Page 8 of House of Glass

Henri, Sonia, Sara, Chaya and Jacques in Henri and Sonia’s apartment shortly after their marriage.

Soon after they were settled in their new apartment, on rue Victor-Cousin, just next to the Sorbonne, they held a housewarming supper for the Glasses, to compensate for the fact that none of them could travel to Lwow for the wedding. Henri took a photo of the evening to commemorate it, and I found the picture, eighty years later, in a small envelope on which he had written ‘famille’. Henri is the first one you notice in the photo, because he is the only one standing. In fact, he appears to be in mid-leap, as he has presumably dashed into the photo frame after having set up the camera. But even in his haste, his three-piece suit sits perfectly on him and every hair is perfectly in place. The only difference about him in this photo compared to previous ones is how happy he clearly is: he is making an unabashed open-mouthed smile and both hands are resting gently on Sonia, who is sitting in front of him. Sonia looks a little more solemn, and with her drooping shoulders and slightly raised eyebrows she looks like she’s asking the camera on the exhale, ‘Can you believe I’m stuck with this lot now?’ By contrast, Sara next to her looks absolutely delighted. She is twenty-two and a striking beauty; her confident pose, with her chin resting coquettishly on the backs of her fingers, makes her, for once, overshadow her usually more dominating sister-in-law. Chaya is seated next to her, a little in the shadows and, as usual, her eyes are going in two different directions, one looking suspiciously at the viewer, the other at Sonia. And finally there is Jacques, not quite as smartly dressed as Henri, but still stylish and very handsome, with the same finely drawn features as Sara. He is holding a French newspaper, whose front page bears a picture of Marshal Pétain, who had just been made Minister of War, and would in six years’ time become the chief of state of Vichy France. He would have more to do with the direction of Jacques’s life than Jacques could ever have imagined as he dangled the newspaper between his long thin fingers. Whereas everyone else in the photo is looking at the camera, Jacques is gazing off to the side, as if he was about to head in a different direction to the rest of them. Alex is not in the photo. Presumably he declined Henri’s invitation.

‘My father was brilliant, but he never had any success before he met my mother,’ Henri and Sonia’s daughter Danièle told me. And she was right. One of the first moves Sonia made when she and Henri got together was to help him get off the bankruptcy charge, and the second was to extricate him from his business with Jacques. Henri felt enormous guilt about leaving his brother, but, as Sonia rightly perceived, Jacques didn’t actually care that much about the business, and certainly didn’t hold it against his brother for leaving it. At last, Henri was free of the work that had caused him so much anxiety, and brought him so little satisfaction. He could simply enjoy his happy marriage with Sonia. But he now had another concern: it was 1935, he was thirty-four, and worried.

‘My time is running out,’ Sonia later recalled him saying.

But fate already had a plan for him, one more befitting to his education than running a fur and carpentry shop. Henri, or quite possibly Sonia, had recently met a man who worked at the Sorbonne Science Faculty. He said that he needed a machine that could reproduce documents quickly and cheaply, and yet no such machine existed in the whole of France. Did anyone know a man who might be able to help, perhaps one with engineering and photography experience?

Henri had finished his engineering studies a decade earlier, but he had forgotten none of it. Sonia obtained a false identity card for him on the black market so, at long last, he could get a job that utilised his education, and he went to work in the Sorbonne, like the proper Frenchman he longed to be. He could finally leave the Pletzl behind and use the skills he’d studied so hard to acquire at university. And Henri wasn’t just a good engineer, he was a truly original one. According to his American patent application, which was accepted on 12 February 1940, he made a machine ‘whereby reproductions may be made on the same scale as the original or on different scales … The prints may be made on glass, negatives, films or sensitized papers.’ In other words, he made a machine that reproduced not just documents but blueprints on microfilm and paper, and these reproductions could be to scale or – crucially – shrunk to much smaller size, making them both easy to store and illegible to anyone until Henri’s machine then reproduced them again at full size. This was to become the machine’s most important feature, and Henri was using technology that was then at the absolute cutting edge. No other machine in France could do this. Henri named his machine the Omniphot.

In less than a year, he sold versions of it to the Paris Observatory, the Army Geographic Service (now known as the Institut Géographique National) and the Paris Municipal School of Physics and Chemistry. Henri was so successful that in 1937 – just two years after despairing of the direction of his life to Sonia – he showed his Omniphot machine at the Paris fair, where it was spotted by a businessman called Marc Haenel. Monsieur Haenel instantly spotted the potential of Henri’s invention and convinced him to go into business with him to create their own company, Photosia, where they would do specialist microfilming. Henri agreed. This was to prove an extremely fortuitous meeting, and just in time, too: Henri’s machine would soon be desperately needed by the Resistance movement, and his adopted country turned out to need him at least as much as he needed it.

4

JACQUES – Passivity

Paris, 1930s

JACQUES GLASS was born under a bad star. That’s what his siblings always said about him, and they would say it fondly, because they really did love him but, my God, he did have a way of falling into bad luck. When he skipped school in Chrzanow, he, alone among his brother and cousins, was the one who was caught by the schoolmaster. Out of all the immigrants in the Marais who worked in somewhat grey areas of legality, it was Jacques who was repeatedly summoned to the courts to pay various fines. A year after Sonia got him and Henri off the bankruptcy charge, he was summoned to court again for, according to his court record, ‘employing a woman worker outside the legal hours’, for which he was fined 62 francs and 70 centimes in costs (roughly 60 euros today), plus a 5-franc fine, a sizable punishment for a poor immigrant. And yet no one was surprised this happened to Jacques. If there was a hole, Jacques’s friends said, he would fall into it.

And he had many friends. Of all the Glass siblings, Jacques was the easiest to get along with. Henri was too shy, Alex so combative and Sara often away due to poor health. But Jacques was easy-going, always with a ready smile, so everyone liked him. Like his father, he was happiest sitting in cafés with his friends. By the mid-1930s he had – just about – his fur shop, and that was more than enough for him. Sonia occasionally bustled across the river to see Chaya, or maybe just to check on Jacques, and when she passed his shop it was, invar

iably, shut. She would then find him around the corner, wasting away the afternoon in a café with friends, and she would upbraid him, astonished at this unabashed show of laziness. If Sonia had ever spoken like that to Alex he would have punched her, but Jacques just smiled and nodded at her, and then moved not an inch. Nothing bothered him, and he was perfectly fine where he was. And as much as he frustrated Sonia, she also liked him enormously – it was impossible not to, really. When she talked about him, even when she was well into her eighties, she would describe him to her daughter as ‘the best of all the family’. ‘Jacques’, Sonia would also later recall, ‘was wonderful. But too passive.’

The idea of Jewish passivity is controversial, and for good reason. The stereotype of the meek Jew in the 1940s who went like a lamb to the slaughter has, for a long time, been used by the culpable to excuse their part in the Holocaust. When Israel objected to the 2018 Polish law criminalising any suggestion that Poland should be blamed for crimes committed during the Holocaust, Andrzej Zybertowicz, adviser to the Polish President, replied that Israel merely felt ‘shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust’.[1] It has also been used in a more sympathetic manner by those who mean to show compassion to the Jews but actually end up fetishising their suffering. Julie Burchill certainly does this in her very weird philo-Semitic book The Unchosen, and Steven Spielberg has been accused of doing similarly in Schindler’s List – unfairly, I think.[2] And for some Jews, too, the stereotype of Jewish passivity has fed into their feelings of self-loathing or, at the very least, self-ambivalence: my father’s friend and one of the heroes of Operation Entebbe in 1976,[3] the late Michel Cojot-Goldberg, wrote in his autobiography, Namesake, about how he felt ‘ashamed’ of his father, who was arrested in Lyon and killed in Auschwitz, and how relieved he later was when he learned his father had, briefly, escaped from the train to the camps. This, it seemed to Michel, proved his father was not passive after all, but had shown some gumption and not obediently walked towards his own slaughter – as if any Jews, Michel’s father included, had much choice, when caught between Vichy laws and German military muscle.[4]

For all these reasons, Israel has long promoted the self-empowering narrative of Jewish defiance over passivity. But not every Jew in the war was a courageous rebel any more than every Frenchman was a member of the Resistance, no matter how much Israel and France might have claimed otherwise over the years. If for too long the stories of Jewish strength were overlooked, it would be equally untrue to overcorrect that mistake by denying the stories of passivity. There was no single narrative for Jews in the run-up to and during the Holocaust. Jacques, like his father, had been a passive soul since he was a child, always happy with the easiest option. And it was this passivity that led to his greatest misfortunes.

Jacques’s first major misfortune looked to him like his greatest good fortune. Even more misleadingly, it came from his mother, the person to whom he was most devoted. By 1936, Jacques was thirty-four and still single, and as much as Chaya enjoyed being able to call on Jacques whenever she needed him, she also wanted him to get married, and that was because she wanted him to marry a particular woman.

Mindel Rotter, known as Mila, was the oldest daughter of Samuel Rotter, Chaya’s older brother, and she lived in Zakopane, a Polish town about 100 kilometres to the south of Chrzanow. Chaya saw no reason why a cross-continental move should change anything about her children’s lives, and she decreed that Jacques should marry Mila, just as she had planned for him when they all lived in Poland.

Henri sighed. That Jacques should marry his cousin from home was bad enough, given how many possibilities for new futures there were in Paris, but that it should be Mila was the real kicker. Why not Mila’s sister Olga? Henri asked his mother. Olga was so pretty and smart and dynamic – quite similar to Sonia, in fact, which might explain Henri’s fondness for her. Whereas Mila was, well …

Alex was more vocal in his feelings about Mila and for the rest of his life described her in the most derogatory terms he could come up with, usually combining references to her Polishness with farm animals. He undoubtedly shared those observations with Jacques but Jacques paid as little attention to them as he did to Alex’s commands that he accompany him to museums. Jacques might have let Alex push him into skipping school when they were children, but they were adults now, and things had changed. Alex had his path, and Jacques had his, and his path was not to kowtow to his younger brother any more. Now, the person he unthinkingly obeyed was his mother, and so Mila was sent for. She arrived in Paris in 1936 and before he even talked with her Jacques knew he would marry her. Because that was what his mother told him to do.

Jacques and Mila.

Jacques and his new wife left the Pletzl and moved just across the river from the ultimate symbol of Parisian pride, the Eiffel Tower, on rue de la Tour. He had found a cramped and dark flat that had little to recommend it other than that it could just about double as a place for them to live and work, with the shop where he would restore and store furs at the front and the living quarters at the back, thus saving him some rent. But if he thought moving across the city, or marriage, would get him away from his mother, he was quickly disabused of that notion. Chaya soon moved in with Jacques and Mila at rue de la Tour.

It also turned out to be a pretty poor choice of flat. According to notes on Jacques later compiled by the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ), the agency established in 1941 to carry out the Vichy government’s anti-Semitic policies, the flat was ‘extremely small’ and ‘badly located with no passing trade’. As a result, the business had ‘no customers and its assets are immaterial’. Jacques had inherited not just his father’s looks and passivity but also his utter inability to earn any money.

But he was happier than he’d ever been in his life. Alex was always baffled by his brothers, both so handsome (and, he repeatedly stressed, so tall, a key point for Alex who was about five foot two), and yet they chose to marry these plain eastern European women. The very few photos of Jacques from this era show a man who was undoubtedly content. In a photo in the album I found in my grandmother’s closet, he is walking down a boardwalk, his hairline starting to recede but his familiar round glasses still in place. Like all the Glass siblings, Jacques loved beautiful things and in this photo he is dressed precisely in a three-piece suit, his face relaxed, and bearing a proud, happy smile, as he walks arm-in-arm with Mila, who smiles uncertainly at the camera. In another photo, taken around the same time, he is posing at what looks like a wedding with almost all the Ornstein cousins. None of the other Glasses are there, and neither is Mila, but Jacques in his round glasses stands at the back, smiling with his cousins. Within six years of that photo being taken, almost everyone in it would be dead.

Not even Jacques could stay oblivious to how difficult life was getting when he read his newspaper in the local café every day. In July 1934 a law was passed imposing a ten-year delay on naturalised foreigners taking public office or becoming lawyers. In 1935 foreigners had to wait four years to practise medicine, unless they had completed military service.

In 1936, France became the first European state to choose a Jew, the socialist Léon Blum, to be its prime minister. But any optimism Jews in France might have gleaned from this was tempered by the ominous fact that, shortly before he assumed office, Blum was nearly beaten to death by anti-Semites associated with the viciously right-wing Action Française league. Four years later he would be arrested and sent to Buchenwald, followed by Dachau and Tyrol, where he very narrowly escaped execution. When Édouard Daladier became France’s Prime Minister for the third time in April 1938, just a month before the Anschluss (when Hitler succeeded in uniting Austria and Nazi Germany), he used his inaugural address to reassure French voters of his ongoing pacificity (and passivity) in the face of German aggression, promising to take harsh measures against illegal immigrants in France.[5] Fines for visa and employment infractions became more severe and it was suddenly much more difficult for f

oreigners to get temporary extensions on their residence permits or renew their identity cards. Laws were passed to fine and imprison illegal immigrants, to send illegal German immigrants back to Germany, to limit the voting rights of naturalised French citizens, and to monitor both foreign and naturalised individuals. Anti-Semitic newspapers in France had a huge resurgence at this point: the daily paper Action Française was read by 70,000 people per issue; the weekly newspaper Gringoire, which regularly cited Jews as the source of all France’s problems, was read by 650,000 readers a week. The Naie Press, a Yiddish-language daily communist paper published in France, compared the life of an immigrant in 1930s France to that of a man ‘bicycling in butter’.[6]

Long after the Second World War ended, and even up to the end of the twentieth century, French politicians insisted France was not to blame for its country’s actions under Nazi occupation, as Vichy was an illegitimate regime that did not represent the country’s values. As late as 1994 President François Mitterrand said, ‘I will not apologise in the name of France. The Republic had nothing to do with this. I do not believe France is responsible.’[7] And yet, as in Poland, the anti-Semitic actions in France during the war were possible only because they reflected something deep within the country’s psyche. Anti-Semitism doesn’t just emerge like a passing fad, it grows from roots that were already there.

French politicians in the mid-1930s insisted all these new laws were merely for the sake of the country and the economy. Unlike most other western countries in the late 1930s, France was still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression and so politicians such as the former Prime Minister Albert Sarraut[8] could pretend that the anti-immigrant crackdown was merely a means ‘to assume control over a foreign population that is becoming excessive and among whom certain elements weigh upon our general economy’. The suggestion that this was all simply about jobs and money was somewhat undermined by Sarraut’s additional comment that it was necessary to go after ‘immigrants of all nationalities who, by escaping all verification, successfully infiltrate and eventually constitute an unassimilable mass of often defective individuals, who possess uncertain resources and equivocal morality’.[9],[10]

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, in which a mass pogrom was carried out throughout Nazi Germany, and tens of thousands of Jews were attacked and sent to concentration camps, German and Austrian refugees fled west, even as right-wing French politicians scoffed that reports of the night had been exaggerated. ‘There were no deaths,’ declared Charles Maurras, organiser of the deeply anti-Semitic political movement, Action Française. (In fact, official records show ninety-one Jews were killed and modern historians suggest the number was almost certainly much higher.) ‘The prestige of France is not threatened when one burns down a synagogue. One can burn them all. It’s not our business and it has no impact on us whatsoever. No diplomatic intervention, no war for the Jews,’ he added.[11]

Even native Parisian Jews were shocked by the French government’s coldness towards the refugees, but many held their tongues to avoid risking accusations of being ‘unpatriotic’.[12] Immigrants like the Glasses who had lived in France for years were in even more of a bind. They had thought of themselves as French, but their adopted country was becoming increasingly hostile towards them, and yet they had nowhere else to go. They had outrun the demons in their home country, but those demons had caught up with them. Not even the most blinkered immigrants who had lived through the Polish pogroms could fail to see the increasingly ominous signs in France as they crept ever closer to their front door. And Jacques, reading his newspaper in his café, would have been forcibly confronted with this reality every day.

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