Nadia Gould - Hitler Made Me a Jew

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HITLER MADE ME A JEW

by

Nadia Gould

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BOSON BOOKS

Raleigh

Published by Boson Books

3905 Meadow Field Lane

Raleigh, NC 27606

ISBN 0-917990-19-6

An imprint of C&M Online Media Inc.

Copyright 2000 Nadia Gould

All rights reserved

For information contact

C&M Online Media Inc.

3905 Meadow Field Lane

Raleigh, NC 27606

Tel: (919) 233-8164

e-mail: cm@cmonline.com

URL: http://www.bosonbooks.com

Contents

Chapter 1

1940: To be Jewish with Honor

I was thirteen when I discovered I was Jewish. American Jews find this hard to believe. How can that be? Didnt your parents tell you? They dont understand what it was like to live in a country where the French Revolution and the Catholic Church were the important influences. My parents were atheists.

As free thinkers, they had no reasons to tell me I was Jewish. Both my parents were born in Poland when it was occupied by Russia. My fathers parents went to live in Moscow. This privilege was given only to a few Jewsthose with special skills. My grandfather as a textile engineer was considered desirable and was allowed to live in the capital. My mothers family went to settle in Harbin, China. There the Jews were encouraged to settle and establish their own businesses. The Russians were occupying Manchuria and were building the TranSiberian Railroad that would link Japan, Korea and China. They gave the Jews many incentives so that they would move in that frontier region and develop it. My grandfather quickly became a successful businessman selling lumber for the railroad. He made a fortune and was a powerful citizen in his community.

My fathers parents were not religious. My mothers parents on the other hand were very religious and followed all the practices of the Jewish religion.

Being Jewish became a problem for us only when the Germans occupied France in 1940. The Jews in France were either French-born, unrecognizable, or they were foreigners (etrangers). My parents were foreigners with a strong Russian accent, and because the French are xenophobes, my parents accent caused me distress in public. I would have preferred them to be like every one else, just ordinary French people.

To learn I was Jewish came to me as a relief. Even though, we are sometimes told surprising things about ourselves, once the initial shock wears off, we feel free, cleansed, as if, deep down, we had known the truth already. I remember feeling that it made more sense for me to be Jewish. I knew in my gut that I wasnt really Russian. Jeannette, who lived in my house, had said I was Russian Orthodox, once when I had been asked what was my religion if I was not Catholic. I thought Russian Orthodox sounded great and exotic. No one in school had ever heard of it, and I loved being different. Being Jewish didnt conjure up anything romantic for me. I accepted it as reluctantly as I did my brown eyes and straight hair. It was also part of my penance for feeling different from my parents because I didnt have a foreign accent. I felt guilty about it but I couldnt help feeling embarrassed my parents accent.

I escaped the Holocaust thanks to my parents, their friends, the Jewish organizations that gave us money when we reached Spain, and the American Quakers who arranged for children like me to come to America in 1943. But I still often wonder why I had to leave Francethe only country I knew at fourteen. Why did I have to give up the language I loved? Why did I have to stop singing the songs I could sing so well? I was French. I loved France and the blue, white and red flag. I had been well instructed in my French school that France was the center of the Universe. Why did I have to leave?

Since I was thirteen, when I learned I was Jewish, it is clear to me now, some fifty years later, that I was a pretender for most of my life. I was born in Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, the land the French went to war in 1914 to recapture from the Germans. I was profoundly touched by the patriotic fervor of this region which I had the honor to represent because I had been born there, had worn the costume of the Alsatian women with its voluminous black bow in all the pageants and special ceremonies of the schools I attended. Yet my parents left Strasbourg when I was nine months old, and I had no recollections of that city.

Nevertheless, it served me well to have been born in Strasbourg as a child because it gave me distinction. In school I was always the only representative of the Alsace province. Alsatians stayed home; they didnt move around the country; they kept their mystery. But in the end it was the fact of my being Jewish, the meaning of which I didnt even understand, that determined my fate and not Strasbourg, the city of my birth.

My father had left Moscow when he was sixteen. He was not interested in politics, so he escaped the Russian Revolution and survived by his wits, traveling across Russia as the assistant of a guru, a man who preached about living a healthy life by eating no meat, drinking no wine, and doing exercise. This was quite revolutionary in those days.

He eventually joined a merchant ship, which he jumped to land in Palestine. There he had relatives and could work and save the money he would need to study at the University of Lige in Belgium.

My mother was able to go to study in Lige also. Her father preferred that she attend the University of Lige rather than any university in Russia. He didnt like Communism.

My parents met and fell in love at the University of Lige in Belgium. My mother told me how my father courted her and how he would show off and ride a motorcycle, standing on the seat of it, with his arms spread out. They had many friends which they kept to the end of their lives and which I met later on also. They were all young people from Poland or Russiaall Jews. Then my parents transferred to the University of Strasbourg. I believe they wanted to live in France. When my mother thought she was pregnant, they quickly got married.

When they finished their studies they remained in France since they could not return to either of their countries. The Communists were in Russia, and Japan was at war with China. But as foreigners, in France, they could not work. They were stateless and carried for identification a document called Nansen ( sans nationalite or without nationality). I, on the hand, was French by birth and also by naturalization.

When I was three, my parents were working on a milk farm in Provence. There, I have memories of having been a cat torturer. I played with a small kitten that I dressed in doll clothes. I put him in a box and looked through a hole to see what it would do and I saw his big yellow eyes staring at me. I was also fascinated by his movements when I pulled out his legs. My mother was surprised the animal didnt scratch me. I didnt understand why the cat ran off and disappeared. I looked for him in vain going under the cows in the meadows. My mother also marveled at the sensitivity of these large beasts that never stepped on me even though I was a nuisance to them.

On the farm, I also had several pretty standard childhood memories of accidents that caused me my first pain. I fell on a rock and cut the corner of my mouth. It made a lump inside my mouth that I can still feel today with my tongue. I remember tasting my blood for the first time.

I fell on my crotch into a milk can as I jumped from can to can, one leg in the can the other outside. The blood ran down my legs and my parents rushed me to an old country doctor who quickly reassured them that I had not lost my virginity. Later, my mother told me, they had been amused because that had not been their worry.