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Holocaust's Children, One by One by One
THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1997 By ANNE ROIPHE FROM 1941 to 1945, at the urging of the Gestapo, 11,402 Jewish children were rounded up by the all-too-cooperative French police. The children were then transported in boxcars, a three-day journey that ended at the death camps, where virtually all were immediately slaughtered. The transit lists, meticulous German records of convoy numbers and names, included girls and boys, French citizens and refugees. The children were usually rounded up from their homes or the streets, separated from their parents, sent to the Drancy camp, which was guarded by the French police, and from there, like so much waste, disposed of in the East. Only 300 of these children survived: the oldest, the strongest, the luckiest. An exhibition of more than 200 photographs of the children, at the New School in Greenwich Village, is based on the recent book "French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial," by Serge Klarsfeld, the French historian and renowned Nazi-hunter. Mr. Klarsfeld gathered individual photographs of 2,500 of the children along with their home addresses in France and the date and number of the convoy on which each child was deported. What is the point? What is the point, so long after the event? It's about the numbness that follows the numbers themselves. We can't contain, comprehend, mourn the whole of this tragedy. The abstract faceless pile of numbers dehumanizes the children once again." But the photographs — in their detail, in their specific claim on our attention — bring the children back from oblivion, allow us to imagine them, alone and frightened, in the dark of the train car, thirsty, hungry, confused, pushed and pulled, crying or not, dresses and knickers soiled: the smell of urine, fear everywhere. When we see their faces and we know what lies ahead, the breath stops, the mind stands still. As we search each individual face, identity is returned. Dignity is restored. From an anonymous mass of bone and ash, they become again Henri, Annette, Rachel and Isadore. Human children who look at you boldly, sweetly, clear-eyed, clutching toy dogs, woolly lambs, a doll. In the photographs — just family photographs, some posed formally, some snapshots — we see the child as the focus of someone's admiration, someone's deep regard. We see coats with velvet collars and boys with hair combed, women with hats at jaunty angles, small polished shoes and tiny white socks that someone has carefully folded just over the ankle. We see Liliane Segal, age 9, wearing a white tulle fairy costume with a paper tiara on her head. We see Jean-ine Stickgold at 16, a gold bracelet on her wrist; we see Berte Poznanski with a white bow pinned in her hair. We see Continued on Page C5 Michael Benicar, with his ears sticking out, who was 6 when arrested on D-Day and was deported on convoy 76 on June 30, 1944. We see whole families gathered in the park before the camera, father, mother, sister, wearing the fatal yellow star that marked Jews for extinction. We see 3-year-old Serge-Max Borstcher, whose mouth turns down at the corners as he looks sullenly at the camera. He was deported on convoy 21 on Aug. 19, 1942. We see handsome Georges-Andre Kohn, 12, wearing a tie and a white shirt, a mischievous look in his eye. He was deported to Auschwitz on the last convoy, on Aug. 17, 1944. He was taken to the Neuengamme camp, where he was used in medical experiments and injected with the tuberculin bacilli. He was hanged the day before the camp's liberation, in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm, a school that housed the inhumane human laboratory in Hamburg. The Dutch writer Abel Herzberg, who survived Bergen-Belsen, has said that six million Jews were not killed, but rather one Jew was killed, and then another and another, and this was repeated six million times. It is this need to reclaim the singularity, the humanness of these children who lived at a particular address, had reached a particular age, had his or her own talents, bad habits, gripes, grudges, loves, ambitions, best friend, favorite food, fear of dogs or vacuum cleaners, limitations, possibilities, that stands behind the 30 panels that make up this exhibition. There are two panels devoted to the town of Izieu, where Klaus Barbie, chief of the Gestapo in Lyons, France, had 44 children sent to their death. We see him in handcuffs, one of the few murderers who died in prison. There are several panels that explain the history of the period and display the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Third Reich. Most striking is the photo of a large poster showing the body of Marianne, a woman representing France, being devoured by a huge Jewish vulture. The poster hangs on the wall behind some people on a bench waiting for the Metro. There is a panel that shows us the photographs of the boys who inspired Louis Malle's film "Au Revoir les Enfants," the story of how three Jewish boys hidden in a school were ultimately sent to their deaths. There is a panel devoted to the work of Mr. Klarsfeld, and his wife, Beate, who have courageously searched for Nazi criminals and confronted indifferent Governments in Europe and South America, devoting themselves to justice for those who can no longer ask for it themselves. (The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation has donated a collection of the book's images to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, which is to open in Manhattan this summer.) At last one finds a panel of survivors. There is a photo of Simone Jacob Veil, who became a minister in the French Government and served as President of the European Parliament. What other leaders, scientists, artists, potters, parents, collectors of butterflies, were lost as the trains moved relentlessly toward Auschwitz? Among the survivors was Ernest Nives, one of the sponsors of this exhibition. We see him as a 4-year-old child wearing a big bow at his neck and short pants. He sits on his mother's lap, near his big brother and father. He and his mother were deported to Auschwitz on convoy 32 on Sept. 14, 1942. His mother did not return from the camps. After the war, he came to the United States. "The Nazis were sure that these innocent children would be forgotten and nobody would care," he says. "We have now proven them wrong. We have rewritten a page of the Holocaust history." This exhibition was curated by Joke Kniesmeyer, a Dutch historian who has worked at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. Its brilliance lies in its spare simplicity, one that leaves room for the viewer to absorb and respond to the identity of each child as well as to the general historical facts. The photos are so large and evocative that you feel as if you have directly encountered the children, time frozen, death near. The panels are lighted from behind and as you move from one to another around the lobby of the New School, you gradually become more patient with the text and more drawn to the eyes of the children, to their specific names and faces. There is no way to avoid the shock of this exhibition: even complete knowledge of Holocaust history doesn't protect the viewer. Ms. Kniesmeyer, who was born in 1948, said that at age 11 or 12 she noticed the empty sections of Amsterdam where the 70,000 Jews had once lived. "These were lovely children," she said. "They all had a life in front of them. I want people to see this exhibit and remember how easy it was to let the idea grow that some children were alien and could be killed, some children acceptable and some not. It is ideology that divides the children this way. This has to be stopped." She speaks of Bosnia and Rwanda and says, "It is still happening." The Holocaust was at once particular and universal. We recognize that these children's faces are entirely, specifically their own, and yet they remind us of children everywhere. Now, 52 years later, the French are beginning to come to terms with their part in this cruel history. The Vichy head of police, Maurice Papon, is just now, in his 80's, coming to trial. Rene Bousquet, the national police chief under the Nazi occupation, held French Government positions long after the war, but his criminal history is at last acknowledged. Paul Touvier, the militia chief of Lyons, was protected by some in the Roman Catholic Church for too long but was finally convicted of ordering executions. We now know that the much-vaunted heroic Resistance was small and that the trains kept right on carrying children to their deaths while too many French citizens turned their heads. The Bal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, said that "forgetting is exile and remembering is redemption." Maybe so, but in this matter it seems as if exile is permanent and redemption all but impossible. There has been so much talk lately about the cause of the Holocaust. The historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen makes the point that eliminationist anti-Semitism drove the engine, but so of course did virulent human sadism. And there's still something to be said for Hannah Arendt's banality of evil theory, and the disastrous Versailles Treaty played its role, and, yes, we can speak of crowd behavior, of tribal enmities programmed into the primitive human brain. But in the end, as we look at the pictures of these children, all reason fails. Alfred Kazin, speaking at Barnes & Noble on upper Broadway the other night, said, "I just don't understand how people could hate so much." And as you walk through this exhibition, which gives us, after all, only the tiniest fraction of the whole, just a faint wisp of the smoke that devoured so many, you can't understand, you can't grasp; you may wish for vengeance or for justice, but both wishes are futile. The chill of bitterness freezes the mind. Faces and Souls The photography exhibition "French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial Exhibition" will be on view at the New School, 65 Fifth Avenue (between 13th and 14th Streets), Greenwich Village, through March 6. Admission is free. Hours: Mondays through Thursdays, 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 6 P.M., and Sundays, 2 to 8 P.M. Information: (212)229-5684. The exhibition, which is presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the Institute for Retired Professionals at the New School, was financed by the Steven H. and Alida Brill Scheuer Foundation; Ernest Nives, French Children of the Holocaust Foundation, and the Titus Foundation. Anne Roiphe, who frequently writes about Jewish themes, is the author of "Season for Healing, about the Holocaust. Her most recent book is "Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World." |
