Maman, What are We Called Now? by Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar

‘A perfect piece of written heartbreak’ – The Jewish Chronicle

The first half of this book, a reprint of the author’s diary, is a scattered account of the days and weeks leading up to the Liberation of Paris in 1944. Inevitably, each entry veers between elation and despair: the end of the War is in sight but Mesnil-Amar’s husband is in German hands, and destined to be on the last deportation train out of Paris. The family, who are Jewish, have spent the war years moving from one city to another in both Vichy and the Occupied Zone, sometimes living on the kindness of strangers, more often forced to pay for help. As luck would have it, they can afford to pay for shelter. They are affluent members of the Parisian upper class who have, until the War, taken their wealth and privilege for granted. ‘We failed to see the horror looming on the horizon,’ Mesnil-Amar writes, ‘…nor were we aware that we were about to be betrayed by a large section of our own social class, a betrayal that would be cold, timorous, and poorly concealed under a veneer of politeness.’

She is equally hard on herself. If, in the pre-war years, they had ‘danced on volcanoes’, as non-practicing Jews they had also failed to align themselves with the hordes of refugees arriving from outside their borders. She ‘understood too late’ the implications of this flight from Hitler and it is not until the second half of the book, written in the aftermath of the discovery of the death camps, that the personal finally become the political for Mesnil-Amar.

In a series of articles written between 1944 and 1946 she becomes the volcano. She is consumed by rage: at the Nazis… at herself… by the destruction of several generations of Jews. She pictures herself in the cattle trucks, she sees herself and her child in the showers at Auschwitz. She rejects attempts by the German public to whitewash their involvement, to deny their collusion, in the rise of Hitler. But it is for the French themselves that she reserves the worst of her scorn. The French have moved into a state of ‘willful amnesia’ over their role in the Holocaust and Mesnil-Amar will not stand for it. She names collaborators. She lists their crimes, she urges her readers not to forget ‘the appalling complicity,’ that followed the invasion, ‘the insidious almost smug cowardice, that shocking race for jobs, even by those who had no need of them, that frantic anxiety to please, to kow-tow, sometimes even taking a secret delight in doing so’. She refuses ‘to draw a line under it all’, refuses to move on until, called upon to work with refugees, she finds an outlet for her grief.