An author's experiences during the Shoah lend her fictional narrative a discomfiting authenticity.
By AKIN AJAYIfrance ww2 88 224(photo credit: Courtesy)Shadows of a Childhood
By Elisabeth Gille
The New Press
138 pages; $14.95
Even after the Vichy government of wartime France had stepped up the deportation of Jews in the summer of 1942, turning its attention from the so-called foreign Jews to the native-born minority population, there were still many who believed that the deportations were a benign matter and that no lasting harm would come to the Jews.
"Wasn't it cruel to separate the child from her parents? This... decision to let the children go with their families - hadn't it been made out of generosity? Poland was supposed to be a very Catholic country: The Jews would probably be well treated there..." muses Sister Saint-Gabriel, a nun tasked with hiding a small Jewish girl in her boarding school in Bordeaux.
This child is Lea Levy, six, smuggled from Paris to the south of France in a final act of desperation by her parents. Her story of her enforced concealment during the war, and of her struggle to come to terms with the horrors of the Holocaust, forms the heart of the recently republished Shadows of a Childhood, by Elisabeth Gille. It is a powerful and uncompromising tale, a story given a special poignancy by its provenance; the author, a well-known publisher in France until her death in 1996, was the younger daughter of Irene Nemirovsky, the posthumously lionized author of Suite Française who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942.
Gille was sent to live under an assumed identity before her parents' deportation and death, and her experience lends the narrative a discomfiting authenticity. Lea, her heroine, struggles with austere life in hiding far removed from the comforts of her previous life. Alone, uncomprehending, she finds a kindred spirit in Benedicte, two years older than her. She was hidden at the school by her parents, members of the Resistance, for her safety. She recognizes Lea's loneliness, even if she cannot fully comprehend her pain. The two form a close bond.
The war ends, but Lea's parents do not return for her. That this is a surprise to her impromptu guardians merely emphasizes the lengths to which the French protected themselves from the awful truths of the Final Solution. It is at this point the novel comes into its own, leaving behind the melodrama of Lea's life in hiding and metastasizing into a haunting, discomfiting exploration of her attempts to make sense of her life.
Sister Saint-Gabriel takes her to Paris to search for her parents. Even then, a year after the liberation, the French public remained largely protected from the conditions in the death camps, and the descriptions still seemed hardly credible. While Sister Saint-Gabriel is apprised, privately, of the likely fate of Lea's parents and the other 80,000 Jews deported from France in 1942, Lea wanders around the hotel where the returnees have been sequestered.
"Lea started and looked up. A corpse had appeared out of nowhere and was watching her... ashen skin, mottled with red blotches and stretched over slanting cheekbones so sharp they seemed about to slice through it; big red circles under the eyes; yellow teeth protruding from receding gums; chapped white lips. No hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. No beard, but that wasn't surprising since he was a boy who couldn't have been more than 13 or 14 years old. Lea tried to run away, but the icy hand held tight to her wrist."
Gille writes with a formal, detached style, one that one might otherwise detract from the raw emotion of Lea's story, but which in this case matches the narrative perfectly, setting Lea's emotional detachment into stark relief against the complacency of the society around her. Orphaned by the war, brought up as a Catholic, she is taken in by Benedicte's parents and raised as their own. Around her, people move away from the brutality and privations of the conflict, treating it as a distant memory best left undisturbed.
Postwar France was a curious place. Even as the trials of collaborators ground on interminably, the nation as a whole concentrated on a reconstruction of its collective memory of the war: a process of sanitation, of repression, of reinvention. Within this conspiracy of silence, Lea tries, alone, to piece together her identity with the help of yellowed newspaper clippings and solitary sessions with the radio, listening to the trials of those complicit in the deportations.
The France of Gille's novel never really comes to terms with the war and the occupation; neither, sadly, does Lea. She is a soul adrift, and her only anchor to the real world is Benedicte, her faithful friend, supportive if not always comprehending. One senses that without her companionship and her loyalty, she would be lost, hopelessly lost.
When the girls move to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, Lea's focus shifts once more. Paris, unlike Bordeaux, presents possibilities, and the tools that Lea needs to reconstruct herself abound. She plunges headfirst into a world of radicalism and bohemianism, seeking some resolution to the complicated conflation of her Jewish and French identities, the question that has haunted her all her life.
Shadows of a Childhood is an enigmatic, provocative work. It avoids the tidy exposition of slogans and certainties; it confronts the reader with a profound psychological portrait of a child-woman struggling to escape the long shadow cast by her childhood. Her lifeline is her friendship with Benedicte; whether it will be enough to sustain her, we cannot say. We can only wait, and hope.
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