The Voice of the Xenolith (22 page)

Take Brighton, for example. Now called Brighton and Hove, population 273,000 people. Look at the Ordnance Survey map, 1:25000 scale, where you can see the actual buildings in the town, drawn onto the map; then divide the town into four segments and cover up all of the houses in one of those segments using a permanent black marker. That’s what happens when you murder one quarter of a population.

Maybe it is easier to grasp if I look at a town which has a population of the same number as the number of Jews who were murdered. For example, Weymouth and its neighbouring area, Portland. We have had seaside holidays in Weymouth, and of course my dad couldn’t resist analysing the sand there because it is a beach with unusually fine sand; the size of each sand grain is one of the smallest in the whole of the UK. They have sandcastle building competitions there, and sand sculpture festivals, because the sand is so fine that it sticks together and makes it easier to build sandcastles. And we have visited Portland to look at the quarries where Portland stone is found, because my dad thought it would be an educational trip for me and Jasper. Portland stone is a limestone and is still being quarried there; it was used in St Paul’s Cathedral as well as Buckingham Palace.

Weymouth and Portland. Population, 65,100.

Kill them all.

Here is another analogy: the street where you live. A quarter of all people means that out of all the people who live in your street, every fourth person would be taken away and murdered.

Or take your own house, that’s a good analogy. Take a family like mine, my mom and dad and me and Jasper. One of us would be murdered.

There is actually no way to know what a number like 73,221 means. It is too big for our minds to manage. So maybe it makes it possible to imagine all those deaths if we just think of the two of them, Ignace and Andre, two brothers who came to France to find a better life and who died the worst death you can imagine

I originally planned to go to France for my fourteenth birthday, but I just couldn’t wait that long. I was almost burning with the need to find out more about Ignace and to find out soon.

It took a lot of negotiation with my parents to let me have my birthday trip in advance, in fact nine months before the actual birthday, but I did it, and we, my mom and Mrs. E. and I, went in the last week of the school holidays.

We took the Eurostar to Paris and then the Metro from Gare du Nord and got off at Cadet Station. This must have been the Metro station which the police closed off when they were doing the arrests that night in June 1942, so that even if someone did manage to run away he would not be able to go far.

We walked down the big road with all the shops which I had seen on Google Street View: Rue de Maubege. It was quite a long walk and at first I thought we had made a mistake and come to the wrong place. But then I saw the travel agent’s shop sign, and the art gallery, and between the two, the little opening to the alleyway.

I peered down the alley; I was scared to walk in, just in case someone was there and they saw us. I somehow needed this moment to be all on my own. To be quiet, unheard and unseen.

Mrs. E. and my mother were being sensitive. I knew this because I overheard them talking about it on the way, while we were still looking at the maps and finding the street. So they were hanging well back, because they knew how important it was for me to be there on my own, to be the first person to go where Ignace had been, knowing what I knew.

The alley looked strangely inviting; not at all how I had pictured it. I had imagined it as desolate or ruined, a place of war and fear, but on this sunny day in 2014 I saw beautiful antique street lamps, and pink and red geraniums blossoming in pots on windowsills, behind decorative wrought-iron window grilles. The houses were neatly painted and the street was spotlessly clean. In the sunshine on the day I was there, it looked such a pleasant place, such a happy place.

I couldn’t get my mind to accept two such different things at the same time. On the one hand it was such a pretty scene, and at the very same time I could imagine, so clearly that it might have been real, that horrific night scene, with its group of uniformed police, with guns and with dogs, taking people away.

It was a very strange feeling, because I had been looking for Ignace for such a long time, and now I felt so close to him, as if I could just walk down the alley and knock on the door of number 12 and talk to him.

At first, for one shameful second, I had that familiar feeling of the excitement of discovery, of finally finding what you have been searching for, for so long. But this was very, very different. This time, finding what I had been looking for was heartbreaking.

Ignace was a person, a man who had had parents, who had wanted a better life. He lived not millions of years ago but only seventy years ago. Ignace could even have been a person in Mrs. E.’s family. Ignace had a younger brother, just like I do. And Ignace was murdered in the most horrible way imaginable.

I thought about my list of ‘
re
’ words.
Remember, reveal, reclaim
. And then I thought of my new list: the ‘pro’ words.
Protect and protest
. If I was hoping to protect my fossils, and my ideas, and Jasper, and the memory of Ignace, it was not enough to find out the information and to write it in my notebooks. Ignace did not need me to be cataloguing the facts of his life and death in the way I catalogue my fossils. He did not need me to collect the information about his life and to keep it safe in a private notebook which only I would ever read, safe in my room.

You can’t really protect anything without protesting against its being destroyed or lost. And you can’t protest if you remain silent.

I took one step into the alleyway and stopped there because I was having a minor Heart Attacker. This is where the police had come into the alleyway, and at the other end, in the shadow, I could see how the passage was blocked, so even if you wanted to run you couldn’t get away through the other end. This was where he lived and just there he would have bought his croissant every morning on his way to work and here was the front door of his flat where the police had stood with their guns, and here he was led away at gunpoint by the French police, and taken to Drancy.

I wrote this paper for my English teacher even though the school year was over and I was moving up a class and I would have a whole new bunch of teachers. But it felt like I hadn’t really finished the story, so I sent her this paper in the post, even though I didn’t need to do it and I wasn’t ever going to get any marks or credit for it.

Searching for Ignace Edelstein (Part 3)

By Amethyst Simons

This is what I think it was like for Ignace Edelstein, in the days before he was arrested by the French police for being a Jew.

He and Andre lived in a small, narrow passageway between two rows of rather grand buildings. Even though their flat was small, and rather dark, it was in a very good area, near the centre of town.

Their flat was, for Ignace, in the perfect place: central, around the corner from a bakery where they bought their daily baguettes or croissants on the way to work. And nearby, in the same area, were other artists, and other jewellers and designers, leading the way in Parisian design. It was what he had dreamed of, and it was for this that he had left Turkey and moved to Paris.

Perhaps he worked for a firm which manufactured jewellery for the famous jewellery house, Bernard Herz. Herz was an important dealer in stones and pearls in Paris, and his company was known all over Europe.

One of the top designers of that time, Suzanne Belperron, who even designed some jewellery for royalty, and whose work to this day is in museum collections and is sold on auctions and is worth a fortune, worked with the Herz jewellery house. Her designs were new and different; she broke away from the style of jewellery of the time. She tried using different materials: instead of making jewellery in the usual way, setting precious stones in metal, she used stones, crystals and quartz, as settings, and then inlaid precious stones into the carved stone.

Stone into stone.

And that is why Ignace loved his work so much: he could work with stone, shape it, and make it look like it was soft and curved instead of hard and angular. He could polish it to make it shine like metal or finish it so it looked matte or rough.

Perhaps he became known at the Herz house as the maker who could carry out her new designs, who could see her vision. Perhaps they were a good team, he and Suzanne Belperron.

Ignace loved his work and he was good at it. He was surrounded by other jewellers, working in a large, brightly-lit workshop. He worked quietly, slowly and carefully; his work was precise and accurate, and he became known for the perfection of his creations.

Every day there were new designs, and the technicians had to invent new techniques to achieve the look the designers wanted. They were working with precious metals and exquisite precious stones, and there was a feeling of excitement because they were searching and learning and finding new ways to do things, but at the same time working with absolute accuracy so as not to damage the stones in any way.

Then the war started. Germany invaded France in May 1940. Paris was taken, or maybe gave up the fight, on June 14th 1940. By 1941 all of France was suffering: there were food shortages and fuel shortages. The German army requisitioned anything they could use for their building projects and for their war.

There were new laws all the time, affecting mostly Jews. Jews were not allowed to own businesses or work in certain jobs. Jews were not allowed to change their address. They had to sit in the last carriage on the Metro. Jewish shop windows were being marked out. Synagogues were vandalized and destroyed. Jews were not allowed to have a phone in their house, or to use a public phone.

On the 20th of August, 1941, the French police raided Jewish homes in the 11th District of Paris, not far from where Ignace and Andre lived, and arrested more than four thousand Jews. Most of them were foreign, not French-born Jews. They were the first to be sent to Drancy.

Nobody knew what would become of the people arrested, if or when they might be released.

Rumours were flying. Jews were not allowed to meet in public places like parks and theatres and cafes. Some people left Paris and tried to escape to the South, and a few of Ignace’s friends tried to go back to Turkey, but they were turned back at the border because they had no papers or the wrong papers.

Ignace and Andre stayed on in their flat. Ignace carried on working, in spite of the growing feelings of fear and despair.

Andre had been working late recently. Ignace was worried: Andre had become secretive, going out at odd times and coming back late. Whenever Ignace asked him where he had been, all he would say was “Better you don’t ask.”