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Eventually they were told that half of them would go to the camp at Beaune-la-Rolande and half to Pithiviers. Jacques was assigned to the latter, and when they finally reached the train station he got off among 1,700 rag-tag men,[7] and marched through the little town with the police. The men all carried their rolled-up bags for what they thought would be a mere few nights’ stay while the townspeople watched them silently, uncertain if they were watching a funny parade or a mournful spectacle.
When the men reached the camp, they walked in through the gates and, as ordered, quietly queued up. They registered their names with the black-booted French guards who were sitting at a small wooden table, recording everyone’s information in notebooks. Each prisoner was given a number – Jacques was 470 – and assigned to one of eleven barracks. After that, they walked towards what was now their new house.
I went to Pithiviers on a hot July day in 2012 with a group of about thirty other people, on a trip marking the seventieth anniversary of when our ancestors had been deported from the camp. We met in the Marais, near the Shoah museum, and boarded a bus, in a pale and presumably unintentional echo of the rafle du billet vert. It was a lovely drive from Paris to Pithiviers, past fields of wildflowers and sunflowers, home-made roadside advertisements for foie gras and colourful houses with red slate roofs. The views became lovelier the closer we got to the camp. There was almost a sense of excitement among the group, as if we were making an important pilgrimage. But it turned out we were making a pilgrimage to nowhere: if it weren’t for a stone memorial, its former location would look like just another French suburban street. All signs of the French concentration camp had vanished, hastily erased after the war when France tried to pretend that what had happened had not. We milled around pointlessly on the side of the road and then, with much less excitement, reboarded the bus. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Pithiviers had vanished off the earth, but I was, and I felt a vague sense of pointless anger on the drive back to Paris, like I’d been duped by France’s post-war subterfuge here, setting aside a day to pay my respects to something that no longer existed. (Five years after I visited, in 2017, it was announced that the long-abandoned Pithiviers train station, where the Jews arrived before being taken to the camp, would be turned into a museum about the French deportations. France’s attitude towards its past is, at last, starting to evolve.)[8]
But even if Pithiviers itself no longer exists, the records, carefully compiled by the black-booted guards, remain. So while it might not be possible to walk among the original barracks with tour groups taking photos, as you can at Auschwitz, it’s very easy to get a clear picture of what Jacques’s daily life there was like.
Pithiviers had originally been built for German prisoners of war, but when France became occupied there wasn’t any demand for German prisons any more, only Jewish ones – foreign Jews, that is: no French Jews ever stayed in Pithiviers. The entrance was on a normal pedestrian road – no need to hide the fact that France was interning Jewish immigrants simply for being Jewish immigrants – and conveniently near the railway station so that more prisoners could be brought in with efficient speed. After signing in on that first day in May, Jacques and the other men were directed to the right, towards a row of narrow, regularly spaced barracks; Jacques was originally assigned to barrack 7, then, after more barracks were built to accommodate the growing numbers of incarcerated men, 11 and then 18. He slept in his barrack, washed there, watched the time go by there. Three times a day he’d walk a short distance to the dining hall, which was next to the infirmary. Management offices were also close by, as was a large vegetable garden. Menus were posted weekly telling the men what they would eat every day. ‘Monday,’ read the menu of 22–29 December 1941, ‘Breakfast – coffee; Lun
ch – vegetable soup, glazed carrots and cheese; Supper – vegetable soup, mashed potatoes and cheese.’ Never any meat or fish, just vegetables from the garden mashed, puréed or sugared.
But as prisons went, Pithiviers was not so bad. Family members came to visit twice a month and there was even a place where the Jews could worship on Shabbos and the High Holy Days. Many of the men there already knew one another from home or through the Foreign Legion – Jacques knew several men in the camp from his regiment. Most important, the French guards didn’t beat the inhabitants, and while that was a pretty low bar for describing a place as not bad, it was a crucial one. That the guards were not cruel to them, sometimes even friendly, confirmed to Jacques and the other inhabitants of the camp that they didn’t need to be scared. Nothing bad would happen to them in Pithiviers – they were only there because they didn’t have the right identity papers, and they needed to be kept there during the war for the sake of the economy. They were safe. It was all OK. Everything was fine.
Most of the men spent their days working on local farms, but Pithiviers itself was not a labour camp. No one had to work, and they did so for free, purely to relieve their boredom. There was also cultural life in the camp: many of the men played chess and there was even a Yiddish theatre troupe. Guards encouraged all this because they considered it important to maintaining morale. Decades later, I found a remnant of this cultural life inside the shoebox in my grandmother’s closet: on a yellowed piece of paper, mounted on a slab of cardboard, someone by the name of Arthur Weisz had made a pencil portrait of Jacques, round glasses on his face. It is dated 22 June 1941, and above the date Weisz wrote ‘Camp de Pithiviers’.
Weisz was another prisoner in Pithiviers and he made many portraits of the inhabitants, who would then send them back to their families as keepsakes. When I made the trip to Pithiviers with other descendants, two of the people on the bus said they had their own Weisz drawings. For one of them, Weisz’s portrait was the only likeness they’d ever seen of their father. Jacques, on the other hand, was well photographed, so I know for certain how accurate Weisz’s portrait is, and it is amazingly close. He gave Jacques an air of gravitas that he often lacked in photos, due to his shyness and occasional nervous giggle in front of a camera’s lens. Weisz captures his calmness, which Alex and Henri saw as passivity, and his gentleness, which too often came across as weakness. Jacques’s arms are thin, a sign of wartime deprivation, but his face is handsome. It is, in truth, the kindest likeness that exists of Jacques and a testament both to Jacques’s likeability and to Weisz’s generosity. (Weisz was later killed by the Nazis in an unlisted concentration camp, but probably Auschwitz.)
This is not the only image I have of Jacques in Pithiviers. Also in my grandmother’s shoebox were two black and white photos, both stamped on the back: ‘12 Avril 1942, Camp d’Hérbergement de Pithivier LE GESTIONNAIRE’. One photo shows eight men and the other shows nine, and many of the same men, including Jacques, appear in both photos. Both pictures are rather oddly posed: in one, a man is sitting in a bucket and his friends are either holding him in it or pretending to pour water on his head from watering cans. In the other, they are all arranged awkwardly on a ladder in one of the barracks. Photos like these, showing the men larking around and having a merry old time, were often staged by the camp guards and sent home to the prisoners’ families for propaganda purposes: see, everything’s fine here! It’s basically a holiday camp! But the forced larking was unnecessary because the men are their own propaganda. They look strikingly healthy after almost a year of living at Pithiviers, and they look happy, making smiles too genuine to be forced. The former is proof of how relatively well they were treated in the camp, and the latter a sign of their complete lack of anxiety about the very near future.
These men all worked in the management (gestionnaire) office, a more suitable place for weedy, unathletic Jacques than the fields. Arthur Weisz stressed in his portrait of him that that’s where Jacques worked in Pithiviers, taking particular care over his armband on which he drew a little circle and wrote: ‘Pithiviers Camp d’Internement LE GESTION’. Jacques was probably quite good at helping in administrative affairs, keeping track of which prisoner was in which barrack, punching holes in paper as his time drifted away, drawing up the records I would later use to write his story. But it might have also cost him his life.
When he was in Cambrai in 1940, Jacques went out every day to work on nearby farms, and this is almost certainly how he escaped from that POW camp. Dozens of people from Pithiviers took advantage of the camp’s similar lack of security, running away in their early months of incarceration when they went out to work as farmhands. The local police soon put a stop to that and tightened security, but it’s entirely possible that, had Jacques been going out to work instead of staying in the camp, he would have run away too. Maybe his success in escaping from Cambrai would have emboldened him to try again. Maybe he would have sneaked back to Paris, met up with Mila and gone into hiding with her, with Sonia and Henri’s assistance. Or maybe this could never have happened, even if he’d spent all day hoeing potatoes instead of filing papers. Maybe he always would have gone back to the camp instead of grabbing his chance. After all, he chose to stay in the camp, sitting at a desk and following orders, instead of working outside and then running towards the sunset. Stay where you are, don’t question things, put your life in the hands of others, just trust – those were Jacques’s natural tendencies, and they were how he always felt, whereas his brothers never felt like that. One brother in particular.
Jacques is at the back, partially obscured by a bucket handle (above) and on the far left (below).
According to Alex’s memoir, one day in 1941 he went to Pithiviers, determined to get his older brother out. Alex describes a dramatic encounter with a guard who, on realising he was Jacques’s brother, threatened to put him in Pithiviers, too.
‘I put my hand in my jacket pocket. It was a bluff. I was completely unarmed, not even a pocket knife. But I had my hands and I could strangle him. I was ready to take action and that was obvious,’ Alex writes.
Having scared off the guard, Alex finds Jacques and tells him he’s come to save him.
But Jacques won’t leave. He’s French, he says. He has nothing to fear. He’s here under the protection of French policemen. He has confidence in them.
‘“I’m a French soldier.” These were his only thoughts. French, blind patriot. One could weep with rage to see him thus, submissive, obedient, confident,’ Alex writes.
Whether this scene ever actually happened is impossible to prove. Certainly there’s no record of Alex going to Pithiviers, although if he broke in and scared off a guard there wouldn’t be. It’s possible that Alex was giving a little showman’s pizzazz to a slightly different story that instead Henri and Sonia told their daughter, their nephews and me, and Alex also corroborated.
When Jacques was arrested, Mila was two months pregnant. In late December 1941 she gave birth to their daughter, Lily. Jacques was granted leave on 30 December in order to see his wife and daughter. This was the story my family always told and yet the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed. Why would Jacques be given leave from the camp? I suspected this to be some souped-up lore. Until one day I was in the Shoah Memorial in Paris, looking up Jacques’s records in Pithiviers, and there it was, in unarguable black and white: ‘Permis à deux jours du 30 au 31 [Décembre] inclus, rentre 1ère Janvier 1942.’ He really had left the camp.
‘But Glass,’ the guards said to him before he got on the train to Paris, according to what Jacques then told his family, ‘if you don’t return, we will kill all your friends here, and we will track you down, and we will find you, and we will kill you, too.’
The birth of a child was, according to Pithiviers’ rules, insufficient reason for a prisoner to be granted home leave. So according to Jacques’s records he had to go home because ‘femme gravement malade’. But he’d have had to produce medical notes proving Mila was at death’s door, and even then he probably wouldn’t have been allowed to go. So quite how Jacques pulled off this home visit is a mystery. Perhaps Alex really did bully a guard into letting him out. Perhaps – and this strikes me as the most likely scenario – the guards just liked Jacques and knew him well enough to trust him to come back. However it happened, Nathalie Grenon, the director of CERCIL (Le Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur les camps d’Internement dans le Loiret et la Déportation Juive), who helped me with my research into Pithiviers, described Jacques’s two-day excursion from the camp as ‘plus exceptionnelle’. It was to be Jacques’s greatest piece of luck, and his last.
Jacques arrived at Mila’s bedside to find Henri, Sonia and Alex all waiting for him, along with his newborn daughter. According to Sonia and Alex, this is what happened and what was said.
Run, they told him. This is the chance of a lifetime! You’ve never had any good luck, Jacques, but this is the luckiest break a man like you could have. We can help you. We
will hide you. You will never get another chance like this. We are your family. They will kill you. We know what we are talking about. Listen to us. Run.
Jacques held his tiny daughter and looked at his brothers – his brothers, with whom he’d run through the forests of Chrzanow, with whom he’d lain beside while listening to the pogroms, who had always helped him fight off bullies in school and then fight off bailiffs who nearly destroyed his business before he had even started. He had relied on his brothers all his life. But Jacques had always relied on someone else more. First it was his mother, to whom he invariably deferred, and then it was his wife. He had registered his name and address in 1940 when she told him to do so, which was how Vichy knew where to send the billet vert condemning him to Pithiviers, and he would do what she advised now. They all looked at Mila. She was lying in bed, listening, her eyes shut.
‘Mila?’ Jacques asked.
She opened her eyes and looked around, like a queen preparing to make a regal pronouncement.
‘Mon Jacques a donné sa parole,’ she said.
My Jacques gave his word. He must go back.
