“When I worked in Doctor Brissaud’s department for children with meningitis caused by tuberculosis, I arrived before the procession of doctors and I made the children laugh because I couldn’t bear to see their sadness. One day, he arrived earlier than usual and saw me. He remained behind the door, not wanting to disturb me. He called me to his office and asked me, ‘What do you want to do?’ I answered, ‘Pediatrics, but there’s no way I can. I don’t know anyone.’ In those days one couldn’t expect to get a place as a non-resident student in a good pediatric service if one didn’t have connections. The head immediately gave me a word of introduction.”This type of help was all the more appreciated as even registering in a medical school had been by no means easy. Being a stateless person was an extra hurdle. She explains the complex situation she had faced:“I was supposed to be Czech, my father being Czech as he was born in Czechoslovakia, a country bordering on Hungary and Poland. But the Czechoslovakian consulate did not recognize my right to their nationality.... I wasn’t French either, and the French didn’t want to give me the identification document of a stateless person since I was a Czechoslovakian.”One of the educators of Moissac went to the consulate in Marseilles on her behalf to declare that she renounced her previous nationality in order to obtain the green identification paper of a stateless person. But when she began studying medicine, the Ordre des Médecins (Board of Physicians) was opposed to the idea of granting citizenship to foreign medical students. So she registered for a course of literature at the University of Toulouse, while waiting to obtain the French naturalization papers, which she had requested.Her sister and brother were also encountering similar difficulties at the same time. In France, children of deportees who were not French were considered as war orphans and as such could receive small scholarships.Eager to study, Akerman-Tieder finished her medical studies in brilliant fashion, promising to make children smile again. She emphasized that she married Fred Akerman, a young man born in Berlin who happened to attend the same medical school she attended but whom she met by chance on a boat bound for Israel in 1953.Although Akerman-Tieder soon gave birth to three children, she went on to study for her specialization in pediatrics and, later on, psychoanalysis. It was quite a challenge but she yearned to help all those who suffered, and especially those who had endured persecution during the war.Even though Akerman-Tieder and her husband enjoyed prestigious jobs and social status, she felt they lived in exile. Unlike the word Diaspora, the term exile conveys a negative connotation which she developed in her book.In her opinion, the Jews of France whose Judaism has to remain in the private sphere suffer from a form of “split personality.” Conversely, “Identity Out in the Open” (a chapter title of her memoir) is what she experienced when on Israeli soil, pointing indirectly to the uncomfortable double identity of some Jews in exile.Before making aliyah Akerman-Tieder had visited the Jewish state many times. One of her poems written in French titled “Fifty Years After” illustrates to what extent living in the Land of Israel was a dream that came true: “Fifty years after the war / We’ve had the good fortune of having returned to our Land.” In a chapter she titled “Back in Our Element,” she wrote about their planned emigration: “This project preoccupied us. We’d made many journeys to Israel, and aliyah seemed to us the culmination of our path, the concretization of our Jewish identity, a way of showing ourselves to be fully fledged members of our people in our land, claiming our collective heritage without having to be pigeonholed as dati or “religious,” terms which don’t always fit me.”Akerman-Tieder’s three children all live in Israel today and share the same Orthodoxy as her, the same spiritual energy, transmitted in turn to their own children. Akerman-Tieder is a happy grandmother and great-grandmother whose transmission of her past has been achieved through her memoirs, which she has had translated into both English and Hebrew, the language of her grandchildren.
Akerman-Tieder’s religious background and evolution has definitely played a part in her reconstruction and in the narrative she presented in her memoir, focusing on the depths of the “Jewish soul” and the logical move to Israel as her final home. Dr. Françoise S. Ouzan is a senior research associate at the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center at Tel Aviv University. Her latest book is How Young Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives: France, The United States and Israel (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2018)l