I admit it. I confess. I was a bit of a thief when I was a boy. Not a big thief, but I would steal candies in the candy store, pencils and erasers in the stationary store, cigarettes from my father's pack, and once money from my uncle Leon. I think I've already told that I had seen him hide money under the mattress of his bed.
Once in a while, when my aunt Marie knew that my mother didn't have enough money to buy food to feed her children, she would have my sisters and I come and eat with them. One day, we were all sitting at the dining room table, my uncle Leon, my cousin Salomon, and my sisters, when aunt Marie told me to go get more bread from the kitchen. To get to the kitchen I had to go through their bedroom. So quickly, before going into the kitchen, I reached under the mattress and pulled out a bill, and without looking at it I shoved it in my pocket. Later, in the bathroom I took it out to see how much it was. It was a twenty franc bill. With that money I bought myself some stamps for my collection and a fountain pen. Still to this day, I love having fountain pens.
When my father saw this new pen, he asked where I got it, and I told him that Salomon gave it to me because he had many of them. My father didn't say anything. But I was afraid that he would guess that I had lied. I think I turned all red when I answered him.
Yes, I was a bit of a liar as a boy. But all little boys are liars and sneaky, even if ....
And now, Federman, you're not a liar anymore? Who are you trying to kid?
Well, let's say that now I know how to invent better.
My biggest crime was when I stole a ring in a department store.
In school most of the boys my age had a ring. A ring with a skull on it. When you put ink on the skull and pressed it on a sheet of paper it would make human skulls.
I wanted so much to have a ring like that, but I didn't have money to buy one. The few centimes my parents gave me once in a while I spent buying stamps for my collection or tin soldiers, and sometimes candy. My mother always said that I was a gourmand when I was a boy. But I wanted to have a ring with a skull on it.
One day when I was coming home from an errand, I stopped at the
Monoprix,
a store that sold all kinds of things. I just wanted to look. And I see that they were selling rings with skulls on them. I looked at them a while. I even touched one. A big one, the color of silver. The lady behind the counter had moved away to help somebody else. I looked around. Nobody was paying attention to me. Quickly I closed my hand on the ring and moved away from the counter my hand still closed. I walked around the store pretending to be looking at things. I was very nervous and scared. Then I put my hand in my pocket and dropped the ring inside. I looked around. Still, no one was paying attention to me. The store was crowded with customers and the sales ladies were busy with them. Slowly I walked toward the exit. Suddenly a man wearing a grey suit grabbed me by the arm and said, Come with me, you little thief. I saw you. And he pulled me to the back of the store. I didn't resist, but I felt my legs trembling under me. I was on the verge of tears, but I held back.
We were now in a little room in the back of the store. A bare room except for a table and one chair. Another man came in. He also wore a suit, a black one.
I have never forgotten their suits. The suits were what scared me the most. I thought these men were policemen in civilian clothes.
The man who caught me explains that he saw me stealing a ring which I put in my pocket. The man in black tells me to empty my pockets on the table in front of me. I don't move. I'm frozen in place.
Empty your pocket, he shouts, or I will do it for you.
It was a summer day. I was wearing a short sleeve shirt, a pair of shorts, and sandals. I put my hand in my pockets and took out what was inside. A handkerchief, not too clean, a little pencil stub, a used eraser, two centimes, and the ring.
Ah, ah, the man in the grey suit says, while shaking me by the arm and pointing to the ring on the table. You see, I was right, he tells the man in black, that little thief stole that ring.
The man in black asks me why I stole that ring, and I answered, without thinking, without hesitating, that tomorrow is my mother's birthday and I wanted to give her a present, but I don't have any money.
That's exactly what I said. I swear. It came out of me just like that. I had to invent something.
The two men remained silent, but I saw on their faces that they had a little smile. After a moment, that felt like an eternity, the man in the black suit asked me to write my name and my address on a piece of paper. I had to. So I wrote my real name and my real address. It didn't occur to me to write a false name and a false address. I was thinking, they are going to send the police to my house and arrest me. My father is going to kill me. My mother will be so ashamed of me.
After having examined what I had written, the man in black said, Okay, go home. We'll decide what to do.
So I left. While walking home, I was terribly worried about what would happen when the police would come to arrest me.
The next day, when school was over, I didn't dare go home. I imagined my parents waiting for me, and asking for an explanation.
Several days passed. And each time, before going home after school, I was trembling with fear in the street. But nobody came.
I never told this to anyone. No even to my friend Bébert, who like me also stole candy and others thing in stores, and even cigarettes from his father which we smoked together.
Well, as you can see, I was not a great criminal, but maybe a bit of a pervert. Let me explain.
When I was old enough to take the subway alone sometimes when there was no school and the boys who played soccer in the street didn't let me play with them because they said I didn't know how to play, I would take the subway to the station
St. Paul
in
le Marais
to visit my aunt Ida, my father's youngest sister whom he adored, and whom I also liked because she was always nice to me. There I would play with my cousins Simon and Raymond, the younger one had the same name as me, and also with my little cousin Sarah who was so cute and whom I loved very much.
My cousin Sarah is the only survivor of her family. For the past sixty years she's been living in Israel. I told her story in
To Whom it May Concern.
I would play with Sarah and her two brothers in the garden of Place des Vosges. The same Place des Vosges where the
Grand-Rafle
took place. The beautiful Place des Vosges with its arcades, its garden, its fountain, its chestnut trees, and Victor Hugo's house. I loved to read the plaque on that house that said that Victor Hugo lived there from 1832 to 1848. I had learned many of his poems by heart in school, and looking at his house made me feel close to him. As if I knew him personally. I would wonder what I would have to do later in life to have a plaque like this on my house in Montrouge.
It was at this time, when I was old enough to take the subway alone, that I started looking at women. The boys in school often told each other stories about women while giggling.
One day when we were playing Place des Vosges, my cousin Simon said to me, Come with me. I want to show you something.
So we left Sarah and Raymond, and we walked to rue St. Denis. The famous rue St. Denis. It's there that I saw prostitutes for the first time. I asked Simon what these women standing in the street or in doorways were doing there. Why they were waiting like that. And why all these
messieurs
were going inside the houses with them. And my cousin laughed.
You don't know what a
putain
is?
No, I didn't know. So my cousin explained what these women were doing.
Even though Simon was my age, he seemed to know a lot of things I didn't know.
I asked him if he ever went with one of these beautiful women in very short skirts and black stockings, and who kept asking us as we walked past them,
Tu montes, mon petit chéri.
Come on little love, I'll do nice things to you.
Are you mad, my cousin answered, it costs a lot of money to go with them. And besides you could catch a disease.
After that, whenever I went to visit aunt Ida, or my other aunts who lived in the Marais, I would get off the subway at the station Châtelet and make a detour to rue St. Denis. Now that I knew what a prostitute was, I would blush when one of the beautiful women would ask me to go with them. I never dared.
Federman, don't tell me you never fucked a prostitute.
Yes, in Tokyo when I was in the army, but this has nothing to do with my childhood. So no need to go into that.
Instead I want to tell something else. Something important. How I got from Montrouge to Monflanquin after I came out of the closet. I've never told that story. The end of a childhood.
I have never told how I went from the closet to the farm. How I got from Montrouge to Monflanquin when I finally emerged from the hole into which my mother had hidden me, and where my childhood vanished into the dark.
This crucial moment of my survival, this emergence from the tombwomb into the light and into life has remained so vague in the stories I've told for so many years.
Perhaps it's because I told so many different versions, all so nebulous, to the point that I myself don't even know which is the true version, or if there is one, the real story of what happened after I came out of the closet with a smelly package of shit in my hands which I left on the roof of our house before tip-toeing down the stairs, and then frantically running into the street towards the enigma of my future days of deportation to the farm
This wandering in a no-man's-land between Montrouge and Montflanquin lasted six days, during which I was lost in incomprehension. Oblivious to what was happening to me and around me.
In
Return to Manure
I tell how the boy of that story jumped from a freight train that was racing south in
La Zone Libre
towards he knew not where, and how he landed into a muddy ditch, and how all bloodied and bruised he asked an old farmer working in the fields which way to Montflanquin, and the old farmer seemingly unconcerned by the boy's condition pointed towards the west and mumbled,
vingt kilomètres tout droit dans cette direction,
and how dragging a wounded leg, the boy followed his shadow to the little town of Monflanquin where Leon, Marie, and Salomon had taken refuge before the round-up, and how surprised they were to see him, for they were convinced that, like his parents and sisters, he was already on his way to his final solution, and how to get rid of this unexpected burden they exchanged him for two chickens to a farm woman in need of help to do the farm work because her husband was a prisoner in Germany. No need to tell all that again.
As I come to the end of the story of my childhood, I would like to tell what happened during these six days of wandering.
I have an idea. I'm going to tell that story in the form of a time-table. This way it'll go faster.
About 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1942, the French police who were doing the dirty work of the Gestapoâ
les j'ai ta peau,
as the poet Max Jacob called those who deported himâcame to arrest us,
au 4 Rue Louis Rolland à Montrouge,
because we were Jewish. Undesirable.
It was then that my mother pushed me into a closet on the landing of our apartment, on the third floor, and quietly shut the door behind me as she murmured
Chut.
About 6:00 a.m. the next day, I finally came out of the closet after having spent an entire day and night in that closet.
About 7:00 a.m. on July 17, 1942., I walked from Montrouge to Rue des Francs-Bourgeois in Le Marais where my aunt Ida and her husband Aaron lived with their three children, Simon, Raymond, and Sarah. I tell them breathlessly what happened, how the police came to arrest us, how my mother hid me in a closet. It took me a good hour to get to where they lived. I walked as fast as I could trying not to be noticed by the
policemen and the German soldiers who were everywhere in the streets. I could not take the subway because when I came out of the closet I had nothing, nothing except the shirt, the shorts and
espadrilles
my mother had shoved into my arms. I had no money, no subway tickets, no food stamps. I had nothing except my fear.
Still breathing hard from the long walk, I tell my aunt and uncle that they must leave immediately before the police arrive. I tell them the streets are full of policemen and German soldiers arresting people. My uncle Aaron tells me that they don't know where to go, they don't know anybody who will hide them, and besides they don't have money to buy train tickets. So they are hoping nobody will come. But they have already packed their little bundles.
All the Jews in this neighborhood know that the
Rafle
is in progress. It started very early the day before. While my uncle tells me that they don't know what to do, my aunt Ida is cowering in a corner of the room softly crying while holding her two sons close to her. My cousin Sarah is not there.
In
To Whom It May Concern
I told the dolorous story of how my little cousin Sarah survived. The only one from her family.
A few minutes after 7:00 a.m., the same day, my aunt Ida tells me and Simon, the oldest of her two sons, to go quickly see if aunt Basha is still at home. Maybe she's still asleep and has no idea what is going on. Basha always sleeps late, and besides she's unaware of what is going on in the world.
Aunt Basha was my father's oldest sister. She lived at the corner of Rue Beaubourg and Rue Rambuteau. A five minute walk from Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.
I should specify that aunt Basha's husband, Ruben, and her two sons, Raymond and Roger, had left Paris before
La Grande Rafle.
A rumor had been circulating for days that only men would be arrested. So aunt Basha stayed in her apartment to protect their possessions. Ruben was a wealthy tailor. She felt secure staying in her apartment. After all she was a French citizen even though she barely could speak French. Yiddish was her language.