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a pencil drawing of Jacques, mounted on cardboard, on which the artist had written ‘Camp de Pithiviers, 22. VI.1941’;
a rectangular metal plate on which the words ‘GLASS, Prisonnier Cambrai, 1940’ were written;
a photocopied note on which someone had written, in French, that ‘la famille Glass’ was hiding in Paris under an assumed name;
a telegram from the International Committee of the Red Cross, apologising for the ‘distressing news contained within’;
photos of Henri, Sonia and Danièle when she was a baby;
newspaper clippings about Alex Maguy;
several photos of Alex with Pablo Picasso;
a scrappy piece of paper folded into quarters on which someone had drawn a man, pointing a gun at his own head, and the tip of a cigarette had burned through the paper where the gun was pointing at the man’s head. It was signed ‘Avec amitié, Picasso’.
I put everything back in the shoebox, the shoebox in my bag and flew home the next day. I knew I had a story now, and it wasn’t about fashion.
Over the next decade, I followed these clues to trace the lives of my grandmother and her brothers. Sometimes they confirmed and filled in stories I’d already vaguely known, sometimes they told me things I’d never have imagined about my family. In some cases I uncovered truths that I know were meant to be hidden for ever, and I then seriously questioned the morality of what I was doing, rummaging around in my relatives’ closets that they’d long ago closed for the last time. After all, that I had found my grandmother’s shoebox of tokens from the past was not, I knew, a sign that she had wanted it to be discovered: it was a testament to how quickly she was incapacitated by her stroke that she was unable to destroy it before she died.
Yet I also knew that the stories I found could not be allowed to fade away, like a black and white photo in the back of a closet. The more I researched, the more the story went beyond the personal past to the political present, and it is probably no coincidence that I finally committed to writing this book in the shadow of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Neither of those political shifts was about keeping the Jews out, but they were about keeping out vaguely defined ‘outsiders’.
Sala and Bill in Long Island in the 1950s.
Alongside that, open anti-Semitism was on the rise throughout Europe in a way I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, from the far right and the far left. A 2018 survey found that one in four Europeans believe Jews have ‘too much influence in conflict and wars across the world’, and one in five think they have ‘too much influence in media and politics’.[1] In France, which is where most of my family’s story is set, anti-Semitic acts rose by 74 per cent between 2017 and 2018;[2] meanwhile in America, the Anti-Defamation League reported that in that same period anti-Semitic attacks doubled.[3] Of course, it’s easier to ignore the lessons of the past when the past itself has faded to nothing: according to two recent surveys 41 per cent of Americans do not know what Auschwitz is[4] and one in three Europeans know ‘little or nothing’ about the Holocaust.[5] Reading these news stories quashed any concerns I had that writing about the past, or my family, was self-indulgent.
But my obsession with this story had little to do with political prescience on my part. Instead, it was because of the people involved, each one such an extraordinary force of personality that I couldn’t shake them off decades after they died.
My grandmother and her brothers, once so close, took very different paths during the war, and each of their stories represents a separate strand of the Jewish experience through the twentieth century. Learning about them provided me with not just a map for what was behind me, but one that explained where we all are today. ‘If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future,’ Chaim Potok writes in Davita’s Harp. What I found about the past and present is in this book.
Sender, Sala (centre) and an Ornstein cousin in Chrzanow in about 1916.
1
THE GLAHS FAMILY – The Shtetl
Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1900s
HENRI, JACQUES, ALEX AND SARA GLASS loved being French, and the reason was that they weren’t French and their names weren’t Henri, Jacques, Alex and Sara Glass. They were born Jehuda, Jakob, Sender and Sala Glahs in what is now Poland but was then still Austria-Hungary. This caused further confusion about the nationality of the Glasses in life and death: Alex was often described in newspaper articles in his lifetime as ‘Austrian’ and Sala’s death certificate states her place of birth simply as ‘Austria’. This was echoed by several of her friends from later life who told me that she spent her early years ‘in Vienna, I think’. In fact, Sala grew up more than 400 kilometres away from Vienna and the Glahs family probably never visited what is now Austria at all. They were from Chrzanow, once a busy market town whose name derives, with a memorable lack of romanticism, from the Polish word for horseradish (‘chrzan’), a local speciality. Its region was more elegantly named, Galicia, in what is now Poland’s south-west corner.
Chrzanow was a typical early twentieth-century eastern European shtetl, or Jewish village, the kind that’s so familiar from popular culture that even those who lived there describe it through the prism of art, flattening reality to something close to cliché. The very few times my grandmother referred to her childhood she talked about it in reference to Fiddler on the Roof, and the memoir of a townsperson who lived there at the same time as the Glahs siblings described its picturesque side streets as looking ‘like those in Chagall’s paintings, poor and crooked’.[1] When I visited Chrzanow in 2018 my guide compared it to the towns in stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. But Chrzanow has its own unique qualities that lift it beyond the generic. Back when the Glahses lived there it was known for its surrounding dark forests of densely packed silver birch trees where the children would hide to avoid their parents and school teachers. It also had an exceptionally pretty central square, fringed with colourful houses and shops, where people from miles away would come to do their shopping. Today, it is better known for the more dubious accolade of being only 20 kilometres from Auschwitz, so close the two towns considered themselves to be sisters.
None of the Glahs siblings ever spoke about their childhoods, and if they mentioned Poland at all they’d spit with disgust and move on, no elaboration necessary. So without personal anecdotes to act as my starting point, I turned to historical documents. If my family had been one of the famous Jewish dynasties – the Rothschilds, say, or the Freuds, or even the Halberstams, a wealthy family who lived in the region at the time – this would have sufficed. But they were not, and it did not. There aren’t many records of the individual billions of poorer lives from Europe’s past, people who leave only footprints in the sand that blow away as soon as they are buried; people who leave, at most, unidentifiable black and white photos behind them, their faces blankly solemn for the photographer’s studio, the flash bleaching them of personality; or perhaps a brief mention in a census locked away in an obscure government vault that proves they once existed and nothing more. These people are merely referred to by history as ‘the poor’, ‘the peasants’, ‘the illiterate’, even though their lives are far more revealing of the times in which they lived than those of the grander families whose lives are faithfully recorded ever after by historians.
My father mentioned that back in the 1970s my great-uncle Alex claimed to have written a memoir, which was never published, but my father couldn’t remember if he’d even ever seen it, let alone read it. If it existed at all, it had surely long been thrown away, but it seemed more likely that this was another one of Alex’s many implausible boasts, that he once wrote a memoir that somehow no one had ever seen. The idea that Alex could ever have had the patience to sit down and write an entire book seemed about as likely as me hanging out with Picasso. But one day in 2014, my father’s younger brother, Rich, emailed from Florida: he had found Alex’s memoir among my grandmother’s possessions. A week later it arrived, a bulky FedEx package, the pages untouched for at least twenty years, since my grandmother died. It was typed in French on loose-leaf paper and Alex had almost certainly dictated it to an assistant who then typed it up, because it read just as Alex talked, in his gruff, colloquial, rat-a-tat stream of consciousness: ‘I still have my Yiddish accent. I’ve never tried to correct it. I love Yiddish. It is
my mother tongue. The language I spoke when I knew hunger. When I fought those degenerate Poles who wished me dead,’ he wrote on the first page. It was like he was standing in front of me in his flat in Paris, shaking his finger wildly, jabbing it at invisible opponents. (The first time I saw Joe Pesci in a movie I nearly fell off my seat in shock because, if you swap the Italian heritage for a Jewish one, Pesci looks – and talks, and swaggers and gesticulates – a lot like my great-uncle Alex did.) My father, with characteristic heroism, translated all 250 pages of Alex’s memoir for me from French to English (my French is fine but in no way is it strong enough to handle Alex’s punchy slang with occasional swoops into Yiddish). But before he sent the translation back to me, he warned me to read it with at the very least a sceptical eye: Alex’s tendency towards self-mythology was infamous, and not even those closest to him ever really believed what he said about himself. So while this memoir was an astonishing find, I opened it expecting to read a somewhat deadening litany of Alex’s triumphs. Instead, I was amazed to discover that the first thirty or so pages were a detailed and humble account of his childhood in Chrzanow, a period of his life he certainly never discussed with any of us. Instead of focusing on himself and his glories, he wrote heartfelt descriptions of his family and their struggles, and lives that had been hidden in darkness for over a century burst into the light.
Jews had lived in Chrzanow since 1590, when the town’s first Jew, a man called Yaakov, settled there.[2] Yaakov clearly had quite an impact because by the beginning of the twentieth century more than 60 per cent of the town’s inhabitants were Jewish,[3] and one of its main industries was manufacturing Judaica, such as Torah scrolls and mezuzahs.[4] The town square was bordered by 120 specifically Jewish shops, their signs written in both Hebrew and Yiddish, while the open market within was where women shopped for kosher food and headscarves. When the Glahs children were born, Chrzanow even had a Jewish mayor, Dr Zygmunt Keppler, a lawyer. From its top office to its lowest social order, Chrzanow was a Jewish town.
This was the tail end of what was a brief and relatively golden age for Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anti-Semitism certainly existed there, most infamously in the Hilsner Affair, a series of trials that took place in 1899–1900, in which a Jew, Leopold Hilsner, was accused of blood libel and spent nineteen years in prison before finally being pardoned. But Emperor Franz Joseph I had a fondness for the Jewish religion, and under his rule, Austro-Hungarian Jews emerged from the ghettos and became part of society as the emperor gave Jews equal rights, and financed Jewish institutions. This is why there seems to have been such a flourishing of Jewish productivity in the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1848 and 1916, from such people as Theodor Herzl, Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud: it’s not that this generation of Jews was uniquely talented compared with previous ones, it’s that they were granted a then unique amount of freedom.
The Chrzanovian Jews were mostly poor, but their lives were better than they had ever been or would be again. They had a friendly relationship with the Catholic Poles in the neighbouring countryside, who came into town to go to church, do their shopping and take their children to school, where they were taught alongside the Jewish children.[5] Chrzanow was situated close to the Three Emperors’ Corner, the border dividing Russia, Germany and Austria, and the city lay on the main highway that connected eastern and western Europe, meaning traders from all over came through it. So although it was a very Jewish town it was also a very international one, and the townspeople regularly mixed with many other ethnicities and nationalities. Back then, this was a wonderful financial advantage for the town’s Jews; very soon, it would become one of their greatest misfortunes.
One person who never trusted her neighbours was Chaya Rotter. Born in 1873 and the youngest of three children, she grew up in Chrzanow. Despite her lifelong closeness to multiple other countries, she spoke only Yiddish and Polish. She had little interest in mixing with anyone but her own kind.
On 13 March 1898, when she was twenty-five, she married someone who was, ostensibly, her kind in a wedding arranged by her parents. Reuben Glahs was a Jewish scholar five years younger than her and also from Chrzanow. But in truth, they were a deeply unlikely couple, in looks as much as temperament. In the very few photos that remain of her it is clear she was a large woman, solid rather than fat, with much-remarked-upon large feet and a face not even a poet could describe as beautiful. But her most extraordinary feature was her eyes. On her medical notes later in life they were described simply as ‘blue/grey’, a description that suggests either enormous self-restraint or irony on the doctor’s part. In fact, they went in two different directions at the same time, which made her look both wild and watchful.
Reuben, by contrast, was dark-haired, delicate, shorter than Chaya and strikingly handsome, like a young Adrien Brody. Unlike Chaya, he was fluent in multiple languages – German, Polish, Russian, Yiddish – and the only person in Chrzanow other than a rabbi who could read and write Hebrew. Where Chaya was tough, practical and energetic, Reuben was gentle, scholarly and slow. In his memoir, Sender – Alex as I knew him – draws frequent comparisons between his parents (invariably to his mother’s disadvantage, no matter how neutral the differences he was describing): she liked to debate furiously in the market square, washing the family’s dishes around the central well where the townswomen gathered, while he preferred to sit with his friends in the cafés, listening and nodding and drinking coffee. She was ambitious for more whereas Reuben thought you should be happy with what you have. Between them, they represented the different attitudes peasant Jews had about their place in the world at that time: should you fight for a better life than the one you were born into, or should you meekly sit back and be grateful for what you were given? Chaya and Reuben never really resolved this difference, and their marriage was less than blissful.
