As the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is commemorated, and the last survivors are summoned to compensate for the inadequacies of a memory that never seems to be able to take root, Ruben Honigmann reflects in this text on the possibility of recounting the Shoah. In his personal text, this attempt resembles a never-ending search, the meaning of which is never certain.
We lived on the second floor in a Strasbourg neighborhood with a small Jewish population. Yet there were three Shoah survivors in our building. Our next-door neighbor, Madame Loeb, the Aalsacian from Mommenheim, was an Auschwitz survivor. The neighbor upstairs, on the third floor, Madame Egri, the Hungarian from Budapest, an Auschwitz survivor. Our neighbor on the fifth floor, Madame Brauner, whom I saw as the most French of the three, a hidden child.
In my family, there had been no Shoah. My grandparents had all survived in exile, in London and New York respectively. Of course, the extermination of the Jews oozed from all sides in Germany, to which they had returned after the war and which my parents had left a year after I was born. But there was no Shoah, so to speak, in the flesh in our immediate circle. The experience of the Shoah crept in via the stairwell, through proximity to Madame Loeb, Madame Egri and Madame Brauner.
The three old women also had husbands, all of whom died long before their wives. I only remember Monsieur Egri, who didn’t speak a word of French and gabbled a very broken German that he, the Hungarian Jew, had learned in the ranks of the Wehrmacht. By an incredible irony of history, he had been forcibly incorporated into the Hungarian troops allied with the Nazis, without anyone checking his “race”. He had fought at Stalingrad, where he was wounded, and was repatriated, decorated and saved from deportation. I was always uncomfortable when I found myself stuck with Monsieur Egri in the elevator. I had to exchange a few words with him, but I knew I wouldn’t understand a word he was trying to say to me. He had to, because the Egri family were close to my maternal grandmother Litzi, who lived in Vienna and visited us several times a year. As soon as she dropped off her suitcases at our place, she would head for the Egri’s, with whom she could speak the Hungarian of her childhood. Madame Egri spoke a little French, but with an extremely pronounced Hungarian accent. I had the impression she was speaking Hungarian with French words. When we passed each other on the first floor in front of the mailboxes, we exchanged a few banalities. She never spoke to me about Auschwitz, nor did I dare ask her. In the last few years, she no longer recognized me, and when she passed me in front of the mailbox, she knew we knew each other, but she didn’t know from where. Mrs Egri died five years ago. A couple of rude, violent, nationalistic Russians moved into her apartment.
I was closest to Madame Loeb. Geographically first, since we shared the same landing. I regularly went to her house on Saturday mornings to consult the sports pages of the “Latest News of Alsace”, which she read religiously from cover to cover, with the exception of the sports pages. When I knocked on her door, she always answered with a loud, anxious “Who’s there?” which I was embarrassed to elicit simply to find out the previous day’s score for the Strasbourg’s Racing Club, which I didn’t know about because of Shabbat. To thank her, I would occasionally bring her chocolates, but she always refused them. This refusal was non-negotiable: Madame Loeb gave but didn’t receive.
Sometimes, I also went to Madame Loeb’s house in the evening, when her three grandsons, about my age, came to visit. The evening unfolded in much the same way, with us watching Fort Boyard and commenting on what we saw on the screen. The boys’ mother wasn’t Jewish, but something inside me told me that they were, in some ways, more Jewish than I was, since their grandmother had been to Auschwitz. On the other hand, there was an atmosphere of lightness and carefreeness that I didn’t have at home, which I attributed to their goyishkeit.
One of the grandsons later committed suicide: he’d lost his mind, was convinced he’d be deported to Auschwitz, had his grandmother’s number tattooed on his arm and set fire to the van he was living in. He had inflicted his own death, which Mrs. Loeb had miraculously escaped. Mrs. Loeb was already very old by then, and I never found out if Mrs. Loeb knew what had happened to her grandson.
Shortly before Madame Loeb’s death, I met the woman who was to become my wife, and made a point of introducing Madame Loeb to her, as if she were an old aunt. She could no longer move from her bed, but still had all her wits about her, and it was then that, for the first time, she told me, in her thick Alsatian accent from Mommenheim, how she had saved her life at Auschwitz.
In the line leading to the gas chambers, she spoke to an SS man in German. The man, apparently moved to hear her mother tongue, made her change lines.
I don’t find myself fascinated by the “last ones”. I get the impression that they’re displayed like trophies, that we’re attached to the survivors, to their so-called “resilience”, for failure to recount the fate of the other 99.9% who were annihilated and about whom we’ll never know anything.
In the final days, when the Nazis were evacuating the living corpses from the camp and loading them onto the death marches, Mrs. Loeb was too weak to walk and was drinking from a puddle. An SS man passed her and pointed his rifle at her to finish her off. Another SS man then passed by and took his comrade by the arm, telling him there was no time for that. She too, like so many survivors, was haunted by the enigma of her own survival. “And why not the others?” she said. She also said that we shouldn’t complain in life, because there were people who had harder lives than we did, and I wondered every time how anyone could have a harder life than Madame Loeb.
Like every time someone dear to me dies, my mother tells me in passing, as if I already knew. She says, in the middle of something else, getting into the car or taking the elevator, “You know so-and-so died”. She doesn’t ask me the question, she just says it, like a reminder of a known fact. It’s as if verbal circumvention were going to lessen the pain of death, to ward off the reality of the thing. In Madame Loeb’s apartment now lives a couple of Kabyles, who maintain warm, friendly relations with my parents.
I knew almost nothing about Madame Brauner. The fifth floor was too far for me. I only went there once a year, for my elementary school’s annual tombola. Every year, Madame Brauner bought several tickets from me, and once she even won a completely ridiculous prize – a horribly kitsch doll. She was genuinely happy about it, and welcomed it with open arms. Unlike Madame Loeb, Madame Brauner was able to give and receive. Madame Brauner was the last to die, last year. I don’t know if she had any children, and I don’t know who now lives in her apartment.
There are no more Shoah survivors today at 9 rue Edel in Strasbourg, just as there are almost no survivors anywhere.
I don’t find myself fascinated by the “last ones”. I get the impression that they’re displayed like trophies, that we’re attached to the survivors, to their so-called “resilience”, for failure to recount the fate of the other 99.9% who were annihilated and about whom we’ll never know anything. I see it as a final, derisory attempt to make what happened heard, perhaps precisely because there was nothing to make heard. If this has failed for 80 years, there’s no reason why it should succeed any more in the final seconds of history’s stoppage time. The story of the Shoah may have shaken a few isolated consciences. But it has not avoided the permanence and telluric resurrection of anti-Jewish vomit.
The page of the Shoah has been turned. All that’s left are obscene recuperations, the grand n’importe quoi of the game of whether the Palestinians or the Israelis are the new Nazis, a gutted “never again”, death camp tourism, quarrels and anathemas between Shoahtologists, an inexhaustible literature that no longer interests anyone, and mushy novels about love stories in Auschwitz.
I’ve never been to a concentration camp, extermination camp, internment camp or any other Shoah site. I don’t believe in the materiality of the past and the memory of stones. On the other hand, in my dreams, I repeatedly find myself in Madame Loeb’s apartment, with or without her. Nothing much happens in these dreams; I simply wander around her apartment, while she’s in another room. I’m not sure why.
