Read The Voice of the Xenolith Online

Authors: Cynthia Pelman

The Voice of the Xenolith (18 page)

What had Ignace been thinking while he was there? He must have been desperately worried about his younger brother. And when Andre got to Drancy, eight months later, he must have known Ignace had been there. Did he search for him in the hope that he was still there? Andre must have felt a double loss now: to be where Ignace had last been, and not to find him there; and to know now for sure that he was gone, but not to know more. Because at that time the fate of those who were sent from Drancy by train was not yet known.

I read about those trains, jam-packed full of people, too many to leave space to sit down, no food or water or toilets. I imagined the trains starting to move slowly, then picking up speed, then the long, long trip, hour after hour, nobody knowing where they would end up and how they could survive this journey.

Things were suddenly moving too fast. I remembered the strategy Mrs. E. taught me to use if I felt that I wasn’t comfortable in her session, if I felt scared or worried or if I couldn’t breathe or if she was making the changes happen too fast, too many steps at a time. I just had to put up my hand, like a stop sign, and she would know I wasn’t happy, and we would do something different; she might give me a different game to play with, or maybe go and make tea while I calmed down a bit.

I wished I could put up a hand and stop this happening to Ignace, maybe even stop the convoy, but it was going too fast.

There were other detention centres in France where Jews were held before being sent to concentration camps, but Drancy was the biggest. Altogether, 67,400 Jews were deported from Drancy during the war, in a total of 64 train transports.

Ignace’s transport, convoy number 3, was made up of 1000 people; 933 men and 66 women. Of those, only 24 men and 5 women were alive after the war.

Andre’s convoy, number 46, also had 1000 people. How meticulous those Nazis were, making sure that everything was so precise, so exact. Precisely 1000 people per convoy.

Looking at Andre’s convoy details in the Klarsfeld list I found a new category, which had not been there in 1942 when Ignace was taken: “Gassed on arrival.”

From Andre’s convoy, 77 men and 92 women were selected to work at Auschwitz. The rest, 816 people, were gassed on arrival. After the war, 21 men and 7 women were alive from Andre’s convoy.

There were also children on those convoys: 11,400 children in total. I found another list, also compiled by Serge Klarsfeld, titled ‘French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial.’ This book includes photographs – not that many photographs survived the displacement and imprisonment in concentration camps – but the Klarsfelds carefully collected what they could and published them in the book, along with the list of names.

I saw that in the first convoys very few children were included; that came later. There was only one child on Convoy number 3, on the train with Ignace. Jacques Bronfman, age 17.

Somebody’s child. A teenager like me. A boy like Jasper.

I started to understand how a real guardian, a responsible Guardian of Memory might feel: you start to live with that person, you find your life connected with his in strange ways, and you wonder what you will discover next, and the more you find out the worse the news gets and the more horrific the story and your heart is beating as fast as a Heart Attacker but you know you can’t stop looking now.

That’s when the hopelessness of responsibility started to become clear to me.

In the meantime my life was going on as usual at school and at home. Jasper was still irritating me and I was still irritating some of my teachers. And all my spare time was now spent online, searching for Ignace.

I hadn’t told my parents; they thought that my visits to the Wiener library were for some school project. I didn’t know how to tell them, and I also thought, maybe there is nothing to tell yet, I have found out so little.

But one day, when I was at Mrs. E. working on a paper I had to write, because even though I had done a successful oral presentation and there were no new complaints about me from the teachers, my parents thought I should keep seeing her until the end of that school term, I decided to tell her.

When I told Mrs. E. what I was doing, and what I had found out, she was quiet for a while. I thought perhaps she wasn’t pleased I was doing all this searching; after all she was the real, the official Guardian of his Memory; she had the certificate and she had the right to do it herself. I hoped she wouldn’t feel that I had hijacked her certificate or stepped on her toes somehow.

But what she said, after she had been quiet for a while, was that however old she is, she is always learning something new, and what she learned that day was that some people of thirteen are ten times as wise as people of sixty-three.

She said that if I needed help with this project she would be happy to help me, but that I must guide her; I must tell her if I needed her to join in the search and what I wanted her to search for, because I was now in charge. And even if I didn’t need any help, she said she would be ‘most grateful’ if I told her what I found out, because that way we could both be the guardians of the memory of Ignace Edelstein, and the more we knew about him the better we could remember him.

23
Changes

I wasn’t doing homework, I wasn’t working on my notebooks or my dictionary, and I wasn’t sleeping well.

I was searching.

I started to think about where the brothers had lived when they were caught. The address said it was in the 9
th
Arondissement in Paris. I looked at online maps of Paris and found out that Paris is divided into areas, called Arondissements. The 9
th
has some wide streets, some big department stores, some museums and galleries and the beautiful old Opera House.

I enlarged the online maps and I found the street. Then I looked on Google Street View and saw it as it is today, as it would look if you were there, standing in the street.

The place where Ignace lived is not an actual street but a narrow alley, a passageway, between two rows of big buildings with beautiful wrought iron balconies. If you look on Google Street View you can see the shops at street level: a travel agency on one side of the alleyway and an art gallery or maybe a framer on the other side of the alleyway. I think the buildings might have been really grand and expensive once, but it doesn’t look like a very posh street now, just an ordinary street with shops downstairs and flats above and quite a lot of traffic going by. In the Street View photograph the narrow entrance to the alleyway is half obscured by a traffic light; I wished the person taking the pictures for Street View had managed to avoid it, because it was blocking my view.

I trawled through the internet for hours and found, published online, a very old photograph, in black and white, or maybe it is sepia, taken of that passage. The photograph was taken in the early days of photography, in 1860, and it was clearly the same place I could see on Street View. I printed it and framed it; it is sitting on my desk now as I write.

In another place on the Klarsfeld website I found a copy of Ignace’s death certificate. The Nazis were so efficient: they wrote everything down, and kept every piece of evidence of their deeds. Not even an attempt to hide it or to cover it up.

This is a copy of the exact words, from the Nazi death certificate, written in Auschwitz, for Ignace:

‘Edelstein, Ignace (1903-02-16 1942-07-14)

Birthplace: Konstantinopel, Residence: Paris IX,
Religion: Jew.’

And that was it. Those were all the facts I could find.

I wanted to know why he had moved, why he had gone from Turkey to Paris, why he had made that fateful change which led to his death.

I know something about change of place. Not just because my family has done so much travelling, and not just because of changing schools, but also because of something else I suddenly remembered.

Back when I was six years old, after about a year of therapy in Mrs. E.’s house, she told me we would soon stop having our sessions at her office; instead she would have a room at the school and I would see her there. She told me we would have the same toys, the box with the miniatures and the tree house, and we would have our own room, but it would be at the school.

That was a big change for me. Much bigger than that day when she had come to visit my classroom and had sat there quietly saying nothing.

I was not happy with that, not at all. I didn’t want any changes. I didn’t want to be at school anyway, and I definitely didn’t want Mrs. E. to become one of the school teachers. But it was not up to me, and a month later she had a new room at the school. It was a tiny room, which used to be where they kept the overflow books which didn’t fit in the library, so it was not nearly as nice as the room she had in her own house.

Also there was a strange smell there, a kind of damp smell. I suppose that was because we were in the basement. I hated that room and it took me a long time to stop being cross with Mrs. E. about the room. I checked to see if she had really brought all the games, our favourites, and the tree house, and sure enough she had, but it felt so strange, and it smelled so ugly, and I didn’t feel like talking there at all. The worst thing about it was, I never knew who would walk past or even walk right into the room while I was there.

And I thought that Mrs. E. should not have let that change happen.

Mrs. E. asked me to help her decorate the new room, because it had no pictures on the walls, and the cupboards were a big mess, with all her toys just dumped inside. So together we decided how to arrange the room, and she bought stacking boxes and I made labels with her label maker so that we could organise all the stationery and the coloured paper and the games. Slowly the room started to look more like a room I would want to be in, and she bought some pictures to hang up on the walls and it felt a bit more like home after that.

We carried on with our usual activities in the new room: playing word games, and making up stories with the characters from the tool box, and Mrs. E. carried on writing down my stories for me, which by that time I was able to tell her, because I had made so much progress in speech therapy. And gradually I forgave her for moving to the basement room in the school, although I never did get used to the smell, and one day when we played a game called ‘I wish’, what I said for my wish was that I wished we could go back to being in her old room, and walk through the stained glass colours of the entrance hall into her room which smelled like wild honeysuckle.

Now that I am older, I can see that she probably got me to help her decorate the room so that I would feel more familiar with it, so that I would feel I had some responsibility for that space, and perhaps I wouldn’t feel the effects of the change as so hurtful.

I wondered how Ignace managed his change, from Turkey in the East to Paris in the West; whether he found the change easy, and whether he later thought about the terrible consequences of the change he had made.

24
Tracking

I had nothing else I wanted to think about or write about, so I carried on handing in papers with the same title. My English teacher didn’t seem to mind; in fact she was becoming more and more interested in how my search was going, and asked if I would be willing to talk about this to the class, on Holocaust Memorial Day, but I refused. Politely.

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