by R. D. Rosen
In May Sophie said her complicated farewell to her mother and flew first to Canada, where she visited Aunt Putzi and her family, who lived comfortably in Montreal. (When Putzi’s last English employers visited the Rozyckis in Montreal on a trip to the United States, they were amazed that their “humble” former domestic now lived in such a lovely home.) On the eve of Sophie’s departure for New York, visa complications arose that kept her in Canada until August. She spent the summer accompanying Putzi, Kazik, and their seven-year-old son, Henry, on trips to Ottawa and Quebec. When her permanent visa finally came through, Sophie arrived at the newly named John F. Kennedy International Airport in a heavy woolen suit, which had been appropriate apparel in chilly Canada, only to be hit by blasts of ninety-degree temperatures the moment she left the terminal and headed to the taxi stand. Since she was long overdue at her new job, she asked the driver to take her directly to the New York Polyclinic in Manhattan, which she had envisioned as a beautiful modern hospital with gorgeous nurses and especially good-looking male doctors. Her heart sank when the cab pulled up on West Fiftieth Street in front of a dilapidated facility that had seen better days, although it still treated the occasional high-profile celebrity patient. In 1926, while in New York promoting Son of the Sheik, Rudolph Valentino had been rushed to Polyclinic for emergency abdominal surgery, only to die soon afterward from peritonitis and pleurisy. And just two summers before Sophie’s arrival, Marilyn Monroe had had gallbladder surgery at Polyclinic while husband Joe DiMaggio paced in the waiting room.
Sophie’s first months were horribly lonely. She did little but work and sleep, commuting to the hospital on West Fiftieth Street from her room in the Belvedere Hotel on West Forty-Eighth by running across an uninviting parking lot next to the old Madison Square Garden.
Back in London, her mother was busy taking courses at Pitman College in typewriting, bookkeeping, secretarial duties, handwriting, and spelling and diction. Before long, she was offered a job as a part-time student-teacher, and then as a part-time teacher of bookkeeping and general commercial studies at six pounds a week. But in her letters to Sophie, she complained that Sophie didn’t write often enough and wasn’t paying her enough attention. She wrote that perhaps she and Sophie would live together again one day.
Her neediness triggered a complex of emotions in Sophie. Although she and her mother had barely mentioned their life in Poland, even to each other, it was dawning on Sophie, now that she was older and had moved away, that her mother had been nothing less than heroic. Sophie still saw herself as a survivor of World War II, not a Jewish survivor of the attempted extermination of her race, a race she was still far from embracing. If Sophie was preoccupied with Jews, it was not with those who had died, but with those who had lived. She understood that no Eastern European Jew had survived the war without a fight, and that her own mother had defied the odds. Others might have been crushed by their losses, paralyzed by their fears, immobilized by shock, but Laura had forged ahead in the midst of ruin. She had stood up more than once to the Nazis who came for them, she had threatened Herr Leming when he tried to take her promised job away from her, and she had insisted on getting her iron back from the Gestapo, but most of all, and despite the lapses into suicidal despair, she had insisted on living.
Whatever resentment Sophie still harbored toward her mother for her necessary part in depriving her of a childhood was now overtaken by an unfamiliar emotion: she felt guilty for all her mother had done for her. Sophie owed her life to her. She wished she could make it up to her mother, who had lost ten years of her life—her thirties—to the war, and then lost several more in servitude to her aunt and uncle. (Sophie’s feelings toward them had been softened by her aunt and uncle’s increasingly affectionate attitude toward her, culminating in their generous, but ghoulish, gift to her on her twenty-first birthday of their dead daughter’s ring.)
Yet in England Sophie had felt increasingly like a ghost floating next to her mother—insubstantial, a vestige of a past she barely understood. However lucky she had been, she was still a casualty of the Final Solution. Her childhood had been erased, her adolescence had been postponed, and adulthood still seemed unattainable. She may have owed her mother her life, but that wasn’t the same thing as having a life. And the painful price of having that, she knew, was to now keep some distance between them.
As lonely as she was, and as much as she knew it would hurt her mother deeply, she sat down one evening in her room at the Belvedere and wrote her to say that things couldn’t be as they had been anymore. She needed to make a clean break. She needed to stand on her own two feet.
By definition, virtually all children who were hidden during the war had been utterly cut off from those hidden elsewhere. There was certainly no mechanism or organization, even by the 1960s, by which these formerly hidden children could learn of one another’s existence. And so Sophie could not know that only a mile south of her new home at the Belvedere Hotel in Manhattan lived Flora Hogman, a year older than Sophie, who had also survived the Holocaust and had also ended up in New York City.
Sophie and Flora wouldn’t meet for another fifteen years, by which time they both would have launched substantial careers that were impressive even for women whose childhoods had not been destroyed by the Nazis. Flora, however, had had to overcome even greater obstacles than Sophie to accomplish anything at all. While Sophie had emerged from the war with at least her mother, Flora had lost everything and everybody.
FLORA
My first conversation with Flora Hogman took place at her apartment in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. As I stepped out of the elevator onto her floor, I could see a tiny figure standing at the far end of a very long hallway, but even at that distance I could see that she was smiling broadly. This surprised me, for although she had agreed to talk to me about her hidden childhood in wartime France, I had already learned from months of interviewing Sophie how sensitive this ground could be.
Throughout my career, I have been reluctant to delve into other people’s suffering. As a young reporter, I shrank from invading the privacy of strangers with tragic stories to tell. Yet here I was, unpacking my laptop and tape recorder at Flora’s dining room table while she went to the kitchen to get me a glass of seltzer and a plate of her rich homemade chocolate truffles. Flora, a petite and stylishly dressed woman with a charming French accent, had lost everything, even her self, to the Nazis.
Unlike Sophie, who seemed armored against the past despite admitting to me that our interview sessions had left her depressed, Flora from the beginning was agitated about talking to me. I tried to assure her that her story might actually help bring a relatively neglected aspect of the Holocaust to the attention of a larger public, but her tension remained palpable. And her smile failed to mask her wariness.
She seemed especially concerned that I wouldn’t get her story right. Not that I blamed her. The whole enterprise of trying to capture another person’s life, regardless of the circumstances, is full of pitfalls, to say nothing of the chasm between any writer’s ambition and the subject’s felt experience and spotty recall. My endless questions frustrated her. Flora lamented the loss of her memory as if it were another person whose disappearance she mourned. Her story sometimes seemed to come out of her in a chronological jumble, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle emptied onto a table. After a couple of long interviews, I sent her a first draft of what I had written, and heard nothing for a few weeks. Then this:
Hi Richard,
I have started to read the manuscript over and over again. I hesitated to answer as I am in many regards somewhat dismayed by the writing. There are parts of it which are fine, but others are quite troubling and make it difficult for me to feel that you really concentrated on understanding the person you are talking about and about what happened to her and within her rather than in details which are often wrong.
It ended:
Sorry, but I must be honest. It is very important to make come across the power of forgetting and s
ilence, it is not so easy. I hope you feel up to it.
All the best, Flora
The next time we met, I reminded Flora that we were in this together, that without her help I would never get it right, and I asked for patience. Fortunately, since we’d last met, it seemed to me that Flora’s memory had stirred and stretched; her recall was sharper, the story more coherent than before. I had experienced this with Sophie too.
But getting one’s hands on a vanished reality is no easy matter, especially when there’s just one living witness. At times our sessions felt a little like hand-to-hand combat—with memory itself.
The fates of millions of Eastern European Jews were decided by a hand. The one holding the gun aimed at the base of the skull. The one gripping the flashlight that panned the hiding place, looking for the sets of terrified eyes in the dark. The hand that had the power, with the stroke of a fountain pen, to condemn or reprieve. The one that separated death camp arrivals to the left or to the right.
Flora Hillel’s fate was decided by her own six-year-old hand, and what she didn’t do with it. Seventy years later, she would still not understand what play of unrecognized forces in her young mind had prompted her to keep her hands on her desk.
An only child, she was born in 1935 to opera-loving, Czechoslovakian Jewish parents, the granddaughter of the famous Rabbi Dr. Friedrich Hillel, who served in Leipnik, Czechoslovakia, and was himself descended from the great Jewish sage and scholar Hillel the Elder, who led the Jewish people around the time of Jesus Christ. Flora spent her first two years in San Remo, Italy, where her father, a maker of false teeth, had decided to go because of his tuberculosis. After he died from a recurrence of TB in November 1936, her mother, Stefanie—a pianist and writer—kept Flora in San Remo with her until she decided to join friends who lived across the border in Nice, then part of the Unoccupied Zone administered by the Vichy government.
In June 1942, Stefanie moved the two of them thirty miles west to Nice to a small apartment on Avenue Monplaisir, a mile inland from the Mediterranean, where they started their new life together. Flora did not have to share her mother’s love with anyone and grew so accustomed to maternal adoration that she would never forget the few times she provoked disapproval instead. On one such occasion, Flora’s mother chastised her for making fun of an amputee on the street, and she reprimanded Flora when she caught her and some friends singing popular ditties mocking Hitler and Mussolini.
Desperate to make ends meet, Stefanie Hillel took in sewing. She expertly embroidered Flora’s name on the clothes she wore to her new school, which was a short distance away. Each morning her mother tied a ribbon into a bow near the part in Flora’s hair and sent her off to school with her friend Rachel, who lived nearby. There wasn’t much food—not in the markets near them, anyway, or at least not much that her mother could afford, and Flora worried about her mother’s weight, since she gave most of what she had to Flora.
The taunts of the children who made fun of her for being fatherless brought her to tears. She was helpless to defend herself, since she was not exactly sure how he had died, or why, or even, at times, whether he had died at all. Her mother would often tell her that he was “traveling,” which fueled her fantasies that he would return.
When the French police began arresting Jews by the thousands in August 1942, mother and daughter boarded a bus to Vence, a walled medieval village west of Nice known for its natural spring water and—more recently—for a children’s home and boarding school run by a Protestant relief organization, Maison d’Accueil Chrétienne pour Enfants, that was taking Jewish children.
The bus lumbered up Avenue Colonel Meyere toward Vence’s crested cluster of terra-cotta-roofed buildings and stopped in front of a stucco building with shutters. Holding her mother’s hand, Flora watched an assortment of girls around her age wandering around a dirt yard, one of them clutching a soiled doll.
Her mother assured her she wouldn’t be there long.
Flora turned to her mother in panic. It hadn’t really occurred to her that her mother meant to leave her in Vence. She had never been away from her before.
Her mother straightened her hair ribbon and crushed her in a hug, whispered that it would only be for a while, and was gone.
The days without her mother dragged on among strange children, all of them little refugees from some threat beyond their comprehension. Flora was too numb to concentrate on the games or the songs or the prayers. She wet her bed constantly.
My dear little Flory! her mother wrote just before Christmas, I hope to kiss you soon. Take care of yourself and don’t forget to wear your pants! Lots of kisses. . . .
Chère Maman, she wrote back in January 1943, I hug you very hard. I’m sending you this little letter to make you happy. . . . When the letter comes to you I want you to come. . . . I’m eating well and I hope you’re eating well also. . . . I’m ending this little letter. Your little girl, Florine Hillel.
At least there was food—milk, days-old baguettes, a little cheese, a spoonful of preserves.
And then, miraculously, there was her mother. She reappeared toward spring, thinner than ever, to take her home. Flora ran to her, happier than she had ever been in her life. Back in Nice, Flora returned to school and to her best friend Rachel. All was well, or so it seemed to Flora, for many months. Then came September 1943. On the way home from the food market one day, Flora and Stefanie found themselves in the midst of an excited, expanding crowd, and were soon trapped on the sidewalk, pressed against a store window. Frightened, Flora clutched her mother’s hand and tried to see what the fuss was about, but at first she could only hear the sound of a clacking drumbeat getting louder and louder. She peered between the bodies in front of her to catch a glimpse of the German army’s grand entrance into the city. Flora had never seen anything like it. Helmeted soldiers filed past in perfect formation, the rows bristling with rifles. The clacking sound turned out to be the staccato gun-burst sound of thousands of jackboots striking the pavement in unison. The soldiers were followed by rumbling tanks and armored vehicles—metal monsters out of a nightmare—then more dense rows of goose-stepping soldiers. Then open touring cars filled with unsmiling men, followed by more soldiers.
Flora was terrified, clutching her mother’s hand in that forest of silent adults. But what was worse was that she could feel that her mother was terrified too. The parade seemed to go on for hours before the people on the sidewalk began to disperse and they could make their way home.
By the following day, Nice sprouted Nazi flags everywhere, and soldiers on every corner, even near her school.
The victims of history are the last to know what hit them. Only as an adult would Flora learn what had brought the massive Wehrmacht to Nice. Following the Allied invasion of North Africa and then Italy, the Italian army had capitulated and the Germans had arrived. Had her mother known by then what had happened in Paris the past July? That the French police themselves, under German orders, had rounded up thousands of Jews and sent them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver near the Eiffel Tower, then on to the transit camp at Drancy, and on their way to Auschwitz?
Flora walked to school with Rachel that day, as usual, and they took their adjacent seats in the classroom and waited for their teacher to begin. This time, however, she departed from her usual routine.
“Qui est juif?” she asked, quite suddenly. “Levez vos mains.”
Would the Jewish children raise their hands? Flora’s stomach fluttered. Next to her, Rachel raised her arm, but Flora hesitated. Had her mother told her not to mention to anyone that she was Jewish? Flora didn’t really think about being Jewish, anyway. They were not practicing Jews. Even though her father’s father had been a famous rabbi back in Czechoslovakia, Flora and her mother never went to synagogue or kept the Sabbath or said prayers or lit candles. What Flora felt was not Jewish, but scared and numb, yet when the teacher asked for hands, Flora thought that she ought to ask her mother first before doing anything, so she kept her hands folded on
the desk.
“Good,” her mother said when later that day Flora reported what happened. But despite her relief her mother was agitated. Word reached them that Rachel and her family were probably now going to be something called “deported.”
Not only did Flora not return to school after that day, but her mother explained that she was going to send Flora to a new school, a Catholic one where she would be safe. She said that it wouldn’t be like the other place. It was just up the hill, right there in Nice.
Flora knew that it would be just like the other place because her mother wouldn’t be there.
She would believe for a long time that it was her mother who drove her to the convent that sat on a terraced hillside overlooking the Mediterranean, on a road that climbed between oleander bushes on either side. Below the convent’s high walls, olive, cypress, and palms trees ran down toward the sea. Then, with a promise to come visit her as soon as possible, she disappeared.
A towering woman in a long robe spoke to Flora from behind an iron grille, welcoming her to “the house of God.” That God had a house was confusing to Flora; that Flora had ended up in it made her want to giggle, except that the woman, obscured by the grille, was frightening her. God must have extremely long legs, she decided, to live both in the convent and in heaven as well. She wondered when she might meet him. She had the idea that she might become his favorite of all the girls there.
And who was this Mother Superior? What was so superior about her?
Afterward she was led up the hill, above the main building, to join the dozen other children congregating in front of a house ringed by rose hedges. It would be Flora’s home now, except that Flora would no longer be Flora. She had been given a new name to go with her strange new home. She must now forget she had even been Flora Hillel. That much had been made quite clear. She was now Marie Hamon, born in Corsica. She wondered if she would be the same girl as Marie Hamon. Marie Hamon, Marie Hamon, Marie Hamon.