one non-Jewish employee. Nobody in the neighborhood seemed even to realize that Emmanuel had been away. Things were not bad. People talked about how the metro was working well again. The big fear had ended. The German soldiers didn't seem as bad as everyone had expected. In fact, some people were starting to come back. Jews were coming back. Nothing had happened, and perhaps they had fled too hastily.
Yankel sent word from Grenoble: “You must leave Paris immediately!”
“But we have merchandise,” Emmanuel pleaded.
“Its nothing,” Yankel insisted. “Come right away!”
I'll come as soon as I liquidate,” Emmanuel answered.
On September 27, 1940, an item appeared in the newspapers: “All Jews must report by October 20 to the sous-prefet of the arron-dissement in which they live to be registered on a special list.” A Jew was defined as “anyone who belonged or used to belong to the Jewish religion, or has more than two Jewish grandparents.” Emmanuel went, as did 149,733 other Parisian Jews. The French police put a stamp on his identity papers indicating that he was Jewish. Then he went home.
Confined to their buildings by a nighttime curfew, Parisians passed their evenings talking to neighbors. One neighbor on Rue Bleue was a French pilot who kept warning Emmanuel to get out of Paris. The pilot knew he was Jewish. Everyone knew that a man named Emmanuel Ewenczyk was Jewish.
But it took months for Emmanuel to unload all the stock at good prices, even with the high demand. Then there were taxes to pay. And rent on the apartment. How long would he be away? Finally, he paid several months’ rent in advance and joined his family in Grenoble.
WHEN PARIS WAS lIBERATED, Emmanuel got on the first train available and went directly from the Gare de Lyon to Rue Bleue. He climbed the stairs to the third floor. The concierge, who had seen him come in from her perch behind the curtain at her glass door, followed him up the stairs trying to call him back, whispering, “Monsieur, Monsieur!”
Emmanuel knocked on the door on the third floor. A man answered and explained in a meek voice that he was a refugee. “And,” he added, his voice growing less meek, “I have a lease.” He waved the document.
Emmanuel went downstairs to the lower shop floor. Where sweaters had once been stacked, there now stood a neatly arranged pile of wooden legs. A full staff of craftsmen were working on artificial limbs. Then Emmanuel climbed up the shop stairs to the upper floor and discovered that a gendarme was living there.
True, he had signed the paper releasing the apartment, but with collaborationists being chased through the streets, beaten, arrested, and put on trial, no one would want to go to court and explain that they had forced a Jew in hiding to relinquish his property.
Before he went into “hiding,” Emmanuel had left a forwarding address with the concierge. While in Grenoble, the Ewenczyks had received a letter from the manager of the building on Rue Bleue, saying that it was apparent that they had left the building, and could they therefore write a letter agreeing to let the apartment go? The Ewenczyks wondered if non-Jews got such requests. Yankel reasoned that it would be better to avoid trouble and write the letter.
But Emmanuel thought differently. “I paid three months’ rent in advance!” he argued.
“But ihey have our address,” Yankel said gravely.
“But the rent is not that much! We can afford to keep paying—a few months at a time, if they want. This is a good set-up. We don't want to lose it.”
With a grim face, Yankel told him, “Listen, Emmanuel. We haven't left much there. We don't want to do anything—risky. They have our address.” The family finally sent the letter. Then they lost contact with Paris.
When Emmanuel returned to Paris and found all three floors occupied, he went to see the owner of the building—a pleasant, polite man who explained sympathetically that he had given the man and his family the apartment because they were refugees. Their own home had been destroyed, the owner explained as he reached into a drawer and retrieved a folded piece of paper. It was an official city document clearly stating that this man and his family had lived at 19 rue Rodier until it had been destroyed.
Emmanuel had trafficked in false documents for the Resistance in Grenoble and knew better than to take official documents at face value just because they had the right form with the right stamps. He went to Rue Rodier, which was not far from Rue Bleue, and found number 19—standing whole and undamaged. These people were not refugees at all. They had simply wanted a better apartment.
All over Paris, Jewish property had been taken over. Nobody had expected the Jews ever to come back. When Emmanuel asked friends for advice they repeatedly told him not to pursue his claim. Even though he seemed to have a good case, it would take years in the French legal system to win it. He would be better off finding another place so he could start working. He could not apply to reopen his business until he had an address, and with all the shortages, if he could get into production at a new place soon, his business would boom. But still, Rue Bleue was his home.…
He went to see the gendarme who was living in the upper story of what had been the sweater shop. “Monsieur,” the gendarme told him icily, “I am here because the gendarmerie gave me this apartment, because I have a wife and child. I do not have the slightest intention of leaving.”
Emmanuel went back to the owner and said the “refugee” family on the third floor had false papers—the building on Rue Rodier had never been destroyed. The owner nodded in agreement and sa
id with a polite smile, “But what can I do?”
“And what about this gendarme? What right does he have to be there?”
The building owner answered with seemingly irrefutable logic, “But he is there, and there is nothing I can do about that. You will have to take it up with him.”
Emmanuel went to the gendarmerie in the neighborhood, where he was told, “Well, he is living in the apartment. If he doesn't want to leave, there is nothing we can do.”
Emmanuel went to the building manager who had so courteously extracted the letter from him when he was in hiding. The manager said he would make it up to him and offered another apartment in a different neighborhood. “And why is this apartment available?” Emmanuel wanted to know.
“Ah, because the tenants left.”
“Were they Jews?”
The manager said he thought they were —“but they have not come back.” Everyone was confident that the Jews weren't coming back. But Emmanuel was not eager to grab this place. And in a few weeks, although the tenants themselves did not come back, one of their parents claimed the apartment. Then the embarrassed manager offered Emmanuel two little rooms on the sixth floor of the building on Rue Bleue. Six flights of stairs to bring merchandise in, six to take it out? Emmanuel thought. But still, it was an address, and he could apply for a permit with an address.
Emmanuel set up the sweater business there. Everything in Paris was rationed and tightly controlled after the war, but the Ewenczyks had bought large orders of wool for their business before the war, and everyone was permitted to acquire materials now based on their 1940 purchases. The same distributors were back in business, and the demand for sweaters, cloth, and even sacks was at a level that Emmanuel had never seen before.
HOW cOULD the pig-headed Emmanuel Ewenczyk ever have resisted the equally strong-willed Fania Elbinger? Fania was a nervy, outspoken twenty-year-old who had immigrated to Paris with her mother and sister from Poland in 1930. Having met in the Resistance in Grenoble, Fania and Emmanuel seemed destined to love and argue. While they were living in Grenoble, about once a month Fania would travel to nearby Chambery with money and clothes and sometimes even a little meat that the Jewish Resistance had smuggled into the district to feed Jewish families. Sometimes she was able to save their children by taking them to the Swiss border with false papers. The Germans would let children pass the border, provided their papers showed that they were not Jewish. In the Resistance, men were of limited use in this kind of work. Although there was no problem in providing them with top-quality Christian identification papers, the Germans would sometimes stop men on the road and make them show that they were uncir-cumcised. When the Germans moved into the formerly Italian-occupied zone of France, they decreed that any circumcised male was a Jew, regardless of what his papers said. For this reason, much of the underground work was done by women.
Wartime life was relatively easy for Jews in Grenoble, at first. The entire southeastern border area, from Grenoble to Nice, had been occupied by Italian troops instead of Germans. Not only did the Italians not harass the Jews, but on several occasions, when French police arrested Jews, the Italians had them released. But in September 1943 the Italians surrendered, and the Germans moved into Grenoble. One night Emmanuel brought Fania home with him to try to persuade his parents to assume a false identity and leave the town. Fania could get them the papers they needed.
“Why should I leave?” said Yankel Ewenczyk.
“Your name is Yankel. Yankel and Syma. You can't stay like this.”
“Why not? Why should I fear the Germans? Let them take me—I have nothing to hide. Fve never done anything wrong in my life. But if they catch me with false papers, then what do I do?”
“Papa, you don't understand. Just listen to your accent.”
“What can I do about my accent?” He shrugged.
Emmanuel went to the library in Grenoble and spent an entire day leafing through the pages of the official journal that published names of people who had been naturalized, looking for ideas. Finally he found an Armenian couple from Turkey.
“You can be from Armenia,” he told his father. “Armenians have accents. A lot of people in Turkey are circumcised because they are Moslem. If the Germans see that you are circumcised, that is more or less explained—”
“What's to explain?” Yankel protested. But they got him the papers.
After the Liberation, Fania returned to Paris with her mother and sister. But when the three arrived at the family leather goods shop, they found that it had been rented to someone else, as was their seven-room apartment. The new tenant was a refugee, but unlike the family at Rue Bleue, this tenant was a real refugee. The Elbingers decided to fight, but the years of futile legal battles that they spent trying to recuperate their spaces only proved to Emmanuel that he had received good advice when he had been told not to pursue it.
AROUND THE CORNER from Rue Bleue on Rue Cadet was a club for diamond merchants. Diamonds, a traditional Jewish trade, was a fast business in 1945, because so many people were selling off their jewels in order to survive. In times of crisis, gold and diamonds flourish, and in 1945, in the diamond and jewel districts of the ninth arrondissement, near the garment district, people had money. But they still had trouble getting food.
Icchok and Dwojra Finkelsztajn, on the other hand, had food, but they needed money. There were shortages of almost everything in Paris, especially food, which was tightly rationed. But it was different in the Pletzl, where numerous Polish peasants lived among the Jews who had moved there from Poland before the war. When food became scarce during the war, these peasants, gravitating toward what they knew best, had moved out of the city and grew food on small plots. By chance, Dwojra ran into a family she had known in Poland, and they offered to sell her their produce. This was, as the French like to say, not altogether legal. In fact, it was a black market that circumvented the rationing system. But Paris was full of black markets. Dollars and silver were traded illegally on the narrow Rue des Rosiers sidewalks. Everyone wanted food, and Dwojra now had access to it. The problem was that nobody in the Pletzl had very much money. Then Dwojra found a diamond merchant.
Icchok and Dwojra would regularly get on the metro with large net bags full of black market food and go to the diamond traders’ club on Rue Cadet. In a thickly carpeted room, they would lay out fruit, vegetables, meat, and butter from Polish farmers, on the waxed dark wood furniture. The Finkelsztajn family supported itself and even saved a little money from this.
The Finkelsztajns had returned to Paris from the Pyrenees in December 1944, during one of the coldest winters on record, a winter that further toughened the bitter battle that was under way in the Ardennes. Some winters, Parisians do not see a single snow-flake. But this winter, the streets were encrusted with a thick layer of snow. Icchok, Dwojra, Henri, and their baby had gone to 14 rue des Ecouffes, where they had left their apartment fully furnished with most of their possessions. When they opened the door, a woman holding a child stared at them, and several more pairs of young eyes peered out at them from inside.
“Excuse me,” said Dwojra. She closed the door, and the Finkelsztajns went back down the stairs and left.
Other apartments were available on Rue des Ecouffes. In the summer of 1942 the police, using the lists they had made in the fall of 1940, had sealed off Jewish neighborhoods. In the middle of the night they had pulled whole families from their apartments and put them in a sports stadium, where they wallowed in squalor until they could be deported for extermination. In this citywide operation—which yielded only 12,884 Jews, not even half of the number hoped, based on the lists—Rue des Ecouffes was one of the richer veins of the motherlode. Number 22 alone, with the work of forty policemen, had yielded five whole families and a total of fifteen children. In the winter of 1945 there were still empty apartments at number 22, and the Finkelsztajns rented one of them, a two-room apartment with a bathroom. In the Pletzl, two rooms for four people was considered a good apartment a
nd a bathroom was a notable luxury.
Icchok, who did not want to go back to day and night labor in the hot basement of the Korcarzes’ bakery, learned of a pleasant little space that was available on Rue des Rosiers. Started by Alsatian Jews, it had been a Jewish bakery for almost a hundred years. The ovens were still in the basement, but the ground floor was big enough that the ovens could be moved up there, and the floor above had a large four-room apartment. The apartment even had enough space to build a bathroom.
The owner of the bakery was a Romanian Jew. During the war his shop had been “Aryanized.” All over Paris—in fact, all over Nazi-occupied Europe—Jewish commercial property had been Aryanized, or given to non-Jews. When the policy was instituted in 1941, more than twenty thousand Jewish-owned businesses had immediately been confiscated and handed over to those who were willing to call themselves “Aryan” in exchange for the gift of someone else's shop. But this Romanian had surprised the new “Aryan” owners of his bakery by surviving the war. He demanded back his bakery after Liberation. Since most of these “Aryans” had received their property as a reward for their collaboration, they were lucky to escape the Liberation with their lives. Yet in late 1944 there were still more collaborators than Jews living in the Pletzl. Little by little they were losing their property, but not their arrogance. They had numbers on their side, and there was little in the way of police or any kind of law to oppose them. The war was still going on, and Hitler was still in Germany and still had a fighting army—and who could be sure that the Nazis would not come back to Paris? Collaborators in the Pletzl regularly shouted from their windows, “Vive the Nazis! Down with the Jews!” A group of these so-called Aryans were so arrogant that they actually staged a demonstration protesting the return of the shops to Jews.
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