[Editor’s Note: The catastrophe in Paris brought back historic memories for the journalist Ms. Brownstein. “Many people think, especially because of recent terrorism acts and demonstrations,” she says, “that France is totally against Jews. But the Shoah memorial testifies otherwise.”]
A warm Sunday morning in Paris in July 2013 — a suitable time to stroll along the Seine, visit one of the art museums or enjoy croissants and coffee at an outdoor café.
But I was in the Marais, a very old Paris neighborhood of narrow streets and medieval-looking buildings. Within the Marais, a small area of just a few blocks constitutes Paris’s Jewish quarter, known as The Pletzl, featuring a delicatessen that is always crowded. Nearby, on a tiny alley-like street, is the Memorial de la Shoah, a center for Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust.
When I told friends I was going to Paris for a vacation, some had suggestions of sight-seeing must-sees. No one suggested the Shoah to me. I had come across the information in a Paris tourist guidebook.
Apart from a couple of obligatory experiences, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, I knew I would have to visit the Shoah, even if it evoked a sadness that was not on the itinerary for a pleasure trip.
After passing through the security at the entrance, I walked into a complex that seemed to consist mostly of courtyards. The Memorial houses Europe’s largest collection of Holocaust-related documents but the dominating feature is the wall in the courtyard near the entrance. On this wall are inscribed the names of 76,000 Jews deported from France. Most likely they perished in the concentration camps of Eastern Europe.
Deportees are listed by year of deportation. For the year 1942 alone, 17 deportees were named Bronstein. Next to each name was the deportee’s year of birth.
“Ann Bronstein–1899. Abraham Bronstein–1901. Arthur Bronstein–1895.” The youngest deportee was Nicole Bronstein, born 1937, a Jewish child with a French first name, five years old.
Were they my French cousins? My father used to say that all the Bronsteins were related but we had no knowledge of a French branch of our family. The only person in our family who did live in France prior to World War II was my father’s cousin Clara.
In an oral history my father dictated to one of my cousins, he described how one of his mother’s sisters began a voyage to the United States but became ill in Paris and stayed there. Her daughter Clara grew up in France. She married a jeweler who served in the French Army in World War I.
“When World War II came around,” my father’s memoir continued, “[Clara’s husband] went out for a pack of cigarettes one evening and never returned. No one ever knew what happened to him.”
Clara was a cousin on my grandmother’s side. I never learned the name of her first husband, so I had no way of knowing if he was one of the deportees listed on the Shoah wall. He well may have been.
Clara, however, was hidden by non-Jews in a series of basements in Paris. She managed to survive the war. My father’s account did not name the families responsible for saving her. This may have been for another reason. My father tried to see Clara when he was still in France at the war’s end.
“I got a letter from Raymond, one of my cousins,” according to my father’s account. “He said if I ever got close to Paris, drop in on Clara. Anything I could do to help, financially or otherwise, I would be reimbursed.
“I spoke with my company commander. We happened to be in a rest period after crossing the Seine River. So the boys in the company all chipped in their cigarettes and soaps and everything else because American G.I.’s were very great that way. We loaded up the Jeep. My Company Commander and I headed for Paris.
“Five miles from Paris, we were stopped because politics had entered into the picture. Although my division had liberated Paris, politically they wanted Charles DeGaulle to march up the Champs Elysees with his troops rather than my division (the 79th). My division’s insignia was the Cross of Lorraine, DeGaulle’s symbol. So we were stopped from entering Paris officially and my jeep was turned back. I never got to see Clara.”
Needless to say, my father did not get to meet the people to whom she owed her life. He did meet her many years later when she had emigrated to the U.S. and remarried.
The Memorial de Shoah also has a wall dedicated to Les Justes, (the righteous), those who helped French Jews, whether they were members of the armed forces, members of the Resistance, or civilians.
Here was another long list of names. I felt regret that I did not know the names of the people who had saved Clara. All I could do was look at the names and silently thank each one. All had risked their lives to save people whose descendants were now living in France, in the U.S., or other countries.
On that Sunday morning in Paris, the names on Le Mur de Justes became for me, ma famille — or as we would have said in my immediate family, mishpocheh.
Ms. Bronstein may be contacted at tanysare@earthlink.net
