Again, he nods knowingly. “You have with you their names?”
“Yes,” I say. I pull out a copy of Mamie’s list and hand it to him. As his clear eyes scan the page, I add quickly, “But Alain, her brother, isn’t in any Holocaust registry.”
He looks up and smiles. “Ah yes. But my registries are different.” He stands, trembling a little on his feet, and then he gestures with a crooked finger. He moves slowly, one foot in front of the other in a shuffle, toward the hallway lined with books. “I was twenty years of age when the Second World War began, twenty-two years of age when they began taking us away, right from the streets of France. More than seventy-six thousand juifs were taken from France, most never to return.”
I shake my head, suddenly mute.
“I was at Auschwitz,” he continues, and suddenly, he stops his slow shuffle to the hall, pausing as if the memory itself holds him back. After a moment, he moves again. “More than sixty thousand were sent there from France. Did you know?” He stops speaking again for a moment, and then he coughs. “After la libération, I returned to find everyone gone. All my friends. My neighbors.”
“What about your family?” I ask.
“All of them, dead.” His voice is flat. “My wife. My son. Mother. Father. Sisters. Brother. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Grandparents. Everyone. When I came home to Paris, I came home to nothing. To no one.”
“I’m so sorry,” I murmur. The enormity of it begins to hit me. I’ve never met a concentration camp survivor before, and as the images from the Mémorial de la Shoah play themselves over again in my mind, I blink a few times, feeling numb. The atrocities in the pictures had actually happened to this kind man before me. I can feel tears in my eyes. I blink them away before he notices.
He waves a hand, dismissing my words. “It is the past. Not for you to be sorry about, mademoiselle. The world you live in today is very different, and I am glad.” He shuffles a little farther and regards his wall of books solemnly. He touches a gnarled finger to one book spine, then another. “The only place I knew to go when I returned was to the synagogue I had attended as a boy. But it had been destroyed. It was a shell, no longer a place.”
I’m frozen as I watch him scan the books. He pulls one out, reads something inside, and then returns it to the shelf.
“When I realized that the ones I loved were never coming home, I began to think about the great tragedy, not just of their deaths but of the loss of their legacies,” he continues. “For when you take away an entire family, and they all perish, who will tell their stories?”
“No one,” I murmur.
“Précisément. And when that occurs, it is as if their lives have been lost twice over. That is when I began creating my own records.” He reaches for another book, and this time, his eyes light up and he smiles. He flips through a few pages and stops at one. He’s silent for a moment as he reads.
“Your own records?” I ask.
He nods and shows me the page he’s stopped on. I see a cursive scrawl across neat, lined pages that are yellowed at the edges. “My lists of the lost.” He smiles and adds, “And of the found. And of the stories that go with them.”
I take a step back and look in awe at his bookshelves. “All of these books are your lists?”
“Yes.”
“You compiled them yourself?” I look around in disbelief.
“It filled my time in those early days,” he says. “It was how I stopped living in the sadness. I began visiting synagogues every day, looking at their records, talking to every person I could meet.”
“But how did you put together so much information?”
“To everyone I met, I asked them for the names of anyone they knew who had been lost, and anyone they knew who had survived. Family, friends, neighbors, it did not matter. No piece of information was small or insignifiant. Each one represented a life lost or a life saved. Over the years, I have written and rewritten their memories, organized them into volumes, followed the leads they gave me, and sought out the people who survived.”
“My God,” I murmur.
“Each person who survived a camp,” he continues, “has many stories to tell. Those people are often the key to who was lost, and how. For others, the only key we have is that they never returned. But their names are here, and what details we do know.”
“But why aren’t these lists in the Mémorial de la Shoah?” I ask.