I was born in Prague at the worst possible moment, four months before Hitler came to power. My father was a lawyer by training, and later became vice president of a large insurance company in Czechoslovakia. A bourgeois aesthete perched on the edge of a volcano, he foresaw nothing of what the future would bring. The personal ex libris pasted in all his books contained a piano, a score by Chopin, and a carpenter’s square, all standing out against the Star of David that served as the background, the foundation, of all the rest—and yet in our family, Judaism as a religion had completely disappeared.

We observed none of the rules of life that Orthodoxy laid down, celebrated none of the holidays, respected none of the customs. I remember visiting a good many of the churches of Prague with Vlasta, my Czech governess, yet I have no memory at all of the Altneuschul, the famous synagogue said to be the oldest in Europe, or of the Jewish town hall with its clock marked with Hebrew letters and hands that turned counter-clockwise, or of the Jewish cemetery, as old and famous as the synagogue. Of all this heritage I remember nothing, except perhaps a few Yiddish words. In short, we were typical representatives of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie of Central Europe.

On March 12, 1939 it had become blindingly clear, even to my parents, that Hitler would occupy Czechoslovakia. We would have to leave—as soon as possible, and my parents mistakenly chose France as a refuge.

For two years we lived in the town of Néris-les Bains, near Vichy, in the Unoccupied Zone. I was placed first in one, then another, institution for Jewish children. On July 16, 1942, the great roundup began in Paris; nearly 13,000 foreign Jews, among them 4,000 children, were herded into the Vélodrôme d’Hiver for deportation to the East. Adolf Eichmann let it be known that beginning on July 20 there would be sufficient space for children in the convoys destined to leave for the East before the end of August. My parents, desperate, appealed to one of their benefactors, Madame M. de L., and it was decided that I would be enrolled in Saint-Béranger, a boarding school run by a Catholic sodality not far from Néris.

My mother, in her plea to Madame M. de L., wrote as follows:

In my despair I am turning to you, for I have learned through my husband that you have taken pity on us and understood what was happening to us.

We have succeeded, for the moment at least, in saving our boy . . . but I don’t want to leave him where he is, for today one can no longer have any confidence in a Jewish institution.

I beg you, dear Madame to agree to look after our child and assure him your protection until the end of this terrible war. I don’t know how he could best be safeguarded, but I have complete confidence in your goodness and your understanding.

My husband’s fate and my own are now in God’s hands. If He wishes us to survive, we will see the end of this awful period. If we must disappear, we will at least have the happiness of knowing that our beloved child has been saved.

The little one has plenty of clothes, underwear, and shoes, and there is also enough money for him. I will leave everything with you if you will have the great kindness to tell me yes.

We can no longer exist legally. (Legal können wir nicht mehr existieren). . . .

The letter having been written on two pieces of paper of different sizes, in a hand that in places was not at all clear, my mother added at the end: “I beg you to excuse the appearance of this letter. My hands no longer obey me.”

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The Abbé Bonnet,1 an old priest with closed-cropped white hair and enormous glasses concealing almost blind eyes, came to Néris to get me. This gentle, affectionate man was taking me off to an entirely new world, to the strictest Catholicism, to an almost royalist, ferociously pro-Pétain, anti-Semitic France, to the ladies of the sodality, who were going to save a soul but who were also taking serious risks because the soul they were saving was that of a Jewish child.

As I entered the portals of Saint-Béranger, I became someone else; Paul-Henri Ferland, an unequivocally Catholic name to which Marie was added at my baptism, so as to make it even more authentic, or perhaps because it was an invocation of the protection of the Virgin, the heavenly mother safe from torment, less vulnerable than the earthly mother whom at this very moment the whirlwind was already sweeping away.

An adult conversion may be a purely pro forma affair, and there were many such during the war, or it may be the result of a spiritual journey that ends in a decision freely made; nothing disappears, yet everything is transformed: the new identity then changes one’s former existence into a prefiguration or a preparation. The rejection of the past that was forced upon me was neither a pro forma affair—for my father had promised not only to accept my conversion but to assure me a Catholic education if life later resumed its normal course—nor, of course, the result of a spiritual journey. The first ten years of my life, the memories of my childhood, were to disappear, for there was no possible synthesis between the person I had been and the one I was to become.

My father had written the following letter to be handed over to the directress:

I am very happy to learn through Madame M. de L. that you are prepared to welcome my only son into your institution . . . and raise him in the Catholic faith.

It is with gratitude that I consent to and formally authorize you to baptize him. My wife and I promise to continue your work along the lines that you have laid down, as soon as God’s will and circumstances permit us to see to his education ourselves.

I understand my father’s letter: in the same circumstance, in the face of the same drama, would not I too have written the same lines, given the same authorization, made the same promises? I never knew whether these promises had been explicitly demanded; this is not impossible. On this point my parents were at peace with themselves, for from this moment on they accepted One goal, one essential imperative: saving their child. And in the face of so much distress, I can only tell myself: happily, not for what became of me, but happily for them, no religious allegiance stood in their way and the step was taken without doubt and guilt coming to the fore. But what, I wonder, would a religious Jew have done if confronted with such a terrible dilemma?

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The day after my arrival the directress, Madame Dutour, gravely received me: “Your parents, my dear boy, have turned you over to us. You are going to have to work hard and learn your catechism quickly so that Jesus may count you one of his own. Here is a sheet of paper with the Our Father and the Hail Mary written out on it; you are to recite them to me tomorrow. Madame Chapuis will prepare you for your baptism and set the hours for your lessons. So go see her right away and remember to learn your prayers.”

Saint-Béranger educated its pupils in a Catholicism that was particularly strict, even for the time, and did everything possible to encourage priestly vocations. The first days in this strange new setting left me with a memory of complete despair.

As I was still only a little pagan, my contacts with the other children at the beginning were extremely restricted. It was considered better to segregate me like this, out of prudence first of all, but also to shield me from the hostile attitude of some of my new comrades.

I had almost nothing to do except learn my catechism lessons, and as I did not yet have a place assigned me in study hall, I spent a good part of the day in the parlor, a little reception room that was almost always empty. I stood for hours behind the windowpane, looking out at the terrace, bordered with a few plants, and the dusty courtyard down below. One afternoon it rained: I found it a distraction, or rather, a relief.

Everything at Saint-Béranger stifled me: the austere discipline, the continual prayers of which I didn’t understand a word, the dreariness of our dark building, and, finally, the food which seemed revolting to me. I don’t know why, but I imagined that the rubbery meat that was served us on the day after my arrival was cat meat.

The “cat meat” and the general upset in my life had a pitiable effect on me, adding a grotesque touch to the overall picture that only accentuated my misery: on my second night at Saint-Béranger I was gripped by severe diarrhea and got up out of bed a good twenty times, as I remember. The next day everyone was put on a diet, for it seemed impossible that one child could have caused that much commotion. I forthwith acquired a dubious notoriety.

But what was happening to me was experienced through the filter of a single thought, a single desire, a single drive of my entire ten-year-old being: I had to rejoin my parents at any cost. It was more than distress or nostalgia: it was a physical need, so to speak, and nothing could stand in its way. My parents, at this time, still hoped to escape to Switzerland. My father’s health, however, had gravely deteriorated, and they were now living in a hospital facility at Montluçon. I felt, with the inexplicable instinct of children, that if I couldn’t manage to rejoin my father and mother before they left the hospital at Montluçon, this separation could be final.

I decided to run away.

Madame Chapuis taught me catechism at the caretaker’s lodge, occupied by her brother. Hence I was able to inspect at my leisure the little front courtyard of Saint-Béranger and the gate that led to the street, but I was terrified by the personality of the brother, a Cerberus who was both lame and one-eyed. I was persuaded that this disabled man, who in reality was the gentlest and most harmless of creatures, had guessed my plans and would lay a trap for me at the last moment. I would wake up at night with a start, pursued by this Cyclops’s limping footsteps; during the lessons, the apostolic Roman Catholic church disappeared in a fog the moment the caretaker’s blind eye was turned in my direction.

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Despite my terror, on the first Sunday of my stay at Saint-Béranger, at the beginning of the afternoon, when everything was quieter than usual, I went and sat down on the bench in the front courtyard, as unobtrusively as possible, waiting for Chapuis to leave his lodge. He went out around three o’clock. I ran to the gate, opened it a crack, and found myself outside.

I had succeeded in making my escape, but where was the hospital where my parents were? A ten-year-old child finds his way by asking people. The passers-by whom I questioned may have been astonished to see such a little boy running about all alone like that, looking for a hospital. But could anything really have surprised them at that time?

At the hospital information window, I asked the way to my parents’ room. I was told which one it was. Even today I am unable to understand why my parents were hiding there under their own name: can their assumed name have totally disappeared from my memory? But how would I have known it?

I climbed up four flights of stairs, opened the door, and threw myself into my mother’s arms.

There are certain memories that cannot be shared, so great is the gap between the meaning they have for us and what others might see in them. Undoubtedly, the words exchanged in this hospital room were, objectively, simple, everyday ones: a child’s pleas and adults’ promises.

I was sitting on my mother’s lap, with my arms around her neck, weeping. Everything was white in this room, the enameled whiteness of hospitals. There were several beds in the room but they were empty just then. The room opened out on to a balcony that ran the length of the building and allowed one to go from one room to another. That was how my father came in to join us.

The red splashes of pots of geraniums fastened to the edges of the balustrades contrasted with the overall whiteness. We had had geraniums on the windowsill in Néris too; it was my mother and I who took care of them. We watered them carefully and cautiously. When winter came, we had to make sure the frost didn’t kill them, but what joy the moment the first flower opened in spring!

On this hospital balcony were chaises longues and a little table, also painted white, on which there was nothing but letter paper, an inkwell, and a fountain pen: no balls of yarn or knitting needles. In Néris, however, my mother used to knit in the evening. She had made me a pullover, a scarf, and mittens, for it was freezing cold in Néris in winter and all the children got chilblains. Since the end of the war, curiously enough, chilblains seem to have disappeared. I don’t know how my mother had managed to come by the wool, but, in any event, the pullover she knit for me—and that I took to Montluçon—was white, with horizontal red stripes; the mittens also had colored stripes. My mother wanted everything to look pretty.

My father was paler than usual that day; he was unshaven and kept pacing endlessly back and forth. Though the weather was nice, he was wearing his woolen sweater for around the house, a light brown one with a thin blue stripe along the neckline. A doctor came in and went out on the balcony with my father. I saw my father shake his head; the doctor left and my father came back into the room.

I heard the continuous hum of voices in the corridor and along the balcony too, outside the neighboring rooms; visiting-hour. From time to time a burst of laughter. The light was already changing.

My father and mother spoke in turn. They answered me endlessly that we would not be separated for long. Meanwhile, it was absolutely necessary that I return to Saint-Béranger. No, I wouldn’t be going with them: they couldn’t tell me why, but it was better that way. I would soon be joining them. What was more, the war would be over shortly and we would go back to Prague; then everyone could—and here my mother used a rather vulgar Czech expression to lend the conversation a gay note, to prove to me that there was no reason, really absolutely no reason, for me to be unhappy.

I was quite aware, however, that there was anxiety in these words: my parents were pleading with all the conviction of those who know that they are not going to be believed. And at that point something happened that was a sign.

A phone call had been made to Saint-Béranger. Madame Chapuis and Madame Robert arrived soon afterward, if I remember rightly. I had to leave. My mother put her arms around me, but it was my father who unwittingly revealed to me the real meaning of our separation: he hugged me to him and kissed me. It was the first time that that timid father of mine had ever kissed me. Nothing was definite yet; others had risked taking their children with them. My parents had put me in a safe place, but here I was, a runaway who had gone straight back to them, unable to bear being separated. Could they drag me away from them a second time? I clung to the bars of the bed. How did my parents ever find the courage to make me loosen my hold without bursting into sobs in front of me?

It’s all been swept away by catastrophe, and the passage of time. What my father and mother felt at that moment disappeared with them; what I felt has been lost forever, and of this heartbreak there remains only a vignette in my memory, the image of a child walking back down the rue de la Garde, in the opposite direction from the one taken shortly before, in a peaceful autumn light, between two nuns dressed in black.

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Following my return to Saint-Béranger, I made satisfactory progress in catechism, and at the beginning of October I was baptized in the Church of Notre-Dame in Montluçon. My first communion soon followed, as well as my departure for Montneuf in the Indre, another school run by the sodality. This school was in the country, and my father had hoped the pastoral setting would have a calming effect on me.

So, some time in the month of October, 1942, I passed through the great stone arch that led to the inner courtyard of my new refuge; beechnuts and chestnuts lay strewn along the paths all around.

I could not say what Montneuf had been before becoming a boarding school—a convent perhaps. But when I arrived, the building looked more like a big farm to me than a convent: everything about it was suited to rural living. As I think back on it today, I can’t help remembering with a certain nostalgia the massive gray buildings, set about the vast, irregularly paved courtyard with the fountain in the center. And yet it was at Montneuf that I was more or less to touch the very bottom.

I was not a country child, and I felt more lost among the little peasants of Montneuf than among the young city dwellers of Montluçon. I would have liked to wander along the ponds, pick a flower, or gather chestnuts, but instead I was obliged to spade the garden, to rake, to do carpentry, and soon was to have to herd the cows—which frightened me more than all the rest. As Mademoiselle Cécile—whose father, she told us, was a fireman in Montauban who spent hours polishing his helmet—put it: “Paul-Henri, you’re all thumbs!” My future was not at all a brilliant one according to her. This good young woman from the south of France, with her strong accent and her trace of a mustache, had no way of knowing how justified her pessimistic prognoses were.

“Paul-Henri.” I couldn’t get used to my new name. At home I had been called Pavel, or rather Pavliçek, the usual Czech diminutive, or else Gagl, not to mention a whole string of affectionate nicknames. Then from Paris to Néris I had become Paul, which for a child was something quite different. As Paul I didn’t feel like Pavliçek any more, but Paul-Henri was worse still: I had crossed a line and was now on the other side. Paul could have been Czech and Jewish; Paul-Henri could be nothing but French and resolutely Catholic, and I was not yet naturally so. (What was more, that was not the last of the name-changes: I subsequently became Shaul on disembarking in Israel, and then Saul, a compromise between the Saül that French requires and the Paul that I had been. In short, it is impossible to know which name I am, and that in the final analysis seems to me sufficient expression of a real and profound confusion.)

I no longer remember whether I arrived at Montneuf just before or just after my tenth birthday, but it was at Montneuf that I received, through Madame M. de L., a letter that my parents had sent me for my birthday. They must have sent this letter before their departure from Montluçon; I don’t know what has happened to it, but I remember it bore no sign of the place that it had been sent from, or of the place where my parents were at the time. They assured me that they were in good health and that I would soon be with them again; they also said everything that parents can say to their child for his tenth birthday—almost a man now, isn’t that right? I was quite aware that there was something strained about this letter. Where were my parents? Were they afraid I might try to run away again? But I didn’t have the strength to do it again. In fact, I was at the end of my rope.

I began to sleepwalk. To avoid being humiliated, I decided to tie myself to the rails of my bed in the evening. I made complicated knots around my left wrist, and even though the arrangement interfered with my sleep, it did keep me where I belonged. But in the morning a new problem presented itself. We were supposed to get ready for mass at a run, or almost. You can imagine the surprise of our dormitory mistress, Mademoiselle Madeleine I think it was, when she found that instead of washing his face like the others, poor Paul-Henri was struggling to untie himself from his bed. I had the choice between sleepwalking at night or being late to mass in the morning. I don’t know what I did then, but as for all the rest, a serious crisis was soon to change the course of things entirely.

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At mass, there were several of us who had the same difficulties. At the beginning, everything went well, but after about twenty minutes, through the combined effect of empty stomachs and incense, and the successive changes from a kneeling position to a standing one, one or the other of us would suddenly get up, leave the pew, walk down the main aisle of the chapel in the direction of the exit, and faint halfway there.

The victims were taken to the office of Madame Chancel, the directress, and when we came to, through the effect of ammonia or a renewal of strength quite natural at our age, we would often see her gaunt face leaning over us.

Madame Chancel’s kindness ought to have been a source of comfort to me, but nothing seemed to be able to bring me out of the melancholic apathy into which I was sinking little by little. I did not react at all, for instance, even when a faintly comic episode occurred in this connection that to me was not at all comic.

One day I saw a boy of about fifteen arrive at Montneuf: Davy, a boy I had known in Néris. If there is such a thing as a Jewish face, his was one, there was no doubt of that, but his name had become much more French than mine even, a name with an aristocratic de in it. He turned up as an Eagle Scout, decked out in a magnificent uniform. He knew all about the most recent patriotic ceremonies and soon he began organizing the salute to the colors, campfires where he recited poems to the glory of Marshal Pétain, and walks punctuated with the most uplifting songs of the day; in short, Davy gave himself over to a feverish program of national revival. He passed through our midst like a hurricane, and during the few weeks that he stayed at Montneuf, he never gave a sign of recognizing me: he made not the slightest effort to be pals with me. I for my part restricted myself to following his lead in a daze: I too gave no sign that I had met him before.

It took me several months to go under entirely. One afternoon in November or December, we were walking on the edge of a wood, the sort of wood where everything grows together in a tangle—brambles, ferns, trees; the trees were almost bare and the whole formed a gray mass bristling with countless twigs. Opposite us, on the other side of the path, were fields the dark brown color of the soil, and, farther away, bordered by reeds, a pond reflecting the sky. The sky itself, covered with huge stretches of dark clouds, was transformed, just above our heads, into a band of intense color. This melancholy landscape was beautiful to me—to the point that I felt a thrill of pleasure. But despite these fleeting joys, I became sadder and sadder: in one way or another, I was going to let myself die.

Toward the end of the winter, in March, the occasion to do so presented itself. I had felt feverish for several days, but I was determined not to say a word about it. Mademoiselle Madeleine, who supervised our walks, was sometimes surprised at the apathetic air of poor Paul-Henri, but did not pursue the matter. And so we started out, as usual, on one of our outings. And as usual I loitered along a bit to the rear, all alone, for I hadn’t been able to make friends with any of the children at Montneuf. The paths were real quagmires, and on the slopes the snow was still piled high in brownish drifts. I could barely lift my galoshes, my throat hurt worse and worse, and I seemed to be seeing everything through a sort of veil; I was burning with fever.

We walked alongside a brook. I fell even farther behind the group, which disappeared around a bend in the path. Without hesitating, I waded into the ice-cold water up to my knees; I knew exactly what I was doing, even though the fever dulled my senses. Suddenly Mademoiselle Madeleine appeared quite near me; I heard her questions, but her scolding seemed to me to be of no importance. Then came calls of “Paul-Henri, Paul-Henri” on every hand, but I couldn’t have cared less about the cries, the laughter, the mocking looks of my schoolmates, who had retraced their steps.

I have no idea how the walk ended, for after I had been fished out of the brook I felt sick, and from that moment on my memories were confused, blending together into a single long stretch of being ill. I was in bed for several weeks; a very bad case of croup; according to Madame Chancel I nearly died. They didn’t dare take me to the hospital, since in a little town like Le Blanc, or even a fair-sized city such as Châteauroux, a child who did not look at all like the others might have aroused suspicion. Madame Chancel installed herself near me, behind a screen, and a long bedside watch began.

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At the end of three or four weeks of illness, my breathing was normal again and my fever began to go down. I was getting well.

I watched the life of Montneuf through the window of the infirmary that looked out on the big courtyard. I could see the wagon hitched to two horses, circle the fountain; I could follow the clumping of wooden shoes on the stones and the shifting sunlight on the wall of the building opposite; I could hear the children come out of mass, and could even make out the voice of Jean, a boy I liked. In short, in this month of April, 1943, I was coming alive again. Even good Madame Chancel was surprised at how quickly I was recovering.

Spring had come by the time I was allowed to go outdoors. In the beginning I had difficulty walking, but soon I could stroll along the edge of the ponds again. The path was bordered with hawthorn in flower and clumps of jonquils formed golden patches in the grass. I felt fine; I had changed. The memory of my parents seemed further away somehow.

During Holy Week I went back to my usual place in the chapel, without feeling faint this time, and began to assist at mass. More than once I was obliged to confess to “impure thoughts,” but I became more pious than ever in order to turn over a new leaf. I was ripe for Saint-Béranger. In September I returned to Montluçon.

Once again it was Madame Dutour who welcomed me. She was exactly the opposite of Madame Chancel in appearance: whereas the latter was tall, pale, and frail, with a black mantilla that gave you a glimpse of two smooth wings of flaxen hair, Madame Dutour was small, dark, and Latin-looking, and had a southern accent. When I arrived at Saint-Béranger, her hair, no doubt once very black, had already turned silver, and formed an agreeable contrast to her dark matte complexion and her brown eyes. Like the entire sodality, both these women lived in a universe that was strange, to say the least.

A circumscribed, stifling world, it was only so in the eyes of outsiders, for to a new boarding student, eleven years old, it meant calm, certainty, roots. The perspectives of this monolithic Catholicism had long since been thoroughly explored, and had no yawning abysses: they had the perfect coherence that marks any total belief. One could not be mistaken about the nature of good and evil at Montluçon, and I imagine that for other students—those who were not suddenly assailed by fits of indefinable terror—this world seemed completely reassuring.

In my memories Saint-Béranger is frozen within the framework—a dusty, faded one, with a slightly rancid odor—of a whole way of provincial life, one that modernity and the Republic had spared, and one that quivered with excitement when the Vichy government was established. For Marshal Pétain was venerated in the sodality; his effigy, like the crucifix and the image of the Virgin, inevitably adorned each one of our classrooms, the parlor, and the dining room. Shortly after my return from Montluçon, Philippe Henriot, the new Vichy Secretary of Information, began his radio campaign. We read his harangues every day; when he was executed by the Resistance, his death seemed an abominable murder to us.

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I adapted and became a devoted Saint-Béanger student. I was placed in the fifth form. Like many of my schoolmates, I soon felt a vocation: I wanted to become a priest.

At that time Saint-Béranger was made up of about forty children and youths, two or three young seminarians, a few nuns—the mainstay of the school—and lay sisters. The use of our time was fixed, down to the minute, from morning prayers to those at bedtime. Chapel services alternated with classes, meals, and recesses, the whole unfolding within a tiny, fairly rundown setting, but one that nonetheless had its charms for us: two main buildings, adjoining each other, and an annex leading, on one side, to the little front court where I had made my first appearance, and on the other to a playground surrounded by a wire fence, and beds of Japanese privet that gave off a heady, nauseating odor when in flower. Beyond that lay the city: in the foreground a dreary square, a boulevard, and two enormous cylindrical gas tanks; farther in the distance, almost at the horizon, the military barracks and the buildings of the Dunlop factories that a bombing by English planes had recently partially destroyed.

Study halls and offices occupied the ground floor and the second story of each of the main buildings; above were the dormitories; the dining room was in the annex. As for the chapel, it was reached by a winding staircase that then led to the dormitories. We went from the dormitory to the chapel, from the chapel to the dining room, from the dining room to study hall, from study hall to the chapel, walking one behind the other, in order of size—little ones in front, big ones behind—arms crossed and eyes lowered, either silently or reciting a prayer. In the evening, when we went to chapel after study hall, the damp walls of the stairway echoed with the “Salve Regina,” while our shadows flickered as they wound up along the walls, to the rhythm of swaying hand-held kerosene lamps that feebly lighted our way up the stairs.

The rites before going to bed followed. We knelt at the foot of the bed for one last prayer, then got undressed according to firmly-established rules: you took your shirt off first so as to put on a long nightdress, harsh and faded from many washings. Then you had to open the bed by drawing down the covers and the top sheet, sit down on the bed, pull the sheet and the covers over your knees, and then and only then take off your trousers, avoiding, through this double precaution, any offense to modesty. Madame Robert walked about among the beds, checking to make sure that each of us would fall asleep flat on our backs, hands crossed over our hearts. The light would go out, a blue night lamp now the only illumination in the room. Our dormitory mistress then went into her room, a small one adjoining the dormitory from which she could peek at us through a little window. Soon her light went out too, and darkness enveloped twenty or thirty boys already breathing in unison.

The pupils at Saint-Béranger came from all over. Names with an aristocratic de mingled with the most common surnames. Children from the surrounding region lived alongside others from Lorraine, Brittany, the Midi, and even from the overseas French colonies; the three D. brothers, for instance, had come straight from Rabat. Most of the pupils came from extremely pious families that had already produced a priest or a nun.

There was nothing about Montluçon to recall the sometimes cynical, often quite equivocal, atmosphere that one associates with large religious establishments, Jesuit schools in particular. Of course, there were few of us, and we were closely watched, day and night. Nonetheless, veritable explosions, sudden, brief, and powerful, occasionally shook our little community. They took the form of quarrels about nothing that broke out without warning among some of the older pupils, usually during evening study hall. Astonishing in themselves in a place such as ours, these fist fights linger in my memory because of their extraordinary violence: in a few moments noses were bleeding, smocks torn, eyes swollen, handfuls of hair torn out; the antagonists used anything that came to hand as weapons, even classroom chairs, and it often took all the authority of Madame Dutour in person to separate them. What could not be expressed otherwise found a spectacular outlet in these fights.

Our studies were based on permanent competition. Each week, on Monday morning, Madame Dutour would solemnly read the list of averages, and each class had its members in first and last place. The names of those first in each subject were posted on the honor roll and my own name was soon on it regularly. I was in the limelight: undoubtedly I was going to become a Jesuit, or rather a “jèze,” as the slang expression of our day had it.

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Religion dominated our lives. Mass, the adoration of the Holy Sacrament, and meditations marked the essential moments of our days, which, in addition, were punctuated by the prayers that preceded and followed meals and classes, by brief aves murmured as we walked from one place to another, as well as by the edifying books read aloud (the lives of saints, for example) at mealtimes in the dining room. It would be wrong to imagine that we experienced this religiosity of every moment of our day as an unbearable fetter: most of us lived it with fervor. We told our beads, tried to outdo one another in ardor, were tempted by mortification of the flesh, and had we been allowed to wear sackcloth and a hair shirt, we would have done so with enthusiasm.

During Holy Week we learned the story of the Passion according to Saint John by heart, first in Latin and then in Greek. Which of us was not gripped with emotion on reciting the last words of Jesus to the Apostles, on the evening of the Last Supper: “As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love”? The visit to various churches on Holy Thursday elated us, and the Good Friday services overwhelmed us: we were literally following in the footsteps of Jesus, imagining his sufferings, weeping at his death, exulting at the news of his resurrection.

I had passed over to Catholicism, body and soul. The fact that the misdeeds of the Jews were mentioned during Holy Week did not trouble me in the slightest; sometimes, especially during walks, I would even relate the dark intrigues that the usurer Abraham had plotted against the noble companions of Kósciuszko, exiled on the outermost borders of Siberia, thus embellishing, for an ever-eager audience, the adventure stories that were occasionally read to us at mealtimes.

Thus in my own way I had become a renegade: though conscious of my origins, I nevertheless felt at ease within a community of those who had nothing but scorn for Jews, and I incidentally helped stir up this scorn. I had the feeling, never put into words but nonetheless obvious, of having passed over to the compact, invincible majority, of no longer belonging to the camp of the persecuted but, potentially at least, to that of the persecutors.

Each of us has certain secret shames, those brief instants buried in forgetfulness that provoke an immediate burning sensation when an association brings them back to conscious awareness, an instinctive disgust, immediately followed by the desire to see these memories blotted out forever: for me it is the stories I told of the usurer Abraham and his intrigues.

And yet, when Madame Robert, who taught philosophy to those rare pupils at Saint-Béranger who entered the last form, sang the praises of Bergson, who was born a Jew but later came very close to embracing Catholicism, though he refused baptism, and even suggested that God would surely count Bergson among His own, I was secretly proud of learning that so great a philosopher could also be Jewish.

The simple unquestioning faith drummed into us was, as I have said, the one I needed. Wasn’t this literal Christianity addressed first of all to the disinherited and forsaken of this world? Had God not tested me because He loved me more than the others, thus pointing out to me the road to sanctity? All these thoughts elated me. But my greatest comfort was devotion to the Virgin. At Saint-Béranger the worship of Mary was the very essence of our religious universe, and in this, too, I became an exemplary pupil. Kneeling before the plaster statue with the sweet face, clad in a long white robe and a sky-blue girdle, her head crowned with tin stars, I rediscovered something of the presence of a mother.

I liked the austere simplicity, the intense self-communion of the early mass at which I sometimes served, not in the little chapel of Saint-Béranger, but in the big chapel of the mother house, a few hundred yards away from the rue de la Garde. For I liked the pomp of church holidays. In reality the big chapel had all the ugliness of plaster-saint church art, with its blue background dotted with gilded fleurs-de-lis. Yet how sumptuous it seemed to me in those days! I was intoxicated by the splendor of the chasubles and the ciboria, the heady odor of the incense, the softness or the majesty of the music; I confess that I have never again felt the emotion that used to grip me when, kneeling in the big chapel during a solemn high mass, I heard Madame Vernier strike the first chords of a fugue or even a simple hymn on the harmonium.

Paul Friedländer had disappeared; Paul-Henri Ferland was someone else.

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In August 1944, the FFI Resistance fighters2 attacked Montluçon. The city was liberated, and through the privet hedge we could see jeeps full of young men armed with submachine guns racing along the boulevard. The Germans had withdrawn to their barracks; the battle raged for a week, more or less, around the fortified rectangle. Taking turns standing on the toilet seats at night, my classmates and I could see the lights of combat; we shivered with excitement at the mortar shots—and also because we were prolonging our stay in this suspect place longer than was strictly necessary.

The sodality did not wish for the victory of Germany, certainly, but the Resistance, which was known to be Communist and atheist, was nonetheless reviled.

The barracks fell—and so did the Thousand-Year Reich. The war came to an end. I remember the day very well. The church bells pealed and the whole town celebrated. “It’s not like in 1918,” Madame Robert said to us regretfully. “And then there’s our poor Marshal. Let us pray for him.” We went for our walk despite all this, and as I remember, the general manifestation of popular joy seemed monstrous and indecent to us. Crowds were jostling each other everywhere, and people were kissing each other, obliging us to lower our eyes—without, however, causing us to make an abrupt volte-face the way we had when one day on one of our walks we sighted the troop of female boarding students from Sainte-Jeanne. On the walls, crosses of Lorraine and the hammer and sickle had replaced the Allied snail pasted up by the Germans, and the whole was topped with posters showing the smug, stupid face of the imperturbable Fernandel.

There was no Te Deum to celebrate the German surrender at our school, as I remember, but instead a constant concern for the lot of the victor of Verdun. When later on, Pétain’s trial began, we faithfully read the speeches of his defense counsel, Maître Isorni, whereas the state prosecutor, who was undoubtedly a Freemason, was unanimously held up to obloquy. The portraits of the Marshal remained on the walls for a long time, and when they were finally taken down it was the end of an era at Saint-Béranger too.

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The war was over, my parents had not come back but I waited for news of them daily. The Red Cross thought that it had been able to identify a couple at Theresienstadt whose names corresponded to those of my father and mother, but a typhus epidemic had put the camp in quarantine, and we had to wait. An unreal wait: the days went by without a sign and during all this time I kept asking myself: How will I greet my parents? Will there be any way to express my happiness?

That year all the students at Saint-Béranger, or almost all of them, left on vacation: there were only three or four of us who stayed behind in the deserted school. We wandered idly through the classrooms and I think even to Madame Robert the world appeared unsettled and uncertain. Our daily walks were rather half-hearted, and often we went no farther than the suburbs of the city: we trailed along the edge of the slag heaps, waiting for the sun to set on this melancholy industrial ugliness.

In the evening it was necessary to confront the empty dormitory. Madame Robert wished us good night and went into her room. A few moments later my three comrades were asleep and I was alone, staring at the vague outlines of the room by the blue light of the night lamp. Then I would begin to feel a growing, vague, intolerable fear.

Nothing is worse than a diffuse anxiety with no definite object: you feel it slowly come over you, you recognize the premonitory signs, you are terrified, yet paralyzed before the idea of what is at hand. You can try making your mind a blank and staring at a stretch of wall, or, on the contrary, attempt to think of some precise thing (and at the time I was still quite incapable of imagining such maneuvers), but nothing helps: anxiety inexorably takes its course. Your mouth grows dry; you are either very hot or very cold, depending on the day; there is a tight feeling in your chest; your breathing becomes more rapid; your heartbeat speeds up and sweats and chills soon follow. These are only outward signs, however, ones that you scarcely notice, remembered only after the fact, for at the moment nothing matters but the fear. But fear of what?—a fear without an object, an empty fear, fear in its pure state. You are certain of only one thing: one moment more and you won’t be able to stand it, you will either burst or dissolve; it is the absolute limit of what you can bear, and yet—

I thought that at any moment I was going to get up out of bed, scream, thrash about, run between the beds and rattle Madame Robert’s door, or else wake up my neighbor, Philippe Morin, and tell him. Tell him what? I could just see the scene: I wake up good old Philippe, in the grip of total panic I shake him, he suddenly sits up in bed: “What’s the matter? What’s happening?” he rubs his eyes but—it’s still dark outside! Then he sees Paul-Henri, bending over him, panting. “What’s the matter, Paul-Henri? Are you crazy?” “Philippe, help me, I’m afraid.” But none of that happened. I didn’t budge from my bed, I didn’t do a thing. At the very moment when it seemed I was about to suffocate, to break in two perhaps, an ebb tide would suddenly flood over me, followed by a strange sense of well-being. Exhausted, I would fall asleep.

After a while this diffuse anxiety changed, became more precise, focused on one definite thing: from this point on it was death I feared. But then everyone is afraid of death. I grant this, but it is still quite an unusual fear for a twelve-year-old. And, though anyone may be afraid of death, there are very few people who imagine their own death, who live through their last moment, as it were, every evening. That was what happened to me. I learned then, from experience, what “cold sweat” means, for I could literally feel an ice-cold sweat running down my forehead. I would draw my sheets up and bury myself under the covers. To no avail. Unable to divert my thoughts in any way, I would imagine the inevitable end that awaited me, whatever I did. Hiding in a dungeon, I knew that the inexorable executioner was on his way, that he would never take the wrong path or retrace his steps; one day he would open the door. I then imagined the very last instant, trying my best to cling to the very last flicker of lucidity, of awareness of being, but no, I had to slip into the void. One last wave bore me upward, and then the ebb tide flooded over me again.

Soon I was not safe from such anxiety attacks even during the day: like the mephitic vapors of old stories, they emerged from the nocturnal abyss to invade the twilight, or, more precisely, the late afternoon, and sometimes the mornings, too.

I knew as I left on the afternoon walk that when the light began to fade, at about five o’clock, I would feel the first waves of anxiety. During all these late afternoons I managed not to say anything, not to show anything, even though my most heartfelt desire was to let other people know. But while the memory of those afternoons remains somewhat vague today, I shall never forget the fear I felt in the mornings, and one morning in particular.

I was to serve at early mass, in the big chapel. It was still dark when I arrived at Sainte-Jeanne. I put on my red cassock and was about to put on my surplice when the first signs of anxiety manifested themselves. You can imagine my panic, for this time I could not wait passively for the wave to pass. I had to serve at mass! I had to give the responses, get to my feet, make all the expected gestures, say exactly the right words—and I didn’t think I was capable of doing it. I stood there motionless, my surplice in my hand, and suddenly a thought, even worse than the others, occurred to me: I was destined to live in this state until my very last moment. My life would now be one long silent torture, a continuous fear that would cling ceaselessly to my skin, that I would never be able to rid myself of. Father H. stuck his head in the door: “Come along, hurry up.” I put the surplice on mechanically, picked up the censer, and mechanically started up toward the altar. I didn’t stumble, I didn’t drop the missal, or the cruets, or the ciborium, I didn’t faint, and I gave the responses without making one single mistake. There were three of us at that moment: the one who was afraid, the one watching him, and the one serving the mass, like a machine. Was I going crazy?

I would have liked to confide in Madame Dutour, snuggle up close to her, cry my heart out, listen to reassuring words, feel a caress, but I didn’t dare.

And then the anxiety disappeared—for a time.

In August, Madame Fraenkel, an old friend and fellow refugee who had shared those two years in Néris, came to visit me. She was a non-Jew from Vienna, married to an Austrian Jew, and she and my mother had been good friends. I asked her, as I did everyone I met from the old days, for news of my parents. She stared straight at me and said, very slowly and distinctly: “My poor Paul, don’t you understand that your parents are dead?”

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It was now clear that this would be my last year at Saint-Béranger. A guardianship council had taken my destiny in hand, a guardian had been appointed, and at the end of the school year I was to be handed over to his care.

Conscious of the dangers that would threaten my faith when I went back out in the world, the ladies of the sodality, for their part, tried to forearm me against these perils. I was confirmed, and then, this time ahead of my age group, I made my solemn communion. Father L., a Jesuit and a teacher who had once been at Saint-Béranger, sometimes came to preach a retreat at Montluçon. He had taken a liking to me, and Madame Dutour decided that a conversation with the good father would be in order. As he was now teaching at a school in Saint-Etienne and had little free time, I set out to visit him, a little after New Year’s.

From every point of view this trip was the beginning of a great adventure for me. Just imagine: for the first time in three years I was leaving the rue de la Garde by myself; for the first time in my life I was taking the train by myself—and at three o’clock in the morning, with a change at Roanne! I must remind the reader not to forget the period: traveling by train in January or February 1946 was an epic undertaking. In any case, for that youngster, oddly clad in navy blue, with a cardboard suitcase three-quarters empty, the threadbare overcoats, the worn jackets, and the sweaty odor of all the passengers—like the dirty snow on the slopes, the fog that let only the frenetic gallop of the telephone poles and the brief flash of stations through—aroused in him an intense and incomprehensible joy, a real feeling of love and brotherhood.

On arriving at Saint-Etienne, I was in no hurry to discover the house of the sodality where I was to spend the night. I strolled through the streets. I knew I was on the eve of great changes, without being able to imagine precisely what circumstances would bring them about or what they would be like. I sniffed the future.

I had received the first pocket money of my life for this trip. And suddenly, without my realizing it, I quite naturally heard all the injunctions of the past: unperceived by me, a tenuous link was being recreated. What could I have bought with these few francs in my pocket? I did not hesitate an instant, and went off to buy two books. On entering the little bookstore, I suddenly rediscovered the familiar odor of printed paper and dusty covers. These were not the splendid copies in my father’s library, but at least they were books. Not textbooks, missals, or even the life of some saint. Real books.

My choice, I grant, is not easily explained. Let us therefore leave it unexplained. I bought a book on cave exploring whose name escapes me, and First on the Rope, by Roger Frison-Roché. An abyss and a summit. I read the novel on mountain climbing immediately, that very evening, and thoroughly enjoyed it. (It was confiscated the moment I came back to school, for on leafing through it the good ladies of the sodality discovered not only a tale of masculine endurance but a very brief love story too.)

The next morning I set out in search of the school in order to meet the priest. The porter did not show me into the little parlor off the entry hall, but into the teachers’ work room. I felt instantly at home there: the studious atmosphere, the piles of work on the tables, and above all the music playing softly on the radio. Learning had an entirely different air about it here from what it had at Montluçon. Was I too going to become a “jèze”? Could I too belong to this élite some day? That was exactly what I wanted that morning, and I later spoke to Father L. about it. Three years’ more schooling and then the novitiate. The path was already laid out: what elation!

Father L. suggested a walk. After strolling briefly through the streets of the town, we entered a church. It was a gloomy day and the stained-glass windows let no light through; in the choir, however, on both sides of the altar, the little flames of dozens of candles gave an air of unreality to this not particularly beautiful church.

We had circled the nave in no time, but we halted in one of the side chapels, talking in low voices of the war and of my parents, and contemplating a picture of Christ on the Cross, so dulled that even in the flickering light of the candles one could see nothing but a face and a body, as though they were suspended in a void. “Didn’t your parents die at Auschwitz?” Father L. asked. What did this name mean? Where was Auschwitz? He must have understood then that I knew almost nothing of the murder of Europe’s Jews: to me the death of my parents was enveloped in vague images, indistinct circumstances that bore no relation to the real course of events. And so, in front of this obscure Christ, I listened: Auschwitz, the trains, the gas chambers, the crematory ovens, the millions of dead—

When we got back to the school Father L. read a few pages of an autobiographical text in which a historian who was a French Jew describes how, when still a child, he discovered anti-Semitism for the first time. Who was it that he read? I am unable to say today, but all through this decisive day I had the impression that the essential pieces of a puzzle that, heretofore, had made no sense, were falling into place.

For the first time, I felt myself to be Jewish—no longer despite myself or secretly, but through a sensation of absolute loyalty. It is true that I knew nothing of Judaism and was still a Catholic. But something had changed. A tie had been reestablished, an identity was emerging, a confused one certainly, contradictory perhaps, but from that day forward linked to a central axis of which there could be no doubt: in some manner or other I was Jewish—whatever this term meant in my mind.

The attitude of Father L. himself profoundly influenced me: to hear him speak of the lot of the Jews with so much emotion and respect must have been an important encouragement for me. He did not press me to choose one path or the other—and perhaps he would have preferred to see me remain Catholic—but his sense of justice (or was it a profound charity?) led him to recognize my right to judge for myself, by helping me to renew the contact with my past.

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I do not have the slightest recollection of the return to Montluçon and yet how moved I must have been! How confused my thoughts must have been! So I was fully Jewish, but I was also Catholic and, at that time, quite determined to remain one. How then to reconcile the two, how, above all, to know what it meant to be Jewish?

I could only have had a very vague notion of Jewishness, an image composed of the most disparate elements: Jewish origins obviously, the children in my two early schools, M. Fraenkel and his jokes, the story of Hanukkah, the usurer Abraham, the murderers of Christ, Bergson, too, and now Auschwitz and the long trail of persecutions and deaths; the image of our death.

Wasn’t it madness to identify with my Jewishness when Paul-Henri Ferland had no remaining link to the Jews? For I could now remain a Catholic, without the slightest hesitation: hadn’t my ties with the past disappeared forever? I dreamed endlessly of my future as a priest and was convinced of my vocation. So where did this need of a return, a return toward a decimated, humiliated, miserable group, come from? Had I been born of a “really” Jewish family, I would at least have had coherent memories, but in my case this inner obstacle, this constant reminder played no role: I was free.

What secret work was accomplished within me during this trip? What instinct, buried beneath acquired loyalty, suddenly caused a profounder loyalty to emerge? An obscure rupture, brought about by the astonishing discovery at Saint-Etienne.

When I returned to Saint-Béranger, I asked people to stop using my borrowed name and reassumed the name that was mine.

1 All the names associated with my stay in Montluçon and the Indre are fictitious.

2 Forces Françaises de l'lntérieur, popularly known as “Fifis.”

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