When Lilliane Came Home
Early in my childhood, our family had a visitor. I remember a fragment of that weekend. There was no event or tragedy. Vague and visceral, but it still resonates.
I was four or five years old when Lilliane came and left.
It was in the early 1960s, springtime, if memory serves, at the family home in which I grew up, in New Jersey. Lilliane and I played “camera” on the grass in front of our white wooden colonial, built in 1910. Black shutters, brick chimneys, stretched between the corner street lamp, quaintly fueled by gas and a flower garden my mother had planted in the sun, by a paintless wooden fence. I believe Lilliane was twelve years younger than my parents, which would give her a birthdate near 1935. This would place her age at about twenty-eight when we pretended to take photos of each other with our invisible Kodak Instamatics.
Born in Paris, her English was conversational, but the universal dialogue of camera shutter and giggles was the real language we spoke.
“Click, click, click!”
Black hair. Pale Skin. Brown eyes. A classic strand of pearls. Contagious smile. Very Parisian. All of this graces my memory from a time before I knew to treasure things, or how. I would not see Lilliane again for thirty years.
Though we think of her as our relative, the family tree doesn’t connect by blood. Lilliane Frangi is my father’s brother-in-law’s mother’s sister’s daughter. Or something. As Romanian Jews, her parents settled in Paris before Lilliane was born. Knowing nothing that came before, I Googled a timeline, which wasn’t very helpful. They may have fled after Romania became an independent Kingdom in 1881, or to escape the bloodshed of the peasant uprising of 1907. More probable, their leaving for Paris, for a better life, was a result of the debilitating mistreatment of Jews in Romania.
This is all speculative. I know very little with certainty about Lilliane, but I feel anchored to her by narrative heartstrings that I don’t entirely understand. Both my parents adored her. Having met in France in the early 1950s, the impression Lilliane left upon my mother and father braided them permanently with a warmth you can’t counterfeit.
Born in Paris, Lilliane and her sister (still small children), were sent to live with a Christian family on a farm in the French countryside. As with the rest of the Lilliane timeline, I don’t have a specific date, but sometime after the Nazis first marched down Avenue des Champs Elysees in June 1940. If forced to offer a guess, it seems likely that this unbearable decision was cemented by July of 1942, after witnessing La Grande Rafle, the two-day summer round-up of Jewish refugees living in Paris, including thousands of children. Cousins have written that the family escaped to Nice. According to my mother and father, Lilliane’s parents hid in Paris throughout the war.
Whatever the journey’s particular horrors, somehow they all survived.
In October 1994, my parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a lavish party in New York City. Whatever other family and friends attended, it was Lilliane’s presence that ignited the sparklers for me. I put Lilliane and Jacques (her longtime lover) up at the University Club, thanks to the generosity of my friend and club member, Elaine. By circumstance of my living in the city, I was able to spend additional time with them.
After a conversation-filled lunch the day before the party, the three of us sat in casual relaxation on a bench in the cobble-stone park by the Plaza Hotel. Curious to the point of being insensitive, I took advantage of Lilliane’s affection for me and asked her about surviving the years of the German Occupation. She said very little and spoke without emotion, while holding Jacques’s hand. All she would offer was that she, her sister, and her parents all returned to their apartment on Blvd de Strasbourg after the war. The flat had been emptied of all their belongings, with the exception of a single fruit bowl left resolute on a mantel.
And one other thing. A man was living in their home. In Lilliane’s words: “A Vichy policeman.” In other words, for six months the Frangi family shared their apartment with one of Pètain’s disciples.
When I talk to my sister about this, decades after my discussion with Lilliane, she questions the probability of the tenant having been Vichy. The Vichy Police were empowered in Southern France, not in Paris. After the war they were so hated by the French population for being Nazi conspirators, it is hard to believe any Vichy would be given an apartment in Paris. Not that the Parisians were terribly welcoming to returning Jews, either. My sister and I hotly debated the subject on multiple fronts (meaning I got emotional), including the possibility of my memory splintering the facts so many years after my conversations with Lilliane. In my defense, I come up with a number of scenarios where an out-of-place Vichy guard could end up in the vacant flat of a Jewish family in Paris. So much lay beyond reason or belief in recounting that era.
Stubborn or not, I stand by my memory of Lilliane’s account.
Lilliane and her family shared their home with a man whose job included rounding up Jews for six full months. Vichy Police may not have been the German SS, but they were more than complicit. They were collaborators: French Nazis.
What was the air between the Vichy squatter and the Frangi family? Did he remain until papers arrived proving the apartment was part of reparations owed to the Frangis? Did he stay because he wanted to? Were the girls frightened of him? Did the family treat him with kindness or contempt? Did they hate each other? Once he left, would they ever see him again?
Like so much else involving Lilliane, I don’t have all the answers. Instead, it’s staged in my mind, based on one sentence Lilliane said to me decades ago.
I imagine a young Parisian girl. She is not much older than I was when Lilliane first entered my world. What enters a child’s brain when targeted by enemies she cannot possibly gauge or fathom? I don’t wonder if she was frightened: I wonder just how terrified she was.
This girl does arrive safely back to Paris, only to find the enemy living in her own home.
All these musings, all the details, will pass unanswered once Lilliane is gone. But I won’t upset her by asking. My curiosity is no match for her peace at this late stage. I can only hope, for the sake of posterity, that she has relayed or otherwise documented this human trial, set during one of the most inhumane periods in recorded history.
As an adult, Lilliane worked for Lalique in Paris until she retired, living with her parents in their home on Blvd de Strasbourg. To this day, Lilliane still resides in the same family apartment in the 9th Arrondissement on the Right Bank, in view of the Sacre Coeur Basilica.
Few organized atrocities have touched my life directly. But ask me about Lilliane, now or in my future, and the impression will be the same. I’ll talk about charisma and adoration, indelible before I had the words. As warm as summer dawning after an unspeakable spring.
ANDREW SAREWITZ is an author and a winner of the First Prize from Stage to Screen New Playwrights series for Madame Andrèe.