by Mandy Berman
Simone was translating firsthand accounts of Jewish women from Ravensbrück, the all-woman concentration camp, who were raped or forced into sexual slavery, as well as the non-Jewish female prisoners forced to work in the Third Reich’s brothels. Her field of Jewish studies was still an emerging one in France, and even now, in 2008, it was an area largely dominated by men, and thus, stories of male victims and survivors took center stage. But the women—who were raped by SS officers, impregnated, and then forced to have abortions, or to give birth in makeshift nurseries where the babies would never survive—were regularly sidelined. Simone had already written a book about pregnancy and abortion in the Holocaust, with a great focus on Gisella Perl, the gynecologist who saved hundreds of women’s lives in Auschwitz by performing abortions, despite the lack of access to antiseptics or running water, before Dr. Mengele could get to them for medical experiments.
Recently, in her otherwise all-male department at the university in Paris, Simone had been feeling self-conscious about having spent so much time writing largely about a woman whose memoir had been published, who was well-known enough to have a Wikipedia page. In this way, she was no better than her male colleagues, who wrote over and over about Eichmann and Goebbels and the banality of evil (a term that, ironically, had been coined by a woman); about the most famous survivors, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel; and, on occasion, about Anne Frank, who was a safe choice for Holocaust scholars because of her sunny sheen and secular nature. At the university—not a particularly reputable or prestigious one—Simone had been relegated to the lower-level Introduction to Judaism and Introduction to Holocaust Studies classes. The students were almost entirely men, and the courses were never filled. In graduate school, she’d done her dissertation on the intersection of feminism and Judaism in modern France; then she’d written the book on Perl, which secured her the teaching job; but after the birth of Henri, and a full teaching load, and all the failed attempts at having a second child, research had taken a back seat in her life.
Sometime after the second miscarriage, in the interval before they decided to try once more, Simone began more heavily researching the 35,000 women from Ravensbrück and other camps who had been forced into sexual slavery. The topic had been gnawing at her for a while now because of the lack of scholarship revolving around it—scholarship nearly nonexistent in France. Only a few books on the topic existed now, written by Germans and Americans, but there were still people out there—Holocaust scholars, in fact—who denied that women had been sexually violated during the Holocaust.
She applied for the fellowship on a whim; she was always applying for fellowships. This one, at the Berlin Museum for Jewish Studies, was brand-new, in conjunction with the recent renovation of their archival library. She saw online that the museum had a significant archive of primary accounts by women who’d been in Ravensbrück—letters and diary entries, many of which had not been translated. Many of the primary accounts were in Yiddish or German, languages she could read well—and Polish, of which she had a basic grasp. She argued that France, in particular, desperately needed more scholarship on misogyny and the Holocaust, and she proposed a book that would use the Ravensbrück letters and diary entries to reveal the horrors of sexual slavery during the period, while drawing a clear connection between the neglect of women’s Holocaust narratives and the lack of scholarship on the intersection of Jewish studies and women’s studies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Simone’s fellowship acceptance coincided almost simultaneously with her third miscarriage, and that final, deafening decree from the doctor: she was too old. She was quite fertile still, so IVF wasn’t going to help anything; the problem was that her eggs were not as young as they had once been—or, as the doctor put it, they were “chromosomally abnormal.” She would almost definitely keep having miscarriages as long as they kept trying.
The timing for the fellowship acceptance, then, was exactly right. She so desperately needed to do something again that brought her joy, something that would make her feel useful, because she’d recently been feeling the exact opposite of useful. She missed poring over primary sources under a dim lamp, the way she did in graduate school and as she wrote her first book, pages spread on the large reference table in front of her, her eyes buggy from overuse. She wanted to make connections that wouldn’t otherwise be made, to tell the stories that wouldn’t otherwise be told, to discover it all for herself. She wanted to dig, keep digging, into more stories of women in the Holocaust who’d been forgotten.
So far, here in Berlin, she was coming up short. The letters and diary entries were there, but the content was vague and inconclusive, or—most frustrating of all—written illegibly. And so many more of the documents than she was expecting were in Polish, and she had perhaps overestimated and oversold her proficiency in the language. It had been more than ten years since graduate school, and she was rustier than she’d anticipated. The sources in Yiddish and German that she could read were mostly mundane in nature, likely because these women were censoring their content for fear of their letters being found. She was angry with herself for not having anticipated this sooner, and angry with the museum for not warning her that the sources she was planning to use might not be fruitful. She’d been so eager to start a new project, and so convincing in her application, that she did not stop to consider the possibility that she might not find anything. There was, after all, a reason these sources hadn’t been translated: they said very little.
There was one Polish woman with several diary entries in which the word Sonderbauten was repeated several times. The word meant “special places”; it was the euphemism SS soldiers used for their brothels, of which there were outposts at several camps. This woman had, as far as the archives showed, died in Ravensbrück, so it was curious that she learned about these brothels, which were elsewhere: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen-Gusen, to name a few places. Perhaps she had been receiving letters from a woman in one of the brothels? Or perhaps she herself had, in fact, come from one? Simone had been working for several days now with a Polish-French dictionary, but the translating was painstakingly slow. So far she only had a series of words that had yet to be strung together to create any meaning.
After a few hours of moving back and forth between the nearly illegible Polish writing and her dictionary, her eyes tired from squinting, her phone began to buzz, snapping her out of the moment. She looked at the caller ID: Henri’s school.
“Is this Madame Simone Klein?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“This is Madame Bouchard, Henri’s headmistress.” Simone remembered her from their tour of the school that summer; she had taken an instant dislike to the unsmiling woman in her drab blazer.
“Yes?” Simone said. “Is Henri okay?”
“He’s fine,” the woman said. “But we need you to come to school and pick him up.”
* * *
—
He was sitting in Madame Bouchard’s office, his arms crossed over his chest. His face was red, his lips pursed, his eyes narrowed: an expression landing somewhere squarely between shame and defiance.
The headmistress stood when Simone stormed into the room.
“What happened?” Simone asked. “Is he okay?” She looked to Henri. “Are you okay?” He kept his head down.
“Hello, Madame Klein,” the headmistress said from behind her desk. She was a tall lady—one might have called her handsome. “I’m sorry to tell you that your son hit a girl in his class today.”
“He hit her?” To her son: “You hit someone?”
Still he looked at his feet.
“It was in the playground, during lunchtime,” the headmistress said, her face remaining stoic and cold. “I suppose the girl said something that antagonized him, and he hit her in the face.”
“In the face?”
“It left a bruise.”
&nb
sp; Simone rubbed the bridge of her nose. Henri was big for his age, unaware of his own strength.
“Look at me,” she said to him, and finally he did, the skin around his eyes even redder than the rest of his face. Not from tears, though. His eyes were dry. From something else. Something like fury.
“He has never done anything like this before,” she said to the headmistress. “His father has been in America for the past month, and Henri has been acting out because of it. Extremely childish behavior in order to get attention. Reverting to infancy and so on.” It occurred to her that she was talking about Henri as if he weren’t sitting right there. “Tell me what I can do to make this better.”
“Madame Klein, with all due respect, I’m not here to teach you how to discipline your son.”
Simone was too shocked to respond.
“What we ask is that he have enough control over his”—Madame Bouchard searched for the right word—“faculties to be able to conduct himself in a mature and respectful manner in school.”
Simone had been hoping that a French school would feel like home. They were only going to be here for a year; there had seemed to be no point in putting him in a German school for such a short amount of time. She didn’t want him to feel jerked around, and she thought that keeping him among French or French-speaking teachers and children would make the transition less abrupt. This hostility felt like the opposite of home.
“This is the first time anything of this nature has happened,” Simone said. “I promise it.”
“That may be the case, Madame Klein, but we do not tolerate physical violence of any kind. It does not matter how many times it has happened.”
“What exactly did this girl say to him?”
“Maybe Henri will tell you in private, but he will not tell me.”
“Madame Bouchard, my son is hardly a threat to society. I would imagine this young girl would have had to say something pretty incendiary to get him in here.”
“We really can’t let this happen without some kind of a punishment,” Madame Bouchard said. “You’re going to have to take him home today, I’m sorry to say.”
“Aren’t you supposed to figure out the punishment here?” Simone said. “I have a job.” She thought about all the sources on her desk, the Polish diary entries waiting to be waded through.
“We have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to violence.”
The phone on Madame Bouchard’s desk rang, shrill and disruptive enough to make Henri jump slightly from his seat, and she picked it up without hesitation. She spoke with someone for thirty seconds in German before she realized that Simone and Henri were still in her office. She put her hand over the receiver.
To Simone: “You may go.”
Simone grabbed Henri’s wrist, pulling him up from his seat, and dragged him all the way home: the same way the day had started. Only, no wailing this time. Just a weighted silence while she figured out what to do next.
* * *
—
They lived on a quiet street, two blocks from the canal, two blocks in the other direction from Sonnenallee, a wide two-lane road, home to the best and cheapest Turkish and Lebanese food in the city. Dinner was take-out shawarma and fattoush on more nights than Simone would have liked to admit.
Their flat was on the second floor of a building painted a baby-diarrhea yellow-brown. It had been terribly decorated, with shag rugs and fluorescent overhead lighting—an old lady had died there just before they moved in, which made Oliver uneasy—but the bones were all there: shining hardwood floors beneath the rugs, south- and east-facing windows. They replaced the overhead lighting and splurged on a new stove (nothing, Oliver reminded her, compared to what it would have cost in Paris) and bought a mix of thrifted and Ikea furniture; they’d left all their own stuff at the apartment in Paris. She brought along only the framed black-and-white photographs of her parents and both sets of her grandparents and covered one wall with them, the one wall that felt like home.
“Sit down,” she said to her son, pointing to a chair at the cheap kitchen table which Oliver had frustratedly constructed following the wordless Ikea diagrams. Henri did as he was told. She pulled out her own chair and sat across from him.
“You need to tell me what happened.”
“Madame Bouchard already told you,” he said.
“No, she did not.”
He moved his head back slightly, as if he were afraid of her. Sometimes she had the tendency to do this: come off as stronger, scarier, than she meant to. She experienced it with her students, too. When she spoke of the Führer or Goebbels or the high-ranking Vichy officials during a lecture, she could see them shrink into their seats, like she had the power to do more to them than just teach.
“What did the girl say to you?” Simone tried it more gently now. She had to put the disciplinary self away if she was going to get anything out of him. Beneath her anger at him she still wanted to believe that her son was somehow justified for hitting the girl.
“She called me —” Henri stopped. “I don’t know if I should say it.”
“You can tell me,” Simone said, putting one hand over his. She wanted her son to be justified. She also hoped it wasn’t what she suspected. Tears were brimming in his eyes.
“Go on,” she said, her heart racing.
“She called me,” he started, and hiccupped. “She called me Jewish.”
“You are Jewish,” she said, composing herself. “That isn’t a bad word in itself, chéri.”
“It was she way the said it!”
“How did she say it?”
“Jewish boy. She kept saying that! ‘Jewish boy, Jewish boy!’ ” He imitated a high, girlish voice.
She hugged him and rubbed his back, unsure what to say. Was being called Jewish in and of itself anti-Semitic? She supposed it was, if the word had been lobbed at Henri in such an antagonistic manner. In a way, she was glad to have concrete evidence to go back to that awful headmistress with. If there was anything they ought to take seriously in Germany, this was it.
“It felt really mean,” Henri said as she held him.
“I know it did.” She pulled her face back and looked at him. “But you can’t hit, Henri. There’s never an excuse to hit someone.”
She put her son in his room then, unsure what to do with him.
* * *
—
It was eight in the morning in Pennsylvania. She knew that Oliver’s class wasn’t until eleven, and she would be waking him up.
“Henri hit a girl in school today,” she told him in French when he answered the phone. These days, since he’d been gone, she only spoke French to him. It was her way of preserving what little she had left from her country. Oliver, who was fully immersed back in his America, tended to respond in English anyway.
“He hit a girl?”
“That’s what I said.”
“What the fuck happened?”
“Apparently she was teasing him, calling him ‘Jewish boy’ over and over. Antagonizing him.”
“Christ.”
“At least she didn’t call him a dirty Jew.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Did he hit her hard?”
“She has a bruise.”
“A bruise? Where?”
“On her cheek.”
Oliver let out an exasperated exhale on the other end. “What are we supposed to do?”
“I had to take him home. That headmistress, I swear—”
“Shouldn’t we fight this?”
She took umbrage with the use of the word “we.” “You mean me. I’m not sure how you’re going to be able to help much from over there.”
“Or what about a new school? If the headmistress is really that bad—”
“And how would I manage that?” Simone said. “The next closest French school is
in Prenzlauer Berg. It would take an extra hour out of my day. It’s too much.”
He took another deep breath to steel himself. “I can’t help the fact that I am here, earning money for our family.”
“Right. Money. When does your first paycheck come in, by the way?” She had yet to see any of the money. “Is Miss Ruth Alpert going to hand-deliver it to you personally?”
“Jesus Christ,” he hissed.
She heard herself now; she heard how ridiculous she was being, but she couldn’t help but keep prodding.
“I think you wanted to be there without us,” she said.
“Simone, come on,” he said. “I just woke up.”
He always made her feel so demanding, like she wanted too much from him.
“There’s nothing shameful about needing to process things by yourself,” she said, and she could hear the passive-aggressive tone in her voice. “I know this year was hard on you, too.” He had cried, briefly, after the third miscarriage. He wasn’t entirely unfeeling. But there was something wrong with his leaving nearly the minute they moved to Berlin; he should be processing with her, he should have insisted he stay. She knew she had told him to go, but part of her wished that he’d refused to.
“It’s not that,” he tried.
“Oliver,” she said. “He misses you.”
Which was to say: they missed him. She missed him. Only, it was easier to use Henri as a proxy.
* * *
Simone had met Oliver in a bar in Paris six years earlier, the night after she had refused Ariel’s proposal. They barely spoke in his palatial, sparsely decorated apartment in the third arrondissement, so intent were they on the physical: grabbing and bruising and gnawing and digging. She didn’t sleep there; he was meant to be one time only, a clearing of her system, an erasure of her slate so that she could start anew. Afterward, it was late but she felt like taking the nearly hour-long walk to her apartment in Montmartre—which she was still sharing with Ariel; she would have to move out as quickly as she could—her insides pleasurably sore. Who was this man who could afford to live in such a large apartment in the Marais? It didn’t matter anyway. She’d never see him again.