My Madame Defarge moment (Paris, 1953)
I am about 5 years old living a furtive existence with my mother and father, in Paris France. My parents, who survived the concentration camps, were basically stateless refugees. I was born in 1948, before they left Germany. We moved to Israel after the war and then on to France on a visitor’s permit, hoping to use France to transit to Canada where my mother’s brother Isaac and my father’s sister Lola moved after the war. The former was an Auschwitz child survivor (more on his amazing story in other posts); and the latter fled with her baby, hours ahead of the German occupation of her town in 1940, and somehow survived the Russian winters, scarcity of food, and rampaging Germans, and made it to Canada—with her baby.
When the French visitor’s permit ran out, my parents continued to look for a way to cross the Atlantic Ocean and join their remaining family. To do that they had to go underground: no status, no papers, no work permit, and sought by police for deportation.
We were living in a “hotel”. This was a seedy, dingy, smelly, multistory rooming house. It had a single person rickety elevator and a set of single rooms plus a single bathroom (with just a toilet) on each floor. The ‘hotel’ was filled mostly with refugees from all over Europe, with a full complement of emotionally and physically crippled sole survivors of concentration camps. They had in common being bereft of family, friends, money, education, and skills, yet having to live day by day, struggling to salvage some modicum of a life. My parents and I lived in a single room on an upper floor. It had a bed, a dresser, and a small table with a single drawer that stood by the ledge of the only window. In the evenings, my mother would take a small naphtha camping stove out of the dresser and place it on the tiny wooden table by the window. When there was something to cook, my mother would open the window and fry it and feed it to me. We had only one frying pan and a single plate with a fork. Other days supper was some sort of sandwich. I ate every day. On many days I ate alone as my parents had ‘already eaten’. In the evening I would line up with the other kids outside the door of the superintendent and wait to pick up one of the dozens of cats. I liked doing that. The ‘super’, a small round man, bald, with a rim of greying hair around his head, had a very pretty daughter with a long pony tail to her waist; she was about 2 years older than me, a half head taller, and oh so pretty. Her job was to hand out the cats. We needed the kitty cat to keep the rats from climbing up our bed at night. If they were out of cats before I got to the front of the line, the nights were hell.
In the mornings, my daddy took me to school. We would take the subway. We would change stations at least twice. In one of the stations there was a large rock and display of the Bastille. Every day I asked my daddy what that was and every day he told me something about the times, kings, revolution or whatever. It was hard for a kid to visualise any realistic aspect of that story.
It turned out later that the school was within easy walking distance of the ‘hotel’ but my father was afraid of being followed. My father had no work permit. He bought smuggled (?stolen) silver items from a man and hawked them on the streets, keeping them pinned under his coat. Easy to find if stopped by the police. Every night, he did or did not sell an item, which determined what we could eat and if we could ever pay the rent. After school, my mother often picked me up and there followed a long circuitous rout home by foot. En route we often (but not always) passed a boulangerie (bakery) where the fragrance of the freshly baked French sticks and the smoked ham wafted onto the sidewalk.. I loved to stand outside, look through the picture window, at the spinning disk, rocking back and forth, slicing, slicing, the pink meat. With each pass of the disk, a thin slice would be added to the growing delicious mound. Then suddenly, in a quick practised motion, the baker would scoop up the mound with the knife and his fingers, drop it on a scale, then scoop it up again and lay it on a crispy bread bun he had cut open along its length. And in literally in the same motion, he closed the bun and rolled the whole thing in some wax paper forming a tube, which he sealed by twisting the ends in opposite directions. He then handed it to a little boy while his mother rummaged in her purse for the money to pay.
The school I went to was a large, old, hewed stone structure. My classroom was a portable in the courtyard in the school. The portable was very large (to my recollection as a little kid) and had a very high ceiling. At the front of the classroom, was a raised platform (about a foot high) on which was the teacher’s desk and against the wall, blackboards. The teacher, M. Saluscu was a young man, short and compact and looked to me very authoritative, fit and strong. He wore a white shirt, with his sleeves rolled up, and the same visibly frayed tie every day. He also wore the same cuffed pants and leather shoes with thick soles every day. His suit jacket was always hung over the back of his chair, which was tucked tight up to his desk. When he sat, he sat on the desk, not the chair.
There were about 40 children in the class. The students sat in groups of two at adjoined desks. The students were sorted according to ability. The smartest were placed in the front right of the class and so on until the last desk in the back of the 5th row. I sat around the middle. How I admired the boys that sat in the front of the first row. They got much more attention and teaching from M. Soluscu. He also gave them books which they carried home in their briefcases. They knew answers to questions, got high scores on tests, were great athletes, and were taller and stronger and better dressed than the rest of us. I still have my work book from that class. Looking at it I am amazed at the sophistication of the writing in cursive script, the mathematical calculations and the notes I took—at the age of 5. Still, I wanted so much to be like the boys in the front of the right row. I used to put cardboard into my school bag and pretend it was heavy so people may think I was a front-seater.
Discipline in class was iron clad. M. Saluscu had help from a long round wooden stick which ended in a carved wooden ball about the size of a golf ball. The standard punishment was meted out for infractions such as talking, being late, poor homework assignments, messy notebooks. When caught for an infraction, the teacher called out the student’s name and announced the infraction. The student had to sit up straight, and fold his hands on the desk. Slowly, taking his time, M. Saluscu would come down from the platform with the stick, stand about 7 feet away. Then, when the drama of the moment was at its height, he would raise the stick slowly, hold it aloft, and suddenly bring it down, whacking the student on the top of the head with the ball. I got hit once. Man, oh man, did that ever hurt. After the whack, M. Saluscu walked back to the platform to continue the lesson, while you just sat there, tears welling in your eyes. The other kids would keep their heads forward but do their best to quickly glance to see if you were going to cry. But the culture was that as much as it hurt, no one cried.
In the class was a boy about my age, ‘Allain’. Allain had straight blond hair that flopped around, with a cow-lick, and was uncombable. He was thinner and smaller than I was. He was a funny, bundle of exuberant energy. He repeatedly “disturbed the class” by talking, getting up from his seat, dropping things, needing to go to the washroom, or blurting out answers to the teacher’s question on some occasions and totally clued out when called upon to answer, on others. Nowadays we would probably label him as ADD. Allain was repeatedly hit on the head, sent to the principal’s office, and sent further and further back, snaking up and down each row until he ended up in the last seat in the class. Still, he could not help disturbing the class.
It was late in the afternoon. on a Friday, and Allain and M. Saluscu had a particularly mutually frustrating day. M. Saluscu announced: “Allain, the next time you talk I am going to cut your tongue out.” No one had any reason to doubt the sincerity of the intention and capability of the teacher to do as he threatened. Surely Allain will now keep quiet.
M. Saluscu returned to his lesson. He stopped in mid sentence, suddenly turned and pointed to the back left corner of the class: “Allain, come up here to me right now”. Allain cringed in his chair. “Come on…” Saluscu urged gently but firmly, “come on…” The classroom was totally silent. “Come on up here…” M. Saluscu commanded.
Allain, tears streaming down his eyes, rose slowly from his desk. He began to shuffle one leg advancing a small step and the other leg brought up behind it. We was shuffling sideways on his trajectory to the platform. When he got to the platform, M. Saluscu lifted him up and put him down on the edge of the platform. He strode over to his desk, took his jacket off the back of the chair and lay it on the desk, pulling the chair to the centre of the platform. He then walked back to the desk, pulled his white handkerchief from the breast pocket of the jacket. He walked over to Allain, put his hand on Allain’s back, and led him to the chair. Again, Allain, crying quietly, trying hard not to sob. M. Saluscu picked up Allain and sat him on the chair. Allain’s eyes were wide open and he was no longer crying. M. Saluscu unfurled the handkerchief, held it by two adjacent corners and wrapped it around Allain’s neck and made a show of deliberately pulling the edge against his throat and tying a knot at the back. M. Saluscu brought the garbage can over from the side of the desk and placed it between Allain’s legs. He then went back to the desk, opened the top drawer, and slowly extracted…a large pair of scissors.
Placing himself between Allain and the blackboard, the class had a full view of what was about to transpire.
M Salascu gently pushed Allain’s back forward so his head was over the garbage can.
“Stick out your tongue.” He said firmly.
One has to keep in mind that the ambient culture was well steeped in French “revolution” lore. Everywhere there were comic books, advertisements, posters with men with pony tails, the sans culotte, with their tricolor hats and muskets, women wearing pinafores on their dresses and revolutionary hats and headbands on their heads…and Guillotines. I certainly had no doubt that M. Saluscu was going to slice off Allain’s tongue. Teachers had full authority and would not have to answer to the principal or the parents. Allain’s tongue was going to be cut off and that was that.
Allain sticks a small tip of his tongue between his teeth. Tears once again well up in his eyes.
“more…”
Allain sticks it out a bit more.
I felt a sick feeling in my stomach…I was hoping M. Saluscu would just cut this tip of Allain’s tongue…Allain will have learned his lesson…
M. Saluscu brings the scissors to the side of Allain’s face and opens them slowly, wider and wider.
“stick it out…a bit more…” he says gently to Allain.
Not obeying the teacher was unthinkable. The tongue came out more and then a bit more.. Allain’s eyes clenched tightly shut in anticipation. The scissors opened more and the blades were moved so they straddled the tongue. There was a dead silence in the room.
“Now, are you going to talk in class any more?”
Bawling with heaves, tongue still out, Allain shook his head from side to side.
