be honored,” I heard myself mumble.
A piece of pastry from my plate tumbled down onto the pale violet napkin on my thighs. Blushing crimson with embarrassment, I seized the corners of the napkin, flung it on the table, pushed my chair back, bolted down the gazebo steps, and fled down the gravel path to the safety of the gatehouse at the bottom of the hill. The tears that had been building all summer began to spill.
Embarrassment for my parents filled me with shame. Wasn’t there condescension in the way the other guests hailed them? Did the Parisians and Berliners think of them as “those boors from Warsaw”? Were they the brunt of those hideous Jewish jokes?
My parents wanted me to attend the best schools because education was very important to them. I began studying the piano in Lodz when I was six and for many years had dreams of being a concert pianist. I also loved to sing. The lycée in Paris seemed to be the best school for me to attend. My father was a successful doctor, and he wanted my brother and me to benefit from his success.
Two years before, in September, Papa insisted on driving me to the lycée, taking a route through Austria and Switzerland, and touring the French countryside on the way to Paris.
In Vienna, Mama’s Yiddish—she knew no German—embarrassed her. The hotel maids and bellboys ignored her or pretended not to understand what she was saying. In Switzerland, she regained some of her composure, but in the peaceful heart of the Loire Valley, the innkeepers made fun of her French and behind our backs pointed us out as les juifs to the other guests.
When we reached Paris, Papa registered us at the Hotel Steinfeld, a place Jews preferred, where at last my mother was comfortable. I insisted that we go immediately to the Lycée LaCourbe-Jasson, and after interminable introductions and instructions, the headmistress at last directed me toward my room in a building across the courtyard.
I ran away from them, my mother, who seemed somehow tainted, and my father, who was unable to protect her. I ran without looking back, carrying my heavy suitcase, and stumbled up the steps of my home-to-be. I paused at the door of my room on the second floor long enough to catch my breath and pull my sweaty cotton undershirt away from my skin. There was light coming from the transom and I could hear girls laughing within. My roommate hosting a first-day party, I imagined. I knocked.
The door opened and a round face peered out. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me. Marisa Levy.”
“Levy did you say?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Marisa,” the face said, and the doors flung open, leaving me revealed to six sets of inquisitive eyes.
At my appearance, the room exploded with laughter. Somebody said the words “new Jewess,” and the hilarity increased. I thought of my mother at the Viennese hotel and understood that I was experiencing now what she had—and that I always would.
For the next weeks, my classmates made fun of my textbook French, my braids, my homemade school dresses. And so I retreated into music, the piano keys my dearest companions, their sounds the balm to my soul. I played for my teachers and loved to talk to them, but with the other girls I was silent. Meanwhile, I set about building a wardrobe, mastering French, going alone to cabarets or concert halls.
A clarinetist named Benny Goodman came to Paris to perform with his band, and through the lycée I was able to buy a ticket to hear them. What music they made! It was new to me, melodic, rhythmic, filled with a sensuality I experienced throughout my body, the notes flying from the instruments like wild birds, diving and soaring around my head. Some in the audience began an impromptu dance, and I ached to dance with them, but when a young man came up beside me and asked me to join in, I shook my head and remained seated. When I’m older, I told myself. Then I will dance.
Undaunted, he sat beside me and introduced himself as Jean-Phillipe Cadoux, who had arrived in Paris from Lille two years before, now lived in the 9th arrondissement, and was working as a postal worker to support himself as an architecture student at the École des Beaux Arts. We could talk easily together, once I found that his aggressive approach masked an innate shyness, and we became friends. Just friends so far, but it was to him that I poured out my loneliness and alienation and I knew that when the time came—when it was right—we would become closer. At the end of term we parted, promising to see each other again, and as soon as I returned to Paris he contacted me and we resumed our relationship.
Back in Lodz that summer, more sophisticated and snobbish than all of my classmates combined, I was restless and unhappy. My sweet, pompous father irritated me, and I despised my well-meaning mother for being such a fear-ridden shrew. I scorned them for a lack of elegance and savoir-faire, and pitied them, too.
But at that moment, at the hotel gate in Krzemieniec in the summer of 1939, I would have given anything to be Papa’s little girl again. When I looked up and saw him coming toward me along the gravel path, I gave a little scream of pleasure and ran to him, crumpling onto his broad shoulder.
“Eh, what’s this, Mia?” he asked, stroking my hair.
“It’s that man,” I said. “Professor Stern. He—”
A loudspeaker began to blare from the top of a black panel wagon approaching the hotel. Papa held up his hand, signaling me to listen. “President Mo
Fellow citizens! Last night, our age-old enemy, Germany, began hostilities against the Polish State. I place on record before God and history that our noble Poland will never be vanquished, that our gallant army will fight to the last man before….
My father grabbed my hand, and we ran up the hill to the hotel. Guests were fanning out in a dozen different directions. There was pushing and shoving. Young children screamed for their mothers. My own crisis was pushed aside. Life was reduced to motion.
By the time we’d fought our way back to the hotel suite, Mama was already packing. “I thought it would be best,” she told Papa.
“You were right not to wait.” They spoke in a fearful staccato. Papa paused in the middle of the sitting room, chewing on a fingernail. He was working on our dilemma as if it were a chemical equation.
I ran around Mama and darted toward my room. She raised her head, for once oblivious to my disheveled appearance. “Don’t fuss over the packing,” she called. “We must be ready to leave at once.”
With quick, mechanical motions I transferred piles of clothing from drawers to an open suitcase. Everything fell into a kind of rhythm. Throughout the resort village, the Volhynian mountains, perhaps all of Eastern Europe, life rushed toward a frenetic crescendo.
I carried my suitcase back to my parents’ suite. My father had picked up the phone, his hand covering the receiver. “I’m trying to get through to Jozef, darling. Yes, right this very moment. I…wait. Operator? I’m calling Kraków…. No. Kraków…Yes, madame, I fully understand…yes, of course…. But if you would only nonetheless try….” After a while he hung up with a sigh.
An hour later we were standing outside the hotel, huddled next to a mountain of traveling bags, in the midst of a long line of people shoving one another in their attempts to commandeer cars, trucks, wagons—any transportation that would take them home.
Finally we were permitted our turn. A hay cart driven by a drunken peasant rolled up. “Please, sir,” Papa called out in his elegant, educated Polish, “we would like to hire your services to take my wife and daughter, plus myself and the luggage as far as Dubow.”
“You hear that?” the driver whispered conspiratorially into the horse’s ear. “As far as Dubow.” He patted the horse’s neck with affection then spat on the ground. “How much money you got?”
I could feel Papa fighting an impulse to thrash the farmer for his insolence. “Enough to pay for a cart ride to Dubow.”
The peasant raised a questioning eyebrow. “What then?”
“Then?”