The Voice of the Xenolith (25 page)

Lots of people say to me, what is so interesting about fossils? You find them, maybe the search is fun or exciting, but then you put them in a box, and there they stay. Stones don’t do anything, they don’t speak, so what is the point?

Well for me, there is a point, because fossils speak to me in the same way that sand speaks to my dad. You have to know how to listen inside the silence.

I am like a xenolith: a stone which lives surrounded by a completely different kind of stone. I am different from other kids, I don’t often fit in, and the voice of a xenolith isn’t often heard. You have to look hard to see a xenolith, and you have to listen carefully to hear what a xenolith can tell you.

I may not be a good speaker but I am a good listener. I had to listen very hard, for more than eight months, to be able to hear Ignace, because his voice was silenced when he was murdered. And now that I can hear him, I am a proper Guardian of his Memory: I participate in his life and that is how he can be remembered.

Of course Ignace would not have wanted to be silenced. He would have wanted to tell people who he was and what he did. He would have wanted to show people his work and to tell them what he was doing, to tell them about why he was such a perfectionist and how much he loved living in Paris. And he would have wanted to tell his parents that he tried to save Andre.

Something happened to me while I was searching for Ignace. I found, along the way, that my preferences shifted. Something happened to my strategy of silence, and something inside me changed. I will try to explain, but it’s not simple, and it’s not straightforward.

Maybe I can explain by using an analogy. In nature, things change with time. Even in geology. The sand dunes in the desert don’t stay the same; they shift with the wind. If you study rocks, you will know that there is a thing called a rock cycle: rocks are constantly changing, over time. They are weathered, they are heated and melted and compressed and mixed with other materials, and they are moved around the earth by volcanoes and earthquakes and continental drift.

So any rock you find, even if you can name it and describe its physical and chemical properties, is in the process of becoming something different.

If a rock can change, then so can a person.

In Bruce Chatwin’s book he describes how the people sing to keep the land alive.

So this book is my way of speaking about Ignace, or rather, of giving him a chance to make his own voice heard.

THE END

After I finished writing this book I went back to the Wiener library for one more visit, just in case I had missed something. I was trawling through the list, also painstakingly compiled by Serge Klarsfeld, of the names of every child who was deported from France by the Nazis. 11,400 in all.

It makes heartbreaking reading: whole families, sometimes five or six siblings, taken in one go, and sent to Auschwitz. I didn’t really know what I was searching for, as I had found all I could about Ignace and Andre. So I decided to look at every single home address given for the 11,400 children on this list, in the hope that I might find someone who might have lived on the same street as the brothers.

And after a few hours, incredibly, I found something. I found the names of two teenage girls, Sarah and Dora Kempinski, who lived at the same address as Ignace and Andre: 12, Impasse Briare, 9
th
Arondissement, Paris.

When I saw the address which had become so familiar to me, I wanted to shout, to say something, but everyone else in the library was sitting so quietly, working so hard, that I made myself stay quiet.

Sarah was born on 15
th
February 1926, and sent to the detention camp Pithiviers at age 16. She was deported on convoy number 13 on the 31
st
of July 1942. Dora, two years younger, was born 29
th
May 1928, and was sent, also via Pithiviers, on convoy 20, on August 17
th
1942, to Auschwitz.

I have not found their death certificates so I don’t know if they survived Auschwitz or not. I have searched for the names of the parents of these two girls without success. I have no idea why the girls were living at the same address as Ignace and Andre; I now presume that Ignace and Andre might have rented a room from the Kempinski family. But what happened to the girls’ parents? The only other people by that name, on the entire list of 75,721 people, lived in different towns, not in Paris.

So now I have something else to search for, after all.

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Copyright © Cynthia Pelman, 2015

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