You've Got to Tell Them

A French Girl's Experience of Auschwitz and After

Ida Grinspan, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, Charles B. Potter, Charles B. Potter

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780807169810
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

On a quiet winter night in 1944, as part of their support of the Third Reich's pogrom of European Jews, French authorities arrested Ida Grinspan, a young Jewish girl hiding in a neighbor's home in Nazi-occupied France. Of the many lessons she would learn after her arrest and the subsequent year and a half in Auschwitz, the most notorious concentration camp of the Holocaust, the first was that "barbarity enters on tiptoes... [even] in a hamlet where everything seemed to promise the peaceful slumber of places forgotten by history."Translated by Charles B. Potter, You've Got to Tell Them is the result of a friendship that formed in 1988, when Grinspan returned to visit Auschwitz for the first time since 1945 and where she met Bertrand Poirot-Delpeche, a distinguished writer for the Paris newspaper Le Monde. Sometimes speaking alone, sometimes speaking in close alternation, Grinspan and Poirot-Delpeche simultaneously narrate the story of her survival and the decades that followed, including how she began lecturing in schools and guiding groups that visited the death camps. Replete with pedagogical resources including a discussion of how and why the Holocaust should be taught, a timeline, and suggestions for further reading, Potter's expert translation of You've Got to Tell Them showcases a clear and moving narrative of a young French girl overcoming one of the darkest periods in her life and in European history.

PART I

“The Jewess of Lié”

The Sound of a Motor in the Night

It is after midnight, January 31, 1944, when a Traction Avant¹ pulls up next to the farmhouse of the Marché family, at Jeune-Lié, not far from Melle,² in Poitou. Behind the solid wall, a young girl wakes up suddenly. None of the neighbors would be venturing out to this place at such an hour.

“It can only be for me!” fourteen-year-old Ida Fensterzab says to herself, not yet realizing that she has just entered the point of focus of one of the greatest outrages in human history . . .

A victorious army, though on the point of being beaten, that still can find nothing more urgent to do than to press its subjects to go and round up a little Jewish girl from the Deux-Sèvres in order to send her to hell in Auschwitz! The Homeland of the Arts waging a war to the death against a child, among thousands of others, for the crime of simply having been born! . . . The circumstance is so atrocious, so unimaginable, that one ends up not imagining it at all, no lightning bolts from the sky, no Wagnerian racket, without even a chorus of mourners.

But barbarity enters on tiptoes — Ida’s first lesson from what she will live through — on this winter night, in a hamlet where everything seemed to promise the peaceful slumber of places forgotten by History. It is through the random chance of thwarted precaution that supreme inhumanity thrust its head in, behind the faces of policemen whom one wants to believe to be good and pious fathers, despite their staggering lack of any spontaneous sense of pity, and without showing any other sign of the monstrousness of what they were up to — for they did let on that they knew what the future held in store — than a big checkered bandana pulled out to wipe a sweating brow, as a sign of embarrassment. Thus tragedies are born quietly, on the sly: when will we understand that? Always too late?

Ida’s tragedy is intricately woven, as always when evil stalks the innocent, out of an accretion of tiny gestures, of many little lucky or unlucky events. It would be enough to make one superstitious, if it didn’t ultimately reveal that some very stubborn logic was in fact at work.

France, the Place of Refuge

In the overheated car where the horror begins, Ida will say nothing, her hand resting on her bundle. The cop who is mopping his uneasy brow doesn’t deserve to know what faith in his country had drawn the Fensterzabs to France, with the result that their daughter had now fallen into the paws of the “squad” from Melle. He would only become even redder in the face.

Now a half-century has passed, and the offspring of the good soldier have the right — some would even say the obligation — to hear the epic of these Polish Jews whose only true country was exile. This epic is one of betrayed trust. Let’s listen to it in one go, from Ida’s mouth — while on her arm one can still make out the identification number that was tattooed on her upon arrival in Auschwitz (this part of the interview is taking place on a beautiful summer day in Normandy,³ in July of 2001). The number is 75,360, and in it her executioners saw clear proof of abject servility. In time it has become a powerful symbol of victory over Nothingness.

“My mother was from Ostrów-Mazowiecka, not far from Warsaw.⁴ My father was from Koprzywnica,⁵ further to the east. I haven’t ever visited these cradles of my family. I have only become acquainted with Auschwitz out of necessity, and with the capital. My maternal grandfather was a forest and river warden. My mother, as was not uncommon for women of her generation, did not go to school for very long. Her parents died in the world war of 1914. She worked as an equipment operator in the fur industry. Around 1921 she moved to Berlin where she lived with an uncle.

“It was there that she met my father, who had arrived from his part of Poland. They had a religious wedding in Berlin, followed by a civil wedding in Paris, in the City Hall of the 11th arrondissement,⁶ after getting all of the necessary documents together, in 1926. My brother was already born (in 1924). I was born five years later, in 1929.

“My father’s name, Fensterzab, means ‘window pane,’ probably from some ancestor’s being a glazier. My father wasn’t able to stay in school for very long either. His father died when he was young and there were five kids to feed. He began working at age fourteen, as a tailor. Because of his own difficult childhood he developed a true reverence for school, and he considered attendance to be a privilege. He had very high expectations regarding our grades. The language used around the house was Yiddish, an old German dialect from the Rhineland that the Jews then spread over all of central Europe.

“Later, my father took French lessons, and he would ask me for advice, which I found truly admirable. He didn’t want me to come to his classes. They took place on Sunday mornings. Often he tried to catch me on a question of conjugation, and he was proud when he succeeded. He filled entire exercise books with French lessons. I found them in 1945. Alas, I have no idea what became of them . . .

“My parents were married in a religious ceremony. They didn’t have the necessary papers for a civil wedding, but except for the occasional high holiday, they were not observant at all. They didn’t invoke God, but Man, and the Republic. They taught a very strict moral code: what you should do, what you should not do.

“Poland was victim to a deeply felt anti-Semitism. I learned what the word pogrom⁷ meant very early in life. My father told me about them. Since he worked at home — while my mother made the deliveries in town — he talked to us a lot. The years before 1940 were very important for me thanks to these conversations. Being born in 1898, my father was both a witness and a victim of these pogroms, in that part of the country which was annexed by the Russians before 1914. Mobs would spring up out of nowhere in towns or villages to pillage, rape, and massacre the Jewish population. They could do anything they wanted. The police didn’t try to stop them.

“In addition to the pogroms, there was a general discrimination practiced by the Poles. Jews were not considered full-fledged citizens. There were quotas on how many could enroll for school. My father never stopped stressing how lucky we were to be admitted without any conditions whatsoever.

“Aside from the anti-Semitism, it was the economic situation and inflation in the 1920s that forced them to leave Poland and then Berlin, where they had been happier. It should be noted that, having been born in Paris, my brother and I obtained French citizenship merely by the voluntary declaration of our parents, while they never got it themselves. Our final destination was supposed to be Canada, where some of our uncles had emigrated at the end of the 19th century. But my father did not want to go there without us, as a scout. Paris seemed a safe enough place to be.

“France had an incredible reputation in central Europe at the time. Without actually knowing anyone there, they knew that France had made the Revolution, it was the land of liberty, of tolerance, the country that had freed its Jews. When war was declared, my father volunteered immediately as a foreigner. If he didn’t serve it was, I believe, because he was judged to be too old — over forty years old. Even when the Vichy regime came to power, we refused to believe that it would be a threat to us. France had a prodigious aura about it, nothing could touch it!

“At first we lived in the 11th arrondissement, rue de Montreuil, then rue des Envierges in the 20th. After 1935 we had a very nice apartment with four bedrooms, rue Clavel, in the 19th. I lived there when I returned from the camps. Since then, the individual houses have been demolished and a big apartment house built in their place.

“My memories start at around age four, around 1933, at the kindergarten of the 20th arrondissement. I learned French, which I hardly could speak at all. I got it mixed up with the Yiddish that was spoken at home. At the Hauser dairy products store I might ask for keisele, instead of cheese. The saleswoman corrected me very kindly. The racism common in the press, and in the bourgeois intellectual world in general at the time, is not felt in the local schools in the neighborhood where most of the Jewish families live.

“Amongst the emigré population, we see a lot of each other. They are all Ashkenazies like us and they speak Yiddish. My parents worked very hard. As soon as dinner was done, we would clear the table off and work would continue, work sewing, by hand and not by machine, so as not to disturb the neighbors. My Uncle and my Aunt Dembski lived in Clamart,⁸ in the Paris suburbs. We had fun bathing together. My father was a riot. He enjoyed tall tales, jokes in Yiddish, which is a very rich language. Among our neighbors there was an Armenian tailor (from whom I heard very young in life about the massacres in his country), an Italian bootmaker, and the keeper of the bar on the ground floor that served as a telephone booth. My parents enjoyed very close friendships with all of the neighbors. Alas, many of their friends were deported never to return, often as early as 1942.⁹

“News comes from Germany all the time, via refugees coming from Berlin and elsewhere. From 1937 or ’38 onward we are aware of what is happening to the Jews across the Rhine. Everyone is talking about it. We are worried about it. Although we have no radio at home, I can recall seeing my parents listening to a speech of Hitler at the home of friends. They understood German from the time they had spent in Berlin. Myself, I did not catch the meaning of what the Führer was screaming. But the anxiety it produced in the grown-ups was certainly felt by the children.

“My father read a leftist newspaper, in Yiddish, the Neue Presse, which I went to get from the neighboring stationery shop. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was an important point of reference at the time. I remember very clearly a parade of the Popular Front,¹⁰ in a large square, la Nation or la République, I can’t say which. I was on my father’s shoulders. I remember my surprise: why was everyone singing about ‘serviettes everywhere’?¹¹ My father set me straight right away: “‘the Soviets, Ida, the Soviets, like in the U.S.S.R.!’”

While everything separated Ida and Bertrand as children with regard to both the comforts and the risks involved in life, Bertrand recalls having a similar exchange with his father, in 1938, involving the Danzig corridor in Poland, which he confused with “dancing.” “Surely they aren’t going to war over ‘dancing,’” he protested. Proof that living through the same events at the same time creates a secret bond, no matter how far apart people are born. There is a commonality between everybody born in the same generation, a homeland without borders.

Popular entertainment of the day is also a part of the riches shared by the alumni of the 1930s. So it is with the Walt Disney cartoon Snow White, in theaters around 1937, or the operetta Yana, at the Châtelet.¹² Ida has only good memories of going out with her family:

“My parents took me with them. We went to plays in Yiddish in the rue de Lancry. On the boulevard de Belleville there were films in Yiddish. I knew the language quite well, and since it is close to German this would be a help to me in the camp, it saved me. . . . We also went for walks and picnics in the forest of Vincennes.¹³ And we often visited with friends.

“In school, I was never made to feel that I was from somewhere else, neither by the teachers or by the other students. Nobody joked about my name, which was admittedly difficult to pronounce, except for Madame S., who was not very nice.¹⁴ On the other hand my first grade teacher, who taught me how to read, Madame Roubéda, was especially nice, sweet and motherly. I tried to find her after the war, without success.”

Country Girl

In fact, Ida knew nothing directly about the increasing danger to Jewish immigrants living in eastern Paris during the Occupation, and this for the very good reason that her parents sent her to the countryside even before the massive departure of the civilian population in June of 1940. This decision was not made out of fear of persecution but to protect her from bombardments, invasion, and expected shortages. She had already arrived in the Deux-Sèvres region in 1939 where she met up with her Uncle and Aunt Dembski along with her mother and brother. So it was that she arrived in the home of Alice in Jeune-Lié, near Melle, some 30 kilometers from Niort.¹⁵

We went there together — for Bertrand to get to know the place, for Ida to see it again and to serve as a guide — aided by the kindness and erudition of a man who was a top specialist in local history, Jean-Marie Pouplain, a correspondent of the Institute for History of the Present Time.¹⁶ Later we will tell the story of the emotion we all felt during our meeting with Madame Picard, Ida’s former school teacher in the nearby village of Sompt. The most striking revelation of the trip was Ida’s ease, her almost physical attachment to this land of which she made herself, as it were, the proud representative. Illustrating her account of daily life with expressions in the local dialect, she spoke of “her” school, of “her” road, of “her” sheep, about “her” dog Gardienne, of the relationships of the people buried in “her” cemetery in Sompt.

The village had done more than adopt her: it had instantly erased the differences that might have existed because of where she came from, and of the situation in which she f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• French Publisher’s Preface
• Foreword, by Ida Grinspan and Bertrand Poirot-Delpech
• PART I “The Jewess of Lié”
• PART II From a Human to an Item
• PART III Then What?
• Time Line: The Story behind the History
• French Publisher’s Afterword
• Notes
• Glossary
• Selected Reading