Here's a third piece that I have recently written for History Works and Professor Helen Weinstein to be used by school students for their presentations. It was for this year's Holocaust Memorial day.
At mealtimes
our father would say to us:
‘You know - I had two French uncles
they lived in France.
They were there before the war
but they weren’t there at the end.’
We sat there
not knowing what to think.
‘What happened to them?’
We’d say.
‘I don’t know,’ he’d say
‘They probably died in the camps,’
he’d say.
Camps?
What camps?
We didn’t know about camps
where people went
and never came back..
It was mysterious
and awful.
It made us sad
and afraid.
My brother said
it gave him nightmares…
l thought of the Tower of London
dark grey,
the prison
the torture chamber in there.
I didn’t know what they were really like.
As years went by
I found out about these camps.
I started to research
to find out what happened to my father’s uncles:
I went to libraries
I looked online
I wrote emails.
I went to America
to talk to relatives there.
More libraries
more searching online
more emails.
Bit by bit
I started to find things
about my father’s two uncles.
Martin and Jeschie.
It’s like I was tracking them down.
I found out that Martin and Jeschie
lived in eastern France
but when the war broke out
they - like millions of others
took to the roads.
they fled to the villages and towns of western France
They called it The Exodus.
Let me tell you about what happened to Martin.
I found a trace of him
first in a little seaside place
with a group of others from the east.
Because they were Jewish
they had to wear a yellow star.
One document said that Martin
refused to use his clothing ration
to make the yellow star.
Then he moved to a village inland.
I wondered:
did he run away?
Was he in trouble because he protested about the
yellow star?
He was with his brother-in-law - who was not Jewish -
and they were staying with a landlady.
I wondered
were they hiding?
It was 1943.
Everyone knew that Jews were being rounded up
and deported.
No one knew where they were being deported to
but they knew that no one was coming back.
They called this place Pitchipoï.
One day,
the German Kommandant in the nearest city
issued a command.
‘All Jews present in the region must be arrested in the first hours of January 31, 1944 and they must be transferred as soon as possible to the closed camp of Drancy’.
The command went to the Prefect.
The Prefect gave the command to the Sub-Prefect.
The Sub-Prefect gave the command to the French police:
the gendarmes.
On that One Day
January 31, 1944
at 2.30 in the morning
four gendarmes called at the door of Martin’s landlady.
Martin opened the door,
the gendarmes arrested him
and they took him to the nearby town
where other gendarmes gathered together
all the Jews of the region.
Then the gendarmes wrote up their report.
I wonder did they do this back at the police station
or in the village cafe, perhaps?
They wrote that Martin Rozen
was born on 18 August 1890
in Krosniewice in Poland.
They wrote that he was naturalised French
they wrote that he was of the Jewish race.
They wrote that he was 1m 62 tall.
with dark brown hair,
brown eyes
he had a scar
he had an oval face.
He was wearing yellow cotton trousers
and a grey cotton jacket.
Were these his pyjamas, I wondered.
It was the middle of the night.
He was wearing a Basque beret
- had he put it on to be polite?
I wondered.
He was wearing flat shoes on his feet.
Were they his bedroom slippers?
I wondered.
All four gendarmes signed the report.
That’s what they did on that One Day.
That was their work.
Martin was taken to the Drancy Camp
from there he was taken to Paris Bobigny station
where he was put into a cattle truck
on a train that went straight from Paris
to Auschwitz
This was Convoy 68,
carrying 1500 Jewish men, women and children
on one day February 10 1944.
Out of the 1500, 42 came back.
Martin was not one of them.
I often look
at the gendarmes’ report.
It’s careful.
It’s neat.
it has a lot of detail.
The details of what happened
on that One day
January 31 1944
That’s why my father said to us,
‘You know - I had two French uncles
they lived in France
They were there before the war
but they weren’t there at the end.’
But my father didn’t live long enough
for me to tell him
what I had found out about
what happened to Martin.
He never knew.