Authors: R. D. Rosen
After the taping, Ed asked Herman where the hell he had come from to be on the show.
“New Guinea, Indonesia,” Herman said. “The producers called me, and when I told them I was headed here for medical reasons, anyway, they arranged this little surprise.”
“Wait, Herman. What do you do in New Guinea to make a living?”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it a living, Ed.”
“What do you do there?”
“I became a Catholic bishop, Ed. I’m a Franciscan bishop and we build hospitals there for the natives.”
Ed shook his head at how this man, whom he had long thought dead, who had come so close to death at the hands of the Nazis, had in fact survived and grown up to save lives in Indonesia, and he thought of all the other lives, millions of them, that would have been saved by the blameless Catholics and Jews who had not made it out of the Holocaust alive.
It was only well after the war that Flora began to see her childhood for what it was: a miserable drama played out with millions of others as part of a tragedy whose scope neither she nor the world would ever be able to comprehend. Yet Flora didn’t know the entire truth even of her own drama. What of her memories of life at the convent? In the 1960s, she returned there, looking for answers, where she was confronted by a middle-age nun behind the same black iron grille.
“I was hidden here during the war,” Flora said. “I wanted to thank you for saving my life.”
“I was here, but I wasn’t one of those involved with the children,” the nun replied. “The ones who looked after you”—she rattled off a list of sisters—“I’m sorry to say that they’ve all died.”
It felt like a rebuke to Flora for not having come sooner, on top of which the nun proceeded to lecture Flora, at that point a confirmed atheist, about the importance of religion.
“You don’t have to be a Catholic, you know, but you must be something.”
Flora returned to New York unsatisfied, but twenty years later, in the 1980s, a French friend, Ann, wrote Flora to say that, no, one of the nuns was still alive, the one who had been in charge of the children’s chorus back in 1943. She was retired to a cottage next to the convent. But how, Flora wondered, could the nun she’d seen in the 1960s not have been aware of her? Ann volunteered to visit the surviving nun on Flora’s behalf, and her subsequent letter to Flora proved how unreliable her memories had been. The old nun had been kind, Ann wrote, and said that she and others had tried so hard to reassure the children, urging them to play. The nun had, of course, understood the children’s need for affection; she herself had lost her mother at a young age. Yes, they had taught the Jewish children how to make the sign of the cross, but she emphasized only because of the Germans living across the street.
Flora could barely reconcile this information with her own scrapbook of grim memories at the convent. Surely they had resented the children. Surely they had resented the interruption of their life of silent devotion. She couldn’t possibly have hallucinated the nuns pacing and praying on the roof, their eyes heavenward. Flora couldn’t have invented her desperate wish that they look at her just once.
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.