Final Thoughts – From Generation to Generation

Elizabeth Tuttle

We met Jacques Klajnberg and four other survivors who belong to an association which strives to maintain the memory of the Holocaust and the devastation it wrought on their community: working-class Belleville in the 20th arrondissement. Narrating as we toured the quartier, the survivors instilled life into the memory sites we visited. For example, Rachel Jedinak led us to the depot where, at eight years old, she and her family awaited deportation during the 1942 round-up of Parisian Jews, escaping, in the end, with her sister through a vent. The interaction was personal, painful, and full of inspiration. For me, hope came in the form of Mr. Klajnberg with whom I had a long discussion as we walked the streets of Belleville. He explained that the neighborhood where he, Rachel, and their friends spent their lives had witnessed not only the persecution of Jews during World War II but also the “last stand” of the Communard revolutionaries before their massacre by the French army in 1871.

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Jacques implied that Belleville’s history was punctuated with atrocities but that its inhabitants had an equally long tradition of resisting oppression, no matter what form it took. This was certainly the case for Jacques who after hiding in a storage unit to escape arrest and deportation by the Nazis became a member of the armed Jewish Resistance at age fifteen, telling his father he had found “under-the-table” work at a bakery to account for his time. However, Jacques’s activism began at age eleven when he worked with neighbors, collecting milk for distribution to Spanish children during the 1936-1939 civil war. After World War II, Jacques joined movements protesting the violent conflicts in Indochina and Algeria. He remembers that time: “We took to streets, that’s just what we did”, as if fighting Nazis at age fifteen or tirelessly protesting war-time violence came as naturally to him as reading the paper. Since retiring over twenty years ago, Jacques pursues his activism through the transmission of memory, sharing his experiences in the Holocaust with French school children. At eighty-eight, Jacques tells his story weekly, determined not only to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and its victims but also to rouse French youth to fight injustice around them. He is a living example.

Something about this man moved me. I don’t know if it was his unassuming manner, his story, or the candid way in which he told it. He beamed when he told me how, during liberation, he rode down his village’s main street on an American tank, holding a shot gun. His eyes shone when he described his non-Jewish neighbors’ indifference at his father’s arrest, something he will never forget and can never forgive. As our conversation veered toward the present, I asked Jacques what he thought defined a “by-stander”, a theme we have been grappling with throughout the semester. Jacques simply answered that those who lived through the war had choices and shared his hopes that we should never have to face such impossible decisions or live through such terrifying and uncertain times. However, he added that though circumstances have changed, we continue to make choices every day. Do we recognize and fight injustice, even in our own small way? Do we assist neighbors, expecting nothing in return? Or do we prefer the comfort of ignorance to the challenges that activism presents? Jacques inspired me to confront my own answers to these questions.

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Melancholy colored our exchange of goodbyes and bisous with Rachel, Jacques, and the other survivors in Belleville. We savored that afternoon and the personal contact fostered by the informal setting (Clare even persuaded survivor Georgette to take a “selfie”) because we all knew this meeting could likely be our last. As survivors near the end of their lives, such encounters are increasingly rare and therefore precious. During our meeting with tireless activists, the Klarsfelds, Serge agreed that the Holocaust will soon fade from living memory and slip into the realm of History. What will remain to testify to the pain of the victims? To the brutality of the Nazis and their collaborators? To the courage of those who resisted? We have the power to collectively shape the answers to these questions but first, we must carry out the memory work that will ensure that the victims, that the survivors we met this week, are honored. My commitment begins now, on this trip, with this experience for I know that long after Jacques Klajnberg is no longer able, I will continue to tell his story.

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