Visiting History's Tiny Apartment in Paris

At the age of 26, I went to Paris for the first time, mainly so a woman in her seventies could get me drunk every night. I thought that I was going to be helping my girlfriend record her grandmother’s life story and had bought her a little silver mini recorder for that express purpose. But what hadn’t occurred to me was that the language barrier would mean that, once I had sprung for extra cassettes, my usefulness came to an abrupt end. The girlfriend in question had been born in Israel to a mother who had been born in France, while the grandmother had been born in Hungary. So, it wasn’t just language barrier, but barriers. Julia’s mother spoke French, Hebrew, and English, while Julia spoke English, Hebrew, French, and Mandarin, and Safta (which is Hebrew for Grandmother) spoke Hungarian, Russian, German, and French. I spoke English. Sometimes correctly.

People are always quick to decry Americans for only speaking one language when much of the rest of the world carries a handful around in their head. The truth is, I know lots of Americans who can speak at least one other language. But in my case, they don’t offer you a foreign language elective in public school when you are barely showing up to English class. I knew people who took French or Spanish or German in my high school, but I did not take those classes, or any other classes, with them. They took classes that began with the initials A.P. and I took classes taught by the gym coach, if you could call throwing fishing magazines at students who fell asleep “teaching.” I guess it taught us not to fall asleep.

But Safta had an innovative solution to this problem. Every night she would ply me with enough hearty French stew and red wine to keep me sated, blurry, and silent while she talked to her granddaughter. I remember that she met us at the Metro station the day we arrived and walked with us back to her place. When we got to her building, which was on a corner, she pointed up to a discolored rectangle high on the wall and said something in French. Julia translated, “She says that the headquarters of the French Communist Party used to be in this building and that was where they hung their picture of Lenin, but they took it with them when they moved.” That was pretty much the last non intoxicated, non-drowsy thing I would remember from my first trip to Paris.

Every night, for the next four nights, before Julia and I were to head off for a side trip down to Nice, her grandmother would serve us something with duck or beef and root vegetables in some kind of wine heavy sauce and plop a bottle of burgundy or merlot on the table. We would sit and eat and make stilted conversation and every time my glass went empty, she would refill it. Then, once the plates had been cleared, Julia would produce her recorder and Safta would start talking, in French, and Julia would ask questions, also in French.

We were trying to get Julia’s grandmother’s life story, but we were especially interested in a particular chapter - her story of surviving the Holocaust. Safta had grown up Jewish in Budapest and, when the Nazi’s came, the Hungarian regime could not wait to sign on to the National Socialist agenda. We are used to thinking of the Axis powers as the three bigs of Germany, Italy, and Japan, but there were actually a fair number of smaller states that joined them, with different levels of eagerness. Some as random seeming as Thailand and the Tsardom of Bulgaria as it was styled then, some surprising, like Finland, who kinda half signed on to the Axis to get one back at The Soviet Union, who they had beef with. The Finns would say they were never an official member of the Axis and are cagey about what any Finns might have done, before they reached peace with the Russians and turned on the Germans at the last possible minute. Hungary’s participation is less disputed. Hungary was eager. It started rounding up its Jews without delay, deporting over 400,000 of them to concentration camps. Safta was not one of those. While many of her friends and family were caught up in the deportations, she had managed to get false papers off the black market and spent the war hiding in Hungary under a fake name. This was not safety, this was life on the run, a life of paranoia, a life of hoping every day that you never ran into anyone who could identify you and turn you in for extra rations, or favor from the local Arrow Cross party, or just to be vindictive. She would spend four years that way. Then the war turned, the Nazi’s retreated and the Soviets pushed into Central Europe and Safta saw her chance. Caught between these two armies she started heading west until she eventually ended up in Allied occupied Berlin. When she got there, it was a city in ruins, being run by four different foreign militaries. She made her way to the American sector, hoping to get to the US, across the Atlantic, far away from the horrors of war-torn Europe. But, when she got to an American military base and they found out how many languages she spoke, they conscripted her to a military unit that was trying to process refugees from the liberated concentration camps. She spent 1945 into 1946 in the uniform of an Army nurse, translating all of the horrors that she herself had escaped, horrors that less fortunate loved ones had been subjected to along with millions of other Jews, into her own broken English, so that Allied doctors could figure out what they needed. After the war task was done, she couldn’t fathom a trans-Atlantic voyage, so she settled in France and went about forgetting what little English she knew, now regarding it as the language of nightmares.

I am inevitably making a hash of this story and there are plenty of holes in the way I tell it, but the thing is, I got everything a week later and from Julia, because I didn’t understand a word of what was being said as her grandmother related it each night in French. Julia did make some attempts to translate. Her Grandmother would say entire paragraphs and Julia would turn to me and say, “There was a man who claimed he could get us papers but he…” Several more paragraphs from Safta. “They bombed the train station, so they had to…” A barrage of French from across the table. Julia turns to me with a big smile as though something very humorous has been related, “The currency they had was worthless, but they had something to trade, they….” And then she was cut off by Safta’s renewed stream of French. Eventually, even those meager attempts to translate were abandoned and I sat there watching them bat Safta’s life story back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match who had not just never seen tennis but had never seen a ball or things that bounced. The whole time, the old survivor was refilling my wine glass. This would go on for hours until finally, tired of digging through the past, Safta would suddenly get to her feet and announce, in presumably the only English she cared to remember, “Let’s see Paris!” Then the two women would haul my drunk ass out onto the streets of the 16th arrondissement and march me up onto Montparnasse so I could stare out over the city and just see a blur of lights. Until I returned years later, I would tell people that I had only been to Paris once, but I had seen it twice.

Still, for all my drunkenness and all the barriers in communication, it was impossible not to absorb at least the broad scope and sense of harrowing drama of what this elderly woman had been through. She had fled across the map of Europe, always in the shadow of the greatest evils this world had yet imagined, and she was its express target. She was a woman hunted by powers greater than any one person could hope to escape and yet, not only had she escaped, she thrived and lived for decades in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, she lived long enough to become the matriarch of this international and accomplished family. She lived long enough for her granddaughter to drag some strange American boy into her living room so she could tell the younger woman what it took to make her possible.  

The great tragedies of history are smuggled into the decades that follow them in the memories and secret traumas of those that survived the earthquake or the wildfire, the terrorist attack or the bloody coup, or the death camps. Or in the case of Safta, not a camp - which we always think of as the defining feature of The Holocaust - but the smaller, stranger tragedies spun off by the impact of that larger horror, like people who escape the sinking ship only to find themselves treading water in shark infested seas, miles if not years from help. Nothing is truly over until the last person who lived it is gone. But the wild thing about evil and terror is that it’s dissipation with the last survivor’s death doesn’t rid us of it, it opens the door for it to come back, renewed and hungry for new host bodies to carry its latest iteration through however many decades await, like pristine snow cover, to be stamped with blood. It’s not a coincidence that far right nationalists started feeling free to throw away the dog whistles and began bringing open hate back into public life just as the World War 2 generation started dwindling to handfuls. People like Safta were like antibodies, their presence in the body of humanity helped booster our resistance to the crimes they’d witnessed. But hate is good at waiting out the generations. It goes and vacations in places that are a little less seen, a little less watched, Rwanda, some rage filled little corner of Serbia. But it’s never too far away.

Eventually, we left Safta’s little apartment to head down to the south of France. As we got onto the train that would take us to Dijon and then onto Nice, Julia was reeling with her family’s history. She told me everything, but it came out in a jumble as she tried to order it all on the fly. I sat and took it in as the French countryside rolled by outside. Finally, in the middle of all of this, Julia suddenly said, “She liked you.” I said, “Oh, yeah? What did she say?” Julia smiled and said, “She said you were pretty and quiet and you ate whatever you were given. It was high praise.” And that was how I took it.