The house of labor
Since, like Georges Pérec, I remember little of my childhood - extremely poor memory - I will use the Brainard-Pérec method to try to gather some fragments of things that were; and might still be there, now taking a nap somewhere down the well of some synapses...
I do NOT remember my birth. I do NOT remember the sound of the German soldiers' leather boots striking the cobblestones. I do NOT remember opening my eyes to a torn world, soon to be engulfed in the flames of destruction and covered with mangled bodies - for a while, it seems that death was winning. I do NOT remember the doctor washing his hands in the kitchen sink. I do NOT remember my mother's anxiety in bringing a child in a war torn country. I do NOT remember the neighbor, who came to be of help, saying good night when she was no longer needed.
[That same year Albert Camus wrote in his "Carnets": "When a man has learnt - and not on paper - to stay alone in the intimacy of his suffering, to surmount his urge to flee, the illusion that others can "share", there is little else he can learn. "The plague" would soon follow.]
A few days after I first breathed the cold air of a most severe winter, five French policemen from the special Brigades arrested Charlotte Delbo and her husband Georges. He will be executed two months later. Less than a year later she will be sent to Auschwitz with 230 other women. Only 49 will survive.
"Today people know
have known for several years
that this dot on the map
is Auschwitz.
This much they know
as for the rest
they think they know."
I remember the director of my elementary school showing us the first photograph of the Holocaust I ever saw.
