“What could that mean?” I ask.
“There could be many reasons for this. As complete as our records are, there are occasionally people who have not been properly recorded, especially children. They were lost in the chaos.”
She hands me the documents she has, and I sit down to read over them. For the next few minutes, I try to read the notations, some handwritten, some typed, all of them in French. It’s not until I flip to the third document she’s given me, a census page, that my eyes widen.
There, in tilted handwriting, on a list stamped with the word recensement, is a 1936 listing of the Picard family of Paris, and among their children is a daughter, Rose, born 1925.
As caught up as I’d been in finding out the fate of the names on Mamie’s list, and as much as I’d begun to believe that they were indeed her family, it’s not until I see my grandmother’s first name and her birth year scrawled in indelible ink that it finally sinks in.
My heart pounds as I stare at the page.
I read over the scant details. It appears that, like the deportation information I’d found online said, the man who may be Mamie’s father, Albert, was a doctor. His femme, his wife, Cecile, is listed sans profession. She must have stayed home with the children. The children—the fils and filles—including Rose, are listed, all but Danielle, the youngest, who wasn’t born until 1937, the year after the census. Alain’s name is on the list too. He was just as real as the rest of them.
I go through all the documents, which take me a long time to read, both because my eyes keep tearing up and because I need to keep referring to the English-French dictionary I’ve brought with me. At the end, I’m no closer to finding out what happened to Alain than I was before, nor am I any closer to finding out what happened after the family was deported. None of the copies of deportation documents are annotated with any additional information. The last record of everyone in the family—except for Rose and Alain, for whom no records exist—is that they were all deported on convoys bound for Auschwitz.
I take the documents back to the desk, where the woman who had helped me earlier looks up and smiles at me.
“Did you have luck?”
I nod and feel my eyes fill with tears. “I think it’s my grandmother’s family,” I say softly. “But I can’t tell what happened to them after they were deported.”
She nods solemnly. “Of the seventy-six thousand taken in France, only two thousand survived. It is very likely that they perished, madame. I am sorry.”
I nod, and it’s not until I draw in a deep breath that I realize I’m trembling.
“Did you find the name you were looking for?” she asks after a moment.
I shake my head. “Only on the census form. There’s no record of an Alain Picard being arrested or deported.”
She chews her lip for a moment. “Alors. There is another person who may be able to help you. She is a researcher here, and she speaks some English. Let me see if she is available.”
After a few brief phone calls in French, she tells me that Carole, from the research library, will help me in thirty minutes. She suggests waiting in the museum itself, where I’m welcome to browse the permanent exhibition.
I walk down the stairs into the nearly deserted exhibit hall and am immediately struck by the number of photographs and documents lining the long, narrow room. In the middle of the room, a big screen plays a film in French, and as I listen to a man’s voice talking about what I assume is the Holocaust, I drift to the first wall on the left and am heartened to realize that all the exhibits are captioned in English as well as French. At the end of the room, an eerie image of train tracks to nowhere is projected on a big, blank wall, and I’m reminded of the dream I had just after Mamie gave me the list.
For a half hour, I’m lost in my own thoughts as I read testimony after testimony of the beginning of the war, the loss of Jewish rights in France and across Europe, and about the first deportations out of the country.
Not only did these things happen in my grandmother’s lifetime, but they may very well have happened to the people she loved most in the world. I close my eyes and realize I’m breathing hard. My heart is still thudding double time in my chest when I hear a woman’s voice in front of me.
“Madame McKenna-Smith?”
I snap my eyes open. The woman standing there is about my age, with brown hair pulled into a bun, and blue eyes rimmed with expression lines. She’s wearing dark jeans and a white blouse.
“Yes, that’s me,” I say. I hastily add, “Sorry, I mean, Oui, madame.”