House of Glass

Alex started shouting at her: ‘You stupid woman! You’re going to kill my brother and I’m going to kill you!’ For once, Henri and Sonia didn’t try to hold him back. Instead, they just looked at her aghast.

‘Mila, please, see sense, if he goes back they will kill him!’ Sonia said.

Even Henri, quiet measured Henri, joined in: ‘For God’s sake, they’re killing Jews. We can help all three of you. Think of your daughter!’

But Mila was implacable, as certain of her decision as a cow is sure that life on the farm will always be good. Realising that there was no point reasoning with her, Henri, Sonia and Alex turned to Jacques.

‘If you go back they will kill you, your stupid wife and your baby daughter. What kind of man are you? Stay and protect your family, for God’s sake!’

‘Jacques, please, we can help you. I will get you fake ID, you’ll be safe here.’

‘If you go back on the train, Jacques, you’ll never see your daughter again.’

But they knew it was no use. Jacques never listened to them when Chaya or Mila was around, and he’d never had their drive, their determination to make it, to succeed, or even just to survive. He was already looking out the window, holding Lily, planning his departure.

And so, on New Year’s Day 1942, Jacques got the train back to Pithiviers. He walked back into the freezing camp, his footprints in the snow the only part of him left outside in the free world. He was checked off by the guards who either laughed at his passivity or simply took it for granted, and the gates closed behind him. They would never open for him again. His brothers were right: he had missed his chance.

Mila and Lily.

Was Jacques simply a fool for returning? For so long I thought so. On the bus ride back from Pithiviers I talked with the other descendants, some of whom remembered going to the camp as a child to visit their relatives. One woman spoke to me about how all the children of the prisoners knew each other, and all the men knew one another’s children.

I told her about Jacques going back to the camp after his home leave to visit Mila and I rolled my eyes – wasn’t that just absurd? What an unforgivable waste of an opportunity. Surely her father would never have done that. But she reprimanded me for my callousness.

‘There was a real sense of camaraderie at the camp after all that time,’ she told me. ‘It’s hard for you to believe now, I know, but there was. And that’s why he returned. He would never have abandoned his friends.’

Jacques always had bad timing, but his decision to return to Pithiviers could not have been timed worse. Less than three weeks after he walked back to the camp the Wannsee Conference was held in Germany, at which plans were formalised for the implementation of the Final Solution: the killing of all the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. As early as March 1942 more than 1,000 Jews were shipped out on one train from France to Auschwitz. In early summer, German and French officials met to plan more mass deportations.

The men in Pithiviers heard the rumours from home. But on 14 July, Bastille Day, they were reassured, again, by the Préfecture of Orléans that they would be protected, because they were French, and they were told not to listen to rumours. Less than twenty-four hours later they were told to pack their bags. The next day women and children prisoners suddenly arrived at the camp, and that’s when the men really started to worry, but it was too late.

On 17 July 1942 Jacques was ordered onto a cattle train by the French police, along with 928 other prisoners from Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. This was Convoi 6 and among Jacques’s fellow prisoners on the train were ninety-six women and twenty-four children.[9] One of the women was Irène Némirovsky, author of Suite Française, a series of novels about life in occupied France that was finally published in 2004, having been saved and preserved by her daughter during the war and in the decades afterwards. Némirovsky had planned to write five novels in her series, but she had only finished two when she was arrested. When the police arrived to take her to Pithiviers, she told her young daughters, ‘I am going on a journey now.’ It was one from which neither she nor Jacques would ever return. They were both thirty-nine years old.

There were a hundred prisoners in each wagon, standing pressed up against one another in the airless train.

‘They won’t eat us, they’re just taking us somewhere to work,’ the prisoners muttered to one another reassuringly.

‘Maybe to Drancy?’ another suggested, as they’d heard about another French internment camp that had recently been opened.

In fact, the reason Jacques and the rest of the prisoners were shipped out so suddenly was that Vichy was now going after the Jews so relentlessly that they needed the space in the French camps for the new arrests. The day before Jacques’s train left for Auschwitz, French police completed the now infamous Vel d’Hiv round-up, in which more than 13,000 Jews, including 4,000 children, were arrested, with most held at an indoor cycle track in Paris before being sent to the camps. French police had tracked them down using the 1940 Jewish census, and the man who helped to plan the round-up was René Bousquet, secretary-general of the police and close associate of Colonel Perré, Alex’s friend. According to US diplomatic papers, Pierre Laval – by now the head of government – met with a group of American Quakers at this time and told them that ‘these foreign Jews had always been a problem in France, and the French government was glad that a change in the German attitude towards them gave France an opportunity to get rid of them.’ Laval, the papers add, ‘made no mention of any German pressure’.[10] By the end of 1942, the French government deported almost 40,000 Jews.[11]

For three days and nights, in the stifling July heat, Jacques and his fellow prisoners travelled in the train. There was only a tiny window, no room to sit – certainly none to lie down – no food and no water. The only toilet was a small scrap of hay in the corner of the wagon. The smell quickly became so bad people were throwing up where they stood, worsening the stench and the misery. There was hardly even any air. Some people literally dropped dead where they stood for lack of water. At a certain point – the French/German border, it turned out – the French guards and drivers got off and were replaced with Germans. Seeing they were at a station the prisoners cried out the window, ‘Water, please water!’

‘None for you, Jews!’ came the response, in German, from the civilians nearby. ‘This is hell,’ the prisoners wept, but it was not, because hell was still to come.

They knew now they were in Germany. And Germany, they said anxiously to one another, was a civilised country, right? Surely they were just here to work.

They arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the evening. ‘Raus! Schnell! Schnell!’ yelled the guards, hurrying them off the train, beating them with truncheons.

A LOT IS KNOWN ABOUT Convoi 6, more than most deportation trains because a relatively high number of people who travelled on it were still alive when the war ended – 9

1 out of 928, and many of the details I’ve given above come from the survivors’ testimonies kept at the Shoah Memorial in Paris. It was still so early in the war that the Nazis needed the prisoners to help construct Auschwitz-Birkenau, so there was no selection process when the prisoners arrived in Poland – everyone entered the camp and none were sent to the gas chambers, at least not immediately. As a result, there are only two associations for descendants and relatives of victims of a specific deportation train, and one of them is that for Convoi 6. It was with this association that I visited Pithiviers in 2012. The year before, 928 trees were planted in Israel in the name of Convoi 6, one for every adult and child who travelled on that train.

The tree feels like an apt memorial for Jacques, the boy who once ran through Chrzanow’s silver birch tree forest and was then sent as a man to Birkenau, a camp whose name derives from the German for ‘birch tree’. Did Jacques realise, as he walked into the death camp, he was only 18 kilometres from where he was born? Had he spotted the thin Galician birch trees through the tiny window in the train, and did they look familiar to him? Did they make him think of his brothers and the Ornstein cousins and how they used to hide in the forests? And of his father, buried in the shadow of birch trees only kilometres away from where he was now? Did he wonder why he, alone among his siblings, hadn’t risked anything to stay alive? Why he was the passive one among them and how this was the conclusion to that story? Did he think about the weird irony of his life, how he had always wanted to stay still, but was forced to travel so far, and yet ended up right back where he began? Perhaps he thought, No matter how hard a Jewish man tries, even if he fights for another country, he will still get sent back to the place of his father’s grave instead of enjoying his daughter in her cot – always the past for the Jew, never the future. Never forget who you are and where you’re from, because no one else around you will, and they will send you back. During all that deprivation and degradation on the train, it had felt like the world was ending. Instead, Jakob Glahs walked out to find he was simply back home. Like waking from a bad dream, but the nightmare continues in real life. It had always been thus, the threat just beneath the surface. He simply hadn’t wanted to see it. He had crossed a continent and he hadn’t seen it. But now he was back to where he started and he could see it. At last, he saw it. Once again, his brothers had been right.

Or maybe Jacques thought none of those things. Maybe he was already too sick and too tired and too naturally unself-reflective to think like that at all. And who could blame him? He was always Jacques, only Jacques, why ask more of him than he was? Anyone who expected him to be other than he had been is the foolish one – Alex had learned that, and so had Henri. He had always been utterly true to himself: gentle, popular, caring, weak, trusting, loyal, unlucky, kind. So Jacques was not sent directly to the gas chambers, as so many Jews arriving at Birkenau soon would be. But according to Auschwitz’s records, he lasted fewer than three months building his own tomb, so close to the place of his birth. He was killed on 6 October.

ON 5 OCTOBER, the day before Jacques was murdered, Revillon wrote another letter to the CQJD on Mila’s behalf, asking for her to be allowed to stay in the apartment and stressing that she did not know where her husband was and was very anxious. Sara, too, was worried, and wrote to the Red Cross for help. She would have to wait for two years to get a reply. Henri, Sonia and Alex did not make enquiries. They might not have known where Jacques was, but they had a pretty good idea.

Mila and Lily eventually went into hiding, almost certainly with help from Sonia as there was no way Mila could have evaded the Vichy police on her own with a newborn baby. Miraculously, they managed to survive the war, but this was to be the one miracle in poor Mila’s dumb, cursed life. After the war was over, she returned to rue de la Tour, living in that dark little basement beneath the fur storage business, because it never occurred to her that she might want to do something different. Sara finally received definitive proof that Jacques was dead in November 1944 from the Red Cross, who wrote to her confirming his death in Auschwitz. For the rest of her life, whenever someone asked her about her brother Jacques, Sara would answer quietly, ‘They sent him home.’