by R. D. Rosen
The old nun had passed on the address of a Jewish woman named Lucy, who she said had taken care of the Jewish children because at the time she, just thirteen, was the oldest of them. In 1988 Flora flew to France to meet Lucy, now the owner of a bookstore in Paris. After greetings and hugs, Lucy launched into a jaundiced, detailed account of life at the convent that at times approached a tirade. “Yes,” said Lucy, “they were constantly on the roof, praying. I had the responsibility of calming the children down! You were always so scared. But I never had anyone to talk to! No one to calm me down. I tried to get the nuns to look at me, but, you know, it was a sin for them to look at mere mortals! It was a worldly vanity to look at other humans! When there was a problem with one of you, I had to communicate with them through an intercom in the dining room! They never came over from their side of the wall. God forbid they should look at me when I spoke! I had to do everything—the wash, take care of the sacristy, the chapel, teach you the lives of the saints to keep you occupied. Oh, the nuns, they were too busy praying to help out! The only reason they took us in was because the archbishop ordered them to.
“But you know something?” Lucy said. “Despite it all, I’ve visited them every year since the end of the war. I suppose it’s because they did save our lives. I mean, they were the closest things to parents in my life. My own didn’t make it out of the camps.”
Lucy showed Flora an old black-and-white photo of four girls on the steps of the little house that served as their dormitory.
“Am I one of them?” Flora asked her.
“No idea. So many children came through the convent on their way to other hiding places.”
Later in her trip, when Flora drove to the convent in Nice, for the first time in twenty years, in her anxiety she turned into the wrong driveway, the one to the private mansion across the street. She explained her business to the guard, who indicated the convent in plain view across the way, adding that, yes, the Germans had occupied the mansion during the war. So close, Flora thought; how could she blame the nuns for keeping their distance from their Jewish charges?
Once in the courtyard with its terraced hill, Flora recognized nothing at first but the eerie silence of the place. What she remembered as an orderly garden was now running amok, and a middle-aged woman in street clothes was trying to weed the chaotic bed. To Flora she explained that she liked to help the nuns tend the garden because, as a Christian child, she often came here after rationing during the war because the sisters gave out extra food. That’s why, she continued, the Jewish children could come and go without being conspicuous. The Germans across the street were used to seeing the little ones. Still, Flora shuddered at the thought of her daily proximity to death. And the night she and the others were herded into the covered truck and driven to safety? How could the Nazis right across the street not have noticed, not have been suspicious?
As Flora looked up the hill to the house, still surrounded by the hedge of roses, the woman said, “You should go see the Mother Superior. She was here.”
“But I’ve been told they were all dead except for one, who was in retirement.”
“You were misinformed,” the woman said, pointing across the courtyard. “That’s the door.”
Flora approached the entrance to the convent, wondering if she was about to meet her past in the flesh. She rang the bell and the door opened, as if expecting her. Before her was a row of vertical iron bars that separated the far third of the room from where she stood. Standing behind the bars was a tall figure in heavy robes.
This nun, the Mother Superior, smiled at her as she opened the gate in the iron grille and came toward her.
“You were here during the war?” she asked.
“Oui, Mère Supérieure. My name was Flora Hillel, but here I was Marie Hamon. And now I’m—”
“I know you,” the Mother Superior said. Her mouth widened in a bigger smile. “I prayed for you. I prayed for you so much!” She clasped her hands, as if Flora were proof of God’s existence, the most perfect vindication of her faith.
Flora’s tears flowed down her face as she thought of her mother—it was, she realized, the first time she had been able to cry about her—and she could barely get out the words, “Merci. Je vous remercie mille fois pour m’avoir sauvé la vie.”
Flora reached out her hand, but the nun dodged it and swept in to embrace her, murmuring, “I prayed for you, Flora. I prayed for you so much. You had such an original name when you came. Flora,” she repeated it. “I never saw you because we were not allowed to look at you, but I heard you. We listened to you from the roof.”
It was true, then, that the nuns weren’t allowed to look at them. But it was also true that they prayed for them on the roof. Unlike the last nun Flora had met here, the Mother Superior didn’t lecture her about religion. Instead, unbidden, she started apologizing for prejudice—not the persecution and murder of the Jews by the Nazis, but the denigration of the Jews by the Catholic church. “We didn’t know any better,” she said. “We were taught we were better than other religions.” She straightened to her full height in front of Flora. “We didn’t know it was prejudice. We just thought we were better. It was very destructive. I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive us.”
Of course I’ll forgive them, Flora thought. They saved my life. “We were so scared,” the Mother Superior blurted out, tears on her cheeks. “We were frightened every day. The Germans were so close, across the street. Their boots stomping all the time, their loud voices interrupting our silence every night. We all lived on the edge of death. We all could so easily have been killed. I wish more of you would come back.”
Flora promised to return.
“But don’t go yet. There is someone else you must meet.” She mentioned a nun whose name Flora didn’t recognize. “She was a soeur courière,” the Mother Superior said. “She hadn’t taken a vow of silence and was entrusted with worldly chores, mostly making sure you children had enough to eat.”
She led Flora by the arm to the door to the courtyard and gestured toward a frail old woman in a wheelchair in the garden, wearing a hat against the Mediterranean sun and dragging a hose as she propelled her chair along a path from one dry flower bed to the other. She watered each bed with a thin stream. A gray cat, leashed to the wheelchair’s arm, had no choice but to follow her.
Flora introduced herself. Emboldened by her reception so far, she leaned down to hug the nun. Flora’s touch was like a jolt of energy to the old woman, who suddenly became agitated. She began gesticulating wildly even as she continued to roll on to the next sunflower.
“There was so little to eat!” she exclaimed. “Every day I took my bicycle up and down the hill, looking for food in every store. I had to beg shopkeepers, these merdouilles!”
Flora winced at the profanity—“shitheads”—but in old age the nun obviously felt entitled to her obscenities.
“They didn’t care! They wouldn’t give me any extra milk, any extra bread, and with us having more and more children to feed here every day! Once I found a lousy piece of chocolate, but, oh, did I have to fight for it! I wasn’t going to leave without it! And that Jewish couple we hid? They were so rich, but they wouldn’t part with their black market food coupons! The merdouilles! I threatened to denounce them, but no—they wouldn’t hear of it. Merdouilles!”
It would have been like a scene from a comedy if it weren’t for the tragedy she was still railing about forty-five years later. Flora was freshly appalled by the realities she knew nothing about, but the nun’s outburst appealed to her own irreverent nature.
“Let me tell you,” the nun went on, “everyone is equal under God! Prejudice is nothing but ignorance, jealousy, pettiness”—she shook the hose with each word, sending undulating arcs of water into the flower beds—“and intolerance is responsible for all the violence! It’s drilled into children from the beginning.”
Flora walked behind her, smiling. The world had clicked one notch further into place. She was so glad to have
reconnected with this chapter of her dark childhood. She had the most extraordinary feeling that her mother was near, closer than she could remember in years.
The memory of parting from her mother turned out to be flawed as well. It wasn’t her mother who had taken her to the convent at the beginning of 1943. It couldn’t have been her mother who took her there, since the parents would not have been allowed to know where their children were going, so that they could not give them up under interrogation or torture. Her rescue had actually been the work of one of the most successful Resistance operations of the war, the brainchild of Moussa Abadi. Abadi was a Syrian-born Jewish actor and political activist who earned a degree from the Sorbonne in child psychology, lost his scholarship due to anti-Semitism in 1936, then joined a French theater company, which toured America. After the company dissolved in 1938, he remained in Paris until the summer of 1940, when he set out for Nice by bicycle, where he was joined by his companion, a doctor named Odette Rosenstock. By 1942 they were working with an organization helping Jewish refugees who, like Flora and her mother, had sought a haven in Nice.
At the beginning of 1943, Abadi encountered a man who would change his life and that of hundreds of Jewish children. An Italian chaplain passing through Nice from the Eastern Front of the war told Abadi of Nazi atrocities there. Although the Einsatzgruppen and many of the death camps—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Janowska in Lvov—had been in operation for more than a year, the world had heard little of the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews and believed even less. When Abadi refused to accept the stories, including the chaplain’s reports of atrocities against children, the chaplain laid his crucifix in his palm and swore by Jesus Christ that it was all true. Based on this, as well as the persecution and deportation of Jews they had already witnessed, Abadi and Rosenstock committed themselves to saving Jewish children in Nice.
At the time, Abadi’s cover was working for the bishop of Nice, Monsignor Paul Remond, as an elocution teacher for his seminarians. After Abadi presented his plan to save Jewish children to Remond, the bishop replied that saving children was at the core of his being. Together, they set up a network they called Reseau Marcel. Remond gave Abadi, who dressed as a priest, the improvised title of superintendent of Catholic education, an office, and a signed letter giving him access to Christian institutions in the area. Odette Rosenstock became known as Sylvie Delattre, a social worker in charge of refugee children in the diocese. On the strength of this single document, and the courage of Abadi, Rosenstock, Monsignor Remond, and many others, the lives of 527 Jewish children were about to be saved.
When she learned this, Flora’s memory of her mother taking her to the convent was replaced by a vague recollection of her mother leaving her on a train platform with a man in a cape, a man who must have been Abadi himself, a hero who survived the war, married Odette Rosenstock, and became for many years a dramatic arts critic on French radio. He lived well into his eighties, but refused until almost the end of his life to discuss his work during the war.
Yet, even after all this, Flora continued to be surprised by her emotions. In the 1990s, she volunteered for an organization called Facing History and Ourselves, which since 1976 had been devoted to teaching teenage students about racism, anti-Semitism, and prejudice. Facing History and Ourselves often sent genocide survivors into classrooms to teach children how “to combat prejudice with compassion, indifference with participation, and myth and misinformation with knowledge.”
Facing History sent Flora one afternoon to talk to junior high school students in Manhattan. On the way there, she figured it would be interesting for them to hear the story of how her friend Rachel had raised her hand when their second grade teacher in Nice had asked which students were Jewish. So Flora started to tell them, getting as far as the part where Rachel raised her hand and she didn’t, and suddenly she choked up. The tears began to stream down her cheeks, and she couldn’t go on. In that moment, Flora realized that she had never talked about Rachel before. For the first time in her life, that moment became real—certainly more real than when it had actually happened and the consequences of Rachel’s and her different actions couldn’t be known. It seemed to her that, merely to survive her childhood, Flora’s psyche had had to put the terror of her narrow escape from deportation in a box and not open it again. Taken completely off guard, she began to weep right there, standing in front of twenty-five preadolescents, children who sat, silent, while Flora tried vainly to compose herself.
For many minutes, she cried, unable to collect herself enough to say one more thing. And yet in those twenty minutes she felt that some totally anesthetized piece of her childhood, the part that had sent one girl to her death and her to a kind of living purgatory from which she had still not escaped, had now regained its feeling. And she felt grateful that these children had freed her.
At the end of her crying, during which the students had barely moved, she wanted to continue the story, but just the thought of it brought new tears to her eyes. She looked out at the faces of the students who hadn’t said a word, and knew that there was no need for her to go on talking. She knew that the students already understood what had happened to Rachel beyond what any of her words could have conveyed. The children could see well enough what had happened to her, little Flora Hillel, a child survivor of the Holocaust who had grown up to be a psychologist studying child survivors of the Holocaust, but who had still not fully come to terms with the catastrophe that, to these children, was now much closer and far more real than just another piece of obligatory middle-school ancient history.
AM I A CHRISTIAN OR A JEW?
By forcing so many Jewish children to hide or abandon their Judaism in order to survive, the Germans demonstrated that, while Jewish genes could not be renounced, a child’s religious faith could be irrevocably altered.
This aspect of Sophie’s story had been a subliminal attraction for me. The idea that the descendant of two long lines of Jews could so readily believe herself to be an anti-Semitic Catholic was fascinating. My own religious identity at times seemed tenuous; I was the product of an upbringing that was Jewish in name, culture, and history but without being religious. When my Catholic neighbor and friend John called me a “Christ-killer” at seven, I had no idea what he was talking about, so devoid of overt anti-Semitism and religious rivalry was the milieu of my childhood.
I was raised in a friendly fog of religious freedom, born into a community where no one appeared to give Jews a second look, even if anti-Semitism still operated openly in my father’s textile industry, prompting him to briefly change his name to Ross. I grew up thinking that Jewishness, far from stigmatizing me, actually conferred an extra measure of appeal. Who wouldn’t want to be a Jew in the same 1960s society as Sandy Koufax, Paul Newman, and Sammy Davis Jr.?
My parents were founding members of a Reform temple that looked like an extremely large split-level ranch house. The sedate services, which had been shorn of all alien traces of Hasidism, lacked joy. They were enlivened only by our charismatic, rabble-rousing rabbi, but he no longer believed in bar and bat mitzvahs because “thirteen was too young for any important decisions or for acquiring sufficient knowledge to be an adult Jew in any intelligent sense.” To me, Judaism was not a world of specific rites and ceremonies, but a comforting community based on deeply humanistic and democratic values, humor, dissent, existential rumination, and a penchant for salty and smoked fish.
I identified with those who had lost touch with Judaism and had to decide later in life what being Jewish actually meant to them. After all, what it meant to be Jewish was not a question I could easily answer either, nor did I feel particularly compelled to answer, since I had always viewed competing religious beliefs as little more than an issue of which set of narratives you happened to grow up with. Although countless people throughout history have died rather than renounce their religion, the Holocaust’s hidden children didn’t have the luxury of conscious martyrdom. What did their intr
insic Jewishness consist of now if it could be so easily replaced?
And what did it mean to embrace it again?
I didn’t know whom to identify with,” Flora said of her years after the war. “I knew I was Jewish, but I didn’t know I was Jewish.”
Like Sophie and Carla, Flora had been born to assimilated parents with only a modest sense of religious tradition and little consciousness, before Nazism, of being the persecuted “other.” Her ambiguous or diluted relationship to Judaism was not caused by her wartime experiences so much as exacerbated by it. Instead of simply professing a vaguely apologetic “cultural Jewishness” as an adult, like so many reform and nonobservant Jews everywhere, Flora has had to contend with a more serious confusion of religious identities—and perhaps more than most hidden children—since she had had multiple religions and spiritual disciplines foisted upon her. “I was lost. I was telling everyone I was Protestant, but I became an atheist.” When she finally tried to resolve her religious identity in her thirties, “I figured out it was ridiculous.” When she finally had a seder, she held it on Easter Sunday.
Flora became interested in studying other child survivors’ struggles with split religious identity. In 1988 she published an article, “The Experience of Catholicism for Jewish Children During World War II.” She interviewed four Jewish women who, as girls, were saved by being hidden in convents or Catholic homes. All four women she studied were so enamored of their emergency religion that initially two wanted to become nuns, one wanted to be a Catholic Polish girl, and the fourth wished to be a saint. After Liberation, however, they found themselves in a religious prison. “Feeling abandoned by the church after the war,” Flora wrote, “alone and disillusioned, they still yearn to belong to the Christian world which is now seen as unreachable, while feelings linger that the adult Jewish world failed to protect them. . . . All four women struggled to develop an identity that would include their contradictory experiences, mostly by finding a connection with their Jewish roots so that they could ‘belong’ and also feel ‘good’ through the adoption of Jewish values and qualities.”