June 8, 2023

But not only people were killed, also all the books they had to write. All the paintings they had to paint. All the music they had to compose. I think that is why we, the children and grandchildren of the survivors, are obsessed with working and writing books.

Anne Berest

The Postcard, a 2021 French novel translated by Tina Cover and now available in the U.S., is a lightly fictionalized account of the author’s own family. The central narrative is true. In 2003 Anne’s mother receives a postcard. On the front is a photograph of the Opera Garnier in Paris and on the back are the names of Anne’s great-grandparents and her great-aunt and -uncle. Ephraim, Emma, Noemie and Jacques. All four died at Auschwitz. There is no signature and no return address.

Why was it sent and by whom?

Such a good premise for a novel, and the author Anne and character Anne along with her mother, eventually begin the quest to find those answers. This book is so much more, however, than the unraveling of a mystery.

This book is another reminder of the need to remember the Holocaust and its chilling effects. For example, 76,000 Jews were deported from France.

Have you ever had the experience when reading a book of wanting not to read more, but there was no way you could stop. That’s how this book felt to me, and I remember feeling the same way when as a pre-teen I read The Diary of Anne Frank for the first time. Or years ago when I read Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, which is referred to in The Postcard, and I think I need to read again. As much as I didn’t want to read the truths in either of these books, I knew I needed to know them, and I am grateful to the authors of these books for their abilities to portray truth.

So many scenes in The Postcard remain with me, but I mention just two.

Anne attends a Seder, her first actually, for even though she is Jewish by birth, she has not been a practicing Jew. She is unexpectedly moved by the ritual.

Everything seemed familiar: passing the matzos around, dipping the bitter herbs in salted water, letting a drop of wine fall from fingertip onto my plate, resting my elbow on the table…My ears already seemed to know the Hebrew chants. It was as if time had stopped…I could feel hands sliding into my own, inhabiting them.”

During the years we lived in Cleveland dear friends often invited us to Passover dinners, and I remembered not just feeling privileged to be there, but also a sense of universality and timelessness. I am not Jewish, and I certainly do not know Hebrew, but I connected to that heritage, to that ritual of honoring the past, to the awareness of the presence of God. Being there strengthened and broadened my own sense of what it means to be beloved by God. Such a gift.

The other scene is close to the end of the book. After the war ends and the concentration camps are liberated, French survivors are returned to Paris in the very same buses that earlier transported them to the camps that were the last stop before stock cars and trains took them further East.

They can see the eyes of the Parisians widen as they pass, the pedestrians and drivers pausing for a few seconds, wondering where these hairless beings in striped pajamas flooding into their city have come from. Like creatures from another world.

The survivors are taken to a hotel where they are questioned and received ID papers, a sum of money and vouchers for bus and trains tickets. Then they are allowed to rest there for a few days.

The deportees lie on the floor because they can’t sleep on the softness of mattresses anymore. Often, three or four of them need to lie together, pressed against one another, in order to fall asleep. They are ashamed of their shaved heads and the sores and abscesses covering their bodies. They know just how horrific the sight of them is.

Horrific, indeed. And we need to be reminded of the horror, for we are living in dangerous times.

In many ways this book doesn’t feel like a novel, but more like a nonfiction book. The writing is often almost matter of fact. This happened and then this happened and this person is related to this person etc. Don’t let that fool you, for the simplicity of the words, the factual tone, is perhaps the only way we can get through the reality of what seems too impossible to be true.

Anne Berest has said that writing the book is her “mitzvah,” which has come to mean a kind of good deed; something you do for your community. She has more than accomplished that.

An Invitation

What books have opened your eyes and your heart to something you wish you didn’t need to know? I would love to know.