The Plateau Read online

  Once, I visited Babi Yar myself, alone on a dark December day. The massive site was trash-strewn, its memorials adorned with frozen sputum. I saw, in nature itself, signs of dreadful return: Trees had grown up everywhere, their branches like skeleton fingers grasping at the mud-gray skies; a pack of dogs barked madly around a single dog, piteously alone; a vast murder of crows hunkered in a tree-lined allée, turning over rotting leaves one by one, as if working at some great silent enterprise—grounded, earthly, wing-clipped.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  From there, in the museum, the depths grew deeper, darker. Hidden from the gaze of children, but not from me, were a series of grainy black-and-white films showing scenes of violence erupting toward Jews: women, clothes torn from their bodies, taunted by onlookers in the gray bitter chill in the air; men, safe in their prickly woolen suits, laughing as the women, soft and pale, caved into themselves and wept. There were taunting onlookers, laughing onlookers, onlookers who covered their mouths or closed their eyes as frail Jewish bodies tangled themselves together, inert now and forever more.

  As I stood in front of these grim artifacts, a terrible thought came rushing toward me in the dark: Anyone, at some point, might be asked—with a gun, eye-high, pointed right at his face—“Where are your Jews?”

  And what if this anyone has been himself starving? What if he has been reduced to eating grass and sawdust? What if he has watched his neighbor sent to exile for the theft of a turnip? How do you know who you will be?

  I want to be good, I thought to myself. But how do I know—how do any of us know—what we will be when the army advances and the guns are waved?

  Maybe we like to think there’s a kind of trumpet blast that sounds through history, that tells us when it is time to be on the side of the angels. But what if the trumpet doesn’t blast? What if the moments are so small—say, a neighbor who asks to come in even as I pretend not to be at home—that they pass without notice? And what if I am left, then, in terrible times, with my own frailties? Would I be good? Would I be good, after all?

  But the museum pulls you ever forward. You keep walking with your questions. There is no choice.

  1942: The Final Solution. Tick, the Ghettos and the Work Camps and the Killing Centers and the great metal sign, ARBEIT MACHT FREI—work makes you free—and Tick, the medical experiments and the models of gas chambers.

  Beyond, in the dark, you see a hall filled to the ceiling with family photographs from shtetls destroyed; whole rooms full of shoes; a metal table from one extermination camp, Majdanek, where corpses were ransacked for their gold teeth before heading to the ovens. It is worse and worse down there, in the depths. Closer to some essential barbarity. Deeper and deeper; worse and worse.

  After the shoes and the ovens, after the images of tattooed arms, the room of photographs that might as well rise all the way up to the sky . . . there is, finally, one last floor to the museum. This one is dedicated to rescue and resistance during the Holocaust. Here are different kinds of things: a photograph of Oskar Schindler, and the story of his famous list; the story of the Danish boat that transported thousands of Jews to safety in Sweden in October 1943; the stories of Jewish fighters who lived in forests and the youthful anti-Nazi groups like the White Rose.

  On a far wall, an exhibit shows blurry images of houses on the edge of piney hills; of young people in groups, playing in the snow, carrying pails of milk, sitting in the window frames of great stone buildings, legs dangling down. Framing the whole of the exhibit are photographs of individual children—dark-eyed children, light-haired children, smiling children, knit-browed children; each face a mustard seed containing, up close, an entire world.

  This was the story of that cluster of villages on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, whose community had collectively rescued hundreds, thousands of people—most of them children—from near-certain death at the hands of the Nazis.

  And that’s where I saw a name I knew: Trocmé.

  In my mind’s eye, I called up an image: my great-grandfather Dr. Henry Sweany. He is bent and ash-white with age, stern, sitting on a couch bathed in sunlight, wearing a bow tie. Next to him is his second wife, Suzie. She is small, smiling, kind, with a tidy black bob. Suzie, who once told my Jewish mother that her own family had been part of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Suzie Trocmé.

  Once, Suzie had sent me a letter, and I never answered her.

  * * *

  I grew up in Rochester, New York, in a small wooden house in a row of other small wooden houses on Salisbury Street. Kids would careen around on bikes all summer long in the neighborhood—down streets of the twiggy new trees that replaced the elms felled in the blight of the 1960s, through overgrown back lots, then maybe up to Calabrese’s bakery, where the older boys smoked pot on the roof. At five o’clock the mothers, cigarettes hanging from their mouths, would start screaming to get their piles of kids home for dinner, and sooner or later, the kids would oblige.

  My family were, in a way, immigrants to Salisbury Street. My dad, Dana, an artist by training and by lineage, goateed and high-browed, spoke with the straight-spine precision of a midwesterner. In college, he made wooden sculptures splashed with gobs of paint, destroyed them, and took pictures of the rubble. Click. Now, every evening, the number 9 Bay/Webster bus would drop him off after a long day at the Xerox offices in downtown Rochester—he’d learned computer programming on the fly after my sister was born—and he’d pace his way down the street toward home in his spongy suit and wide striped tie. My mother, Flo, a New Yorker, a corker, a pip, was little and dark and Jewish. She knew how to argue. She knew how to dance, how to pitch a baseball, how to elbow her way in with a hug.

  We were immigrants in the sense that in the Salisbury Street land of the cracked-open Genny cream ale, and the well-earned weekend, and the wide-open nasal aaaaaaaaaaaa, my family was mostly pretty earnest and eggheaded. And because nobody else quite looked like us (“Ha-ha-ha-ha, she’s got a witchy noooooose,” kids would yell as I zoomed by on my bike). And because, in an inner city of intricate and rigid patchworks of white and black and brown folks, my little brother happened to be a ravishing mix of all three. And maybe also because of religion: While other kids were rehearsing their sins for confession on Sunday, we were heading to Hebrew school out in the suburbs, where I learned how to dress up like Queen Esther and say sheket bevakashah; and then crosstown to Bahá’í classes, where we would sing, together black and white and brown, “We are drops (—we are drops—) of one ocean (—of one ocean—), we are pearls (—we are pearls—) of one sea (—of one sea—) . . .”

  Still, like everyone, we would careen through that small world that we knew, block by added block, and have pizza nights, and go to Seabreeze Amusement Park, and have some extras in life, but not so many. And we would share anxieties in the long wake of the race riots of the 1960s, when anger periodically exploded and then hardened, so all the children of all the colors had to wonder, periodically, on their long walks home from school, “Is that kid going to throw a rock at my head?”

  Together, we would swim, eyes wide open, in the murky brown waters of Lake Ontario and, when chance permitted, grab one of a mass of thousands of poisoned silver fish as they floated toward the shore and toss them at one another. And scream.

  Together, we would panic over the Alphabet Murders, where a series of little girls were stalked, snatched, raped, and murdered. One of the girls—Michelle Maenza—lived just a few blocks over, and was in a class with my big sister; now, when we drove around town on both sides of the Genesee River, great rusty billboards with her looming little face, and guileless little eyes, and pigtails bowed with yarn were a lesson to us all about the penalty for talking to strangers.

  And together, we would trudge below the milk-and-water gray skies of the long winters; wobble around and around the skating rink at the corner rec center, swirling through the sweet smell of wet wood and sweat. And, when walking alone late at night in those winters, the streetlamps would light the whole of the broad cottony sky. And, then, it was as though you could feel the turning of the earth beneath your feet right there on Salisbury Street—so quiet it was in the night, and so warm and monumental and bright it was, in the darkness.

  From time to time I, with my long stringy hair and my long witchy nose, would sneak off into someone’s yard, and scramble up into one of Salisbury Street’s few remaining climbable trees, and perch for a while—twisting the stems of fire-red maple leaves as I did—and think. And imagine worlds beyond.

  The summer I was fifteen years old, a friend of mine from the trimmer, tonier side of Rochester invited me to go with her family on a trip to Austria. I would board a plane alone, meet them all in Frankfurt, and then, after a week in Europe, take a train to a village on the Tyrolean border with Italy, and I would stay a month with the family of a girl named Karin.

  It was amazing that my parents let me go. In our family, money generally went toward essentials or, if not that, then for college funds, or trips where we’d pile, all five of us, into the orange Plymouth Volaré to stay in motels with outdoor pools. Marco! Polo! It was dearly paid for, you could say, in foreign currency. But it was well worth it. That Austrian village was where I first learned to let the music of foreign languages wash over me; where I first heard Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”; where I first heard someone say, as she pointed out of a window on a train, “That’s where Hitler was born.”

  It was while I was in Austria that Suzie—Suzanne Trocmé—wrote to me. At the time, I could barely place who Suzie was. I knew she was part of the feminine swirl that surrounded my paternal grandmother, Dorothy. Dorothy had once been a ballerina with the San Carlo Opera Company, clacking along on trains all across America during the Depression. But in 1954, her husband was killed in a plane crash, leaving her to transform from ballerina into junior high school art teacher, and raise my dad and my aunts Barbara and Elizabeth, in genteel poverty, alone. Suzie was my grandmother’s stepmother, as it were, and my own mother had gushed about her warmth and kindness.

  On thin blue paper, Suzie Trocmé wrote to invite me to come visit her in Montpellier, near France’s Mediterranean coast. She even drew a little map of where Montpellier was, relative to my village in the mountains. Of course I wanted to go. I had been dreaming about France as only a fifteen-year-old can: I saw myself walking, gauzily clad, through the very same fields of Arles where Vincent van Gogh had lost his mind. But I was only a teenager, and graceless. I didn’t know how I could even ask my mother about seeing Suzie in France; it wasn’t like it was easy to call home from abroad back then. How would I get there? How could I pay for it? I choked. I left the letter unanswered. There would be no visit.

  * * *

  Now, in an exhibit on the final floor of the Holocaust Museum, I again encounter Suzie’s name.

  The exhibit tells how a pastor, André Trocmé, and his wife, Magda, were among those who figured prominently in the rescue effort on the Plateau. An image of André shows a tall man in glasses, standing next to a striking woman with dark braids folded at her temples, surrounded by four children. Born in Saint-Quentin, France, the pastor was a fierce charismatic, a proponent of the philosophy of nonviolence; in the 1920s, he was reading Thoreau and Gandhi at Union Theological Seminary in New York; by the late 1930s, he was posted to the faraway town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. Magda, it was said, never turned away from her door a person in need. Both were part of the French Resistance, but this was resistance of a nonviolent—if no less perilous—kind: retrieving Jews from concentration camps, finding homes for them, finding work and schools for them, helping them move on toward Switzerland.

  I let my eyes float over the rest of the exhibit, taking in a sea of children’s faces. Children who, in the days before the war, must have barreled through their own worlds—steering their bikes through streets, block by added block, discovering the fire-red leaves of their own trees, knowing the clocked rhythms of their own waking and studying and sleeping, and the crunching rhythm of their own snow-walks on moonlit nights; falling in love with some boy or girl, or in hate with some kid from the other street. These were children who once had, surely, arms to hold them in the fearsome night. Who belonged to someone.

  I looked at those faces, one by one. I thought about what their singularity meant, in this pitch-black place. The text to the exhibit said: “Nobody asked who was Jewish and who was not. Nobody asked where you were from. Nobody asked who your father was or if you could pay. . . .”

  Who was this André Trocmé to Suzie? I had no idea.

  But that’s when I saw that there was another Trocmé mentioned in the exhibit. This was André’s cousin—a lanky young man with thick darkish hair, swept back, with full lips and dark eyes behind spectacles, and ears that stuck out.

  This Trocmé, I would come to learn, was Suzie’s little brother. He’d arrived on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in the late summer of 1942. Tick. There, he directed first one and then two homes for refugee children and young people on the hilly outskirts of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. By the summer of 1943, he was arrested in a raid, and spent the next several months in concentration camps in France, then Germany, and then Poland. He died in Majdanek in the spring of 1944. Tick.

  A light switched on in the darkness for me. His name was Daniel.

  * * *

  And so, a new journey began for me—a journey toward a place called Vivarais-Lignon, a journey to reconcile things-as-they-are with things-as-they-might-be.

  One day, I woke up a social scientist. Then, I snapped. I wanted to study war no more. And I started thinking about how I might do that, started looking at stories that might help me learn.

  “It is connected to our family,” my aunt Barbara said, her melodic voice trailing in my head for years, as I held up that single gem, inside that book that even today smells like old wood and tin. I know my Durkheim and le social. Social science doesn’t need my family. It doesn’t need—from Salisbury Street—me. When it comes to the story of the large-scale n, and the brilliant end of the bell curve, it doesn’t even want me.

  But it seemed there was nothing I could do.

  Somewhere, between the lines of that book from my aunt—and then elsewhere, and again, elsewhere—stood a figure . . . a figure connected to my family. And that figure, who was long dead, long gone, began to haunt my own journey. And to steer it.

  Taped to my wall is Daniel’s photograph, printed on tea-stained paper. He is in three-quarter profile. He is young. He is wearing glasses and a tie, his dark hair carefully combed back. Next to his face, in my own handwriting, are penciled the following words: Arrest, June 29, 1943. Moulin Prison. Compiègne. 1943. Buchenwald. Dora. (Heart problem.) 1944. Majdanek.

  I look at his face. His gaze reaches into the indefinite distance. His expression is inscrutable.

  There is such a thing as good science, properly applied. There is the question of how things work. But then there is also the question of how, as plans are mislaid and theories crumble, we might just be claimed, ourselves, by a larger purpose than we imagine.

  I am a social scientist; I want to study war no more. But it turns out, I can’t do it alone.

  Chapter 2

  DAYS OF AWE

  Blessed are You, Lord our God,

  King of the universe,

  Who creates the fruit of the tree.

  —ROSH HASHANAH BLESSING FOR THE APPLES AND HONEY

  YOU OPEN THE BOOK OF LIFE and the story begins. And what do you first see?

  “Good night, darling,” the nanny would whisper to him, in some of the few English words she knew. “Sleep well . . .”

  Daniel was a boy with wavy light brown hair and ears that stuck out in magnificent curves. He had a soft, round mouth, and eyes that could lock into the distance. They say he was a smiling child. A laughing child. Un enfant délicieux—a delicious child. Surely he loved his nanny, who lived with his family in their home outside Verneuil-sur-Avre, in Normandy, and who called him, softly, darling. One day she was sick with a cold and he thought she was crying. “’Zelle”—mademoiselle, he said, rushing to her—“you shouldn’t cry! Dani is here!”

  Daniel’s parents, Henri Trocmé and Eve, née Rist, were both from old and influential families. The ancestral tree was solid as an oak, its history written in the annals of great French lineages. From the seventeenth century forward, Trocmés settled in a cluster of villages in the northeast region of Picardy, France, where many of the local noble families—Trocmés included—had converted to the dangerous new religion of Protestantism. In the centuries that followed, with religious wars and then the antireligious aftermath of the French Revolution, the Trocmés and their neighbors lived, on and off, in fear, worshipping in hiding, at night, in a chalky quarry known as the Boîte à Cailloux, the Box of Stones. As Protestantism became more and more normal in France—and as Protestants were able to come out of hiding and into broader society—the Trocmé family flourished. Soon, along with the landowners and ministers of Daniel’s line, there was a noted sculptor, a médecin aliéniste—a nineteenth-century proto-psychologist—and even a Knight in the Legion of Honor.

  Daniel’s father was one of the founders and directors of the elite boarding school École des Roches. The school was leafy, orderly, Apollonian; the core of the campus included large lawns, tall trees, and the ribbon of a river, all surrounded by hundreds of acres of fields and woods. Everywhere were signs of dewy wealth: the stables, the outdoor pool, the tennis courts, the elegant residences where staff and students lived together in cozy homelike environments with huge hearths and pianos in the foyers. But while the school was patently intended for the rich, it was founded, too, on a kind of modern get-up-and-go principle called active learning, where, along with classical subjects, students were exposed to down-to-earth problem solving. The study of science required actual lab work in the classroom; out in the fields and waters and stables beyond the classroom, students would figure out how things grew by growing them, or how things flew by flying them. It was a real innovation at the time, that you could aim to create, among the nation’s most fortunate sons, an uncoddled generation of problem solvers who, as the school’s motto read, would be bien armé pour la vie. Well armed for life.