Good luck,
Gavin
I pause and take a deep breath, bracing myself, then I click on the first link, which takes me to a database of Holocaust victims’ names. Below the search box, it’s explained that the database includes records of half of the six million Jews murdered during World War II. My stomach lurches suddenly; I’ve heard the figure before, but now it feels more personal. Six million. My God. I remind myself that Gavin’s probably wrong about Mamie anyhow. He has to be.
The text on the main page also explains that millions of victims remain unidentified. I wonder how this can be the case, seven decades later. How can so many people be lost forever?
I take a deep breath, enter Picard and Paris, and click Search.
Eighteen results are returned, and my heart pounds as I scan the list. None of the first names match the names Mamie gave me, and I don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed about that. But there’s an Annie on the list, which makes me feel suddenly ill. I click on her name, not realizing until I do so that my hand is trembling. I read the scant text; the girl was born in December 1934, it says. She lived in Paris and Marseille and died on July 20, 1943, at Auschwitz. I do the math quickly. She didn’t even live to see her ninth birthday.
I think about my Annie. On her ninth birthday, Rob and I took her and three friends into Boston for an afternoon tea party at the Park Plaza. They dressed up like princesses and giggled about the little tea sandwiches with the crusts cut off. The picture I took of Annie, in her pale pink dress, her hair long and loose as she blew out the candle atop a pink cupcake, is still one of my favorites.
But little Annie Picard from Paris never had a ninth birthday party. She didn’t become a teenager, fight with her mother about makeup, worry about homework, fall in love, or live long enough to figure out who she really wanted to be.
I realize suddenly that I’m crying. I’m not sure when I started. I quickly close the page, wipe my eyes, and walk away. It takes fifteen minutes of pacing the kitchen before the tears stop.
I spend another thirty minutes clicking around the first site Gavin sent me, horrified by nearly everything I find. I remember reading Anne Frank’s diary in school and studying the Holocaust in history classes, but there’s something about reading about it as an adult that has a completely different impact.
The staggering numbers and facts swim before my eyes. Two hundred thousand Jews lived in Paris in 1939 when war broke out. Of those, fifty thousand perished. The Nazis began arresting Parisian Jews in May 1941, when they rounded up 3,700 men and sent them to internment camps. In June 1942, all Jews in Paris were made to wear yellow Stars of David marked with juif, the French word for Jew. A month later, on July 16, 1942, there was a massive roundup of twelve thousand Jews—mostly foreign born—who were taken to a stadium called the Vélodrome d’Hiver, then deported to Auschwitz. By 1943, the Nazis were going into orphanages, retirement homes, and hospitals, arresting those who were the most defenseless. The thought makes my stomach lurch.
I enter Picard into the second database Gavin sent me. I find three surviving Picards listed in a Munich newspaper, and three others—including another Annie Picard—listed as survivors living in Italy. There are three Picards listed in the death book of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, another eleven listed at Dachau in Germany. There are thirty-seven Picards on a list of 7,346 French female deportees who perished. I find the eight-year-old Annie Picard again on this list, and the tears return. My sight is so blurred that I almost don’t notice when two familiar names come up on the screen. Cecile Picard—the second name on Mamie’s list—and Danielle Picard—the last.
Heart thudding, I read the details listed for the first name.
Cecile Picard. Born Cecile Pachcinski on May 30, 1901, in Krakow, Poland. From Paris, France. Deported to Auschwitz, 1942. Died autumn 1942.
I swallow hard a few times. Cecile Picard would have been forty-one when she died. Just five years older than I am now. Mamie, I know, was born in 1925, so she would have been seventeen in 1942. Could Cecile have been her mother? My great-grandmother? If that’s true, how is it that we’ve never spoken of this before?
I blink a few times and as I read the details of Danielle, my heart catches in my throat.
Danielle Picard. Born April 4, 1937. From Paris, France. Deported to Auschwitz. Died 1942.
She was only five.
I close my eyes and try to breathe evenly again. After a moment, I google the third organization Gavin suggested, the Mémorial de la Shoah. I click on the link and enter the first name on Mamie’s list, Albert Picard, into the search box. My eyes widen as I find him.