November 01, 2016
BY ALBERT GARIH
Of all the people to whom I owe for the fact that I am alive today, there is one I want to single out: my mother. She was no taller than five feet, and she was nothing but love. She also had more than her share of suffering. One of seven siblings (two of which died at a young age), she lost her father when she was only 11. This loss left her own mother to struggle with raising the children.
My grandfather had a small shop in Ortaköy, a neighborhood of Istanbul, and the family lived in the apartment above the shop, along a “dere”—which means canal in Turkish. In 1964, when I visited Istanbul with my parents, my mother took me there, and I took a picture of the house with the shop—a picture that I still have in my study at home. Today, the dere is covered with concrete, and the little house with the shop has been demolished and replaced by a small apartment building.
Despite the loss of her father, my mom managed to keep going to school. At the age of 18, she got her Brevet supérieur, which was more or less the equivalent of the French Baccalauréat. Thus, when she arrived in Paris in 1923, she had no trouble finding a job as a secretary, because her French was perfect and very pure, devoid of slang words, which were the only ones she could not understand. Once, she had to write a letter for her boss to someone on Boulevard Haussmann. The only such name she knew was Osman, which was the name of Ottoman sultans. So, she wrote Boulevard Osman, and her coworkers made fun of her. Her boss defended her, saying that when they could speak another language the way my mother spoke French, then they could laugh at her.
My mother and my father, who was also from Istanbul, met in Paris, where they got married in 1928. My sisters were born in 1930 and 1933, and my twin brother and I came along in 1938. At that time, my mother stopped working to raise her children, and life was very difficult, as my father did not make a lot of money—working as an accountant in a garment factory during the day and tearing tickets at night in a movie theater on the Grands Boulevards. The clouds were already accumulating in the skies over France, with Germany rearming and becoming more and more threatening for the Jews. In France, it became particularly dangerous for those without French citizenship like my parents. In January 1939, my twin brother died of pneumonia (I was also sick, but survived), adding more pain to my parents’ lives.
In June 1940, when German troops marched down the Champs Élysées, the people of Paris fled south in what came to be known as l’Exode. That was the first ordeal for my mother: she lost her mother, a brother, a sister, and two nephews when a bomb fell on their car on a bridge in Orléans.
Then, we stayed for a short while in a château along the River Loire, sleeping on the floor with nothing to eat. I was just two years old at that time, and my mother had no food to feed me, so I was crying nonstop and disturbing the other “guests.” After a while, having nowhere else to go, we went back home.
In 1942, under the new laws of the French collaborationist government, we had to vacate the janitor’s apartment that my father’s boss had put at our disposal and find a tiny apartment with very few of the amenities that we take for granted today. But the Vichy government had started doing the Germans’ dirty work, rounding up people and deporting them first to transit camps like Drancy, then on to Auschwitz. My parents were very concerned that we might end up being arrested and deported and decided to send us to a farm not far from Paris. They did not tell the lady we were Jewish, and justified their move with the hope that we would be better fed. Meanwhile, my parents stayed home, hoping that they would not be taken away. After I told the lady we were Jewish, she sent us right back to our parents.
In September 1943, my father was sent away to a slave labor camp, and my mother found herself alone with her three children, constantly terrified that at any moment, they could come to take us away. This is when she met a lady at a street market and somehow, she opened up to her, confessing about her fears. That lady, Madame Galop, told her husband, and the next day, he came to our place to bring us to live with them. The Galops, a Protestant family, had two little girls aged four and three, which means that, as a five-year-old, I had wonderful friends to play with, while my mother was constantly afraid of a denunciation by some neighbors.
Somehow, the six months we spent with the Galops brought some relief even to my mother, because the Galops were so nice and managed to bring some joy in the house, despite the circumstances. Unfortunately, that did not last, because a neighbor threatened to denounce us, which would have meant a certain death for us, and perhaps for the Galop family too. So, we had to go back home again, and a few weeks later, what my mother was dreading happened: two French police inspectors came to take us away.
Somehow—did they feel sorry for us, or were they concerned that the tide had begun to turn for them?—they did not take us away. But once again, we had to go into hiding, and after spending a few days sleeping at the Ménétriers, our neighbors, my mother ended up as a governess in a family with a lot of children—thanks to a social worker. Meanwhile, we were sent to Catholic boarding schools in Montfermeil, a suburb east of Paris made famous by an episode of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. That’s how we spent the hot summer of 1944, until Paris was liberated in late August. That summer, my mother took care of the many children of that family but was unable to communicate with her own.
As soon as Paris was liberated and trains were functioning again, my mother was on the first train to come to visit us. I remember my sisters coming to see me while we were playing in the school’s playground. “Guess who came to see us?” they asked me. At the age of six, it is incredible how quickly we forget about our dear ones. I couldn’t figure out who had come to visit us. My mother, who was very short, was hiding behind my sisters, but when I saw her, I remember how I jumped into her arms. She was so appalled at the way we looked —I was skinny and sick—that she took us right back home. With her food ration stamps, she bought a loaf of bread that we swallowed in no time.
During all these years, my mother was the one who suffered the most, living with the constant fear about what could happen to us. But she managed to get us through that terrible period, struggling like a lioness to keep her cubs alive. To this day, I wonder where she found all that strength and ingenuity to devise solutions to all the problems she had to face.
Later in life, I remember how my mother was so alien to new technology. She was not even comfortable with a telephone, but she found so much resourcefulness when our lives were at stake and was capable to brave the danger with so much calm. Several years later, she told me of one experience she had with me that I was too young to remember. She had to take the metro to run an errand, and she took me along—she was afraid to send me to school because children were sometimes taken away from schools, never to be seen again. At the station, there was an identity check, which meant that people who had a “J” on their identity cards and were not allowed on public transportation would be set aside and sent to a transit camp before being deported. Somehow, my mother took me in her arms, pretended to look for her papers in her purse and walked right past two policemen or militiamen without being stopped. How she managed to do that remains a mystery to me.
My mother was a real hero who kept me and my sisters alive throughout that dark period. After the war, she had a physical reaction to all this torment: she had to be hospitalized with a huge abscess in her shoulder, which was the result of all the anxiety she had to endure. There were several heroes in our wartime experiences: the Galops, the Ménétriers, the social worker, and the headmistress in that Catholic boarding school who treated me as her protégé. But to me, one hero stands out to this day: my mom.
© 2016 Albert Garih. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this website are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.
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