The Voice of the Xenolith (17 page)

I searched some more, and found that the convoy had left from a place called Drancy, and travelled to Auschwitz.

I read some more. Drancy, in Paris, was a detention centre where Jews arrested by the French police and later by the Germans were held before being sent by train to Auschwitz. Between 1941 and 1944, Jews were sent by their tens of thousands on trains from Drancy to Auschwitz.

So I now had a third piece of landscape. I did another drawing, this time with three circles. One circle on the right hand side of the page, to show Turkey in the East, and one on the left side of the page, for France, and a third circle towards the middle of the page, slightly higher up, for Poland which is to the North-East of France. I now had three places.

And three dates: date of birth, date of convoy, date of death.

I didn’t know what date he was arrested, when he was actually taken from his house somewhere in France and taken to Drancy, but I knew he was taken from Drancy on Convoy number 3 on the 22
nd
of June, and it was 22 days later, on the 14
th
of July, that he was murdered in Auschwitz.

You may be wondering why I was so curious about Ignace. I know I used to think, quite often, when Mrs. E. was asking me questions over and over, that she was taking her curiosity too far, and sometimes, I admit, it drove me mad.

But curiosity is useful. I remember her talking to me, when I was six, about why I had trouble talking in school. She was curious. She said, “Nobody really knows. I wonder… maybe it was because you had all those years of travelling when you were little, when you were talking only with your mom and dad, because all the people around you in those other countries didn’t even speak your own language? And then suddenly you had to stay in one country and go to school and speak to people who were not your mom and dad. Maybe that was a bit scary? I wonder…”

One of Mrs. E.’s favourite strategies is using the phrase ‘I wonder.’ She used it often in those days, and she still does. Perhaps you could call it a
Strategy of Wondering
. Or maybe,
The Strategy of Curiosity.

I have already told you that there is a lot Mrs. E. doesn’t know, and then she gets this look in her eye, a kind of sideways and upwards look, and she puts her hand on her chin, and says “Hmm… I wonder, I’m curious, what if…” and then we get into these conversations, about all kinds of things, nothing to do with the things we are supposed to be working on.

So in that way she is very different from other teachers, because the only thing most teachers seem to be curious about is why I refuse to do homework, or why I have an Attitude.

Curiosity. It is something my dad has, for sure. Every time he goes onto a new site, exploring a new desert, he has to find out things he didn’t know before, and if he wasn’t curious he probably wouldn’t find out anything. We talked about it a few times before his last trip, because he was telling us about someone on his team, and how that person was a world expert in methodology, how to do chemical tests on sand and how to send robots into the desert to collect samples, but what he lacked was curiosity. My dad was asking him questions and this colleague kept saying, “Wow, I never thought of that. We need to look into that!”

So I was also curious. I wanted to know more about Ignace. I went to the school library but they had very little on the Holocaust. The school librarian suggested I go to my local municipal library; they sent me to the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide.

It was through the Wiener Library that I unearthed more. The librarian there showed me four thick, heavy books, the work of two people, Serge and Beata Klarsfeld, who documented the actions of the Germans in France during the war. The Klarsfelds were Nazi hunters and tried to find, and to bring to trial, people who were killers during the war and who had walked free afterwards, with no consequences for what they had done.

The Klarsfelds spent years tracking and collecting the documents on which the Nazis had listed every person arrested, every person taken to a detention camp, every person deported to a concentration camp, and every person murdered.

The thought of people making lists of their murder victims made me suddenly wonder whether my lists of words, and of fossil names, meant that perhaps I was actually as weird as my classmates think. But of course there is a huge difference: I don’t actually murder people to get them onto my lists.

Serge Klarsfeld knew what he was doing when he started this work, because he had been a Jewish child in France at that time, and he too was at risk of being caught and murdered. His father was taken in 1943, and Serge and his mother and sister hid in a false partition in a cupboard to avoid arrest.

When the Nazis broke into the building and beat up their friends and neighbours, they could hear everything. They heard the screaming and the shouting for help. He and his mother and sister stayed hidden, they made not a sound, and were not found and not taken.

So Serge Klarsfeld knew something about silence. Their survival in that cupboard depended on their absolute silence. But after the war he broke his silence, and he started to tell the world about what the Nazis had done. The Klarsfelds spent years searching for documents detailing what had happened in those years, and they put together a list of every single Jew who had lived in France and had been deported or killed or sent to a camp during that war. The list is called ‘Memorial to Jews Deported from France.’

They counted the names and it added up to 75,721 Jews. They realised that there may have been more; some names were lost, and some were spelled incorrectly.

Some were babies who didn’t know or couldn’t say their own names, so their names are not on the lists.

I thought about that number: 75,721. All those people, shouting their names from the lists.

On the Klarsfeld documents, each name is listed in a very organised way: first the surname, then the first name, then date of birth, place of birth, nationality, and the number and date of the train convoy which took them from France to the concentration camps.

I found that the lists are published online and you can search for a name through the Klarsfeld website. I scrolled down the list to the ‘E’s and I found his name. Edelstein, Ignace. There is also a photocopy of a typed document, now faded, so it is not easy to read; you have to look carefully. Just as I had read in the first list I had found, the one with the names of Sephardic Jews deported from France, there was his name, date of birth, place of birth, convoy number 3, and the date of the convoy’s departure from France to Auschwitz. I suppose the other website had got their information from the Klarsfeld list.

But what was new for me in this Klarsfeld list was an address and a profession.

Address: 12 Impasse Briare, 9
th
Arondissement, Paris. Profession: jeweller.

I had to get up and walk away from the computer because it was too much, in one go, to find out. I couldn’t take it all in. So few words, just an address and a profession, but suddenly he was a person, someone who had a house and a job and who went to work and went home and went to sleep and got up the next day to go to work again, making jewellery.

I stood by the window of the Wiener library for a few minutes and went back to the computer.

I had a thousand questions I would have wanted to ask. I looked at the list again. The font is very small, you have to keep looking, you have to get your eye in just like when you are looking for fossils, and you never know what you might find. I read his name over and over, trying to imagine him as a person and not as a name on a list.

Then I went back to the first list I had found and looked for other people with the same surname. There was another name, right above Ignace’s name: Andre Edelstein. Also born in Constantinople.

Date of birth 24th April 1907; sent from Drancy, in Paris, to Auschwitz on Convoy number 46, 9
th
February 1943.

Surely this was Ignace’s brother. Born in the same city. Four years younger than Ignace.

Back to the Klarsfeld lists for the address. The same address in Paris: Impasse Briare.

I was struck by such a shock, I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t a Heart Attacker moment, it was something different. Something emerging, something changing, and it seemed like suddenly two real people had appeared, standing just there, near the window at the side of the Wiener library where a soft beam of sunlight falls diagonally. A man and his brother.

I have been listening to stories since I can remember. My parents began reading to me when I was still a baby; my mother made up those little stories when she was teaching me to read; teachers were always reading storybooks to us in class. These days I mostly read detective stories: I am never without a book.

I suppose I have been imagining stories forever too; definitely before I started school, and even after I started school, when I was not speaking.

You don’t need to speak to make up a good story.

And I did that in my speech therapy sessions too, in Mrs. E.’s room, when I was five. She had that tool box, the one with all the little dividers like my fossil boxes, with those lovely miniature toys. She would ask me which characters I wanted to play with during that session, and I would choose a few, maybe two animals and one doll.

I would also take out three or four props, perhaps some toy furniture, or a car or some pretend food, and I would start to play. I didn’t tell the story with words; I just moved the pieces around and made up scenes and things that happened to the little dolls and animals. What Mrs. E. did was to watch my characters, and notice what they were doing, and then she would tell my story for me. She put into words what my characters did, and she described what happened to them.

So I didn’t have to speak; she spoke for me, but it was my own story and she never tried to change anything in my story. She just said the words that I was thinking.

Then she would write my stories down in her foolscap notepads and she would pull the pages out and give them to me. Each page had two punched holes on the side so I could take them home to add them to a story folder, and I could read them any time I wanted to. I have them to this day, and one day, when my mom decides to publish her stories, maybe Mrs. E. and I will publish these stories too. But until then they are just little stories which helped Mrs. E. to know what my characters were doing in their lives, even though I couldn’t tell her with words because I wasn’t yet speaking to her.

So the information I was discovering about Ignace was starting to feel like a story, a story about two brothers. Except that I didn’t have anything to put in the story besides two people’s names, a few place names, and some dates.

I started working with the dates and counting: How many days Ignace had lived between his arrest and his death, how many months between his arrest and Andre’s arrest; how many other people were on the convoy with him. The numbers and dates started going round and round in my head and I was spending hours with paper and pencil and a calculator, counting and calculating days and months.

Andre, if he was really the brother of Ignace, was deported to Auschwitz eight months after his brother. Only seven days before what would have been his brother’s fortieth birthday, in February. But by then Ignace was dead.

Had they been able to communicate at all since the day that Ignace was arrested? How come Andre was not taken the same day that Ignace was, if they lived at the same address? Had Andre hidden? Was that why they didn’t find him until nearly a year after they had taken Ignace?

Before he was taken, did Andre think he might be safe, that they had taken all the Jews they were going to take, that they had got enough dead Jews by now?

Another number: Andre was four years younger than his brother Ignace. Jasper is four and a half years younger than me.

I sat in the Wiener library for hours reading about Drancy, the camp where Jewish people were sent to await their transport to Auschwitz. I read about the horrific conditions there, the overcrowding, the sadistic guards, the filth and illness and the lack of food and medicine and the constant presence of death; the parents searching for their children because sometimes the Nazis took parents without their children, and sometimes they took children without their parents.