After her mother and father were arrested and sent to Auschwitz, 13-year-old Denise Epstein and her five-year-old sister Elisabeth went on the run in France, hoping to avoid the same fate.
”I had to cover my nose when we were on trains,” says Epstein as we sit in a posh hotel in London. She covers her nose with her hand, just as she did 64 years ago. ”Because I have a — how shall I put this? — very characteristic nose. A Jewish nose.” The two girls were pursued around the country for the rest of the war.
Epstein’s mother was arrested on July 13 1942. ”There was a knock on the door. She knew why the police had come, but there were no tears. She just told me to look after my father. She said farewell to us, but I had no idea it was the final farewell, the last time I would see my mother.”
Then their father was arrested and taken away in October 1942. Then the police went to the village school to get Epstein too, but her teacher hid her behind her bed. The sisters’ governess removed the Jewish stars from their clothes and fled the village with the girls. Epstein took only a small suitcase, which she kept with her as they went into hiding for the next two years. They hid in cellars in and around Bordeaux and managed to survive until the end of the war.
”I remember I was distraught because I had to abandon my doll Bleuette in order to carry the suitcase.”
After liberation, the sisters fully expected to see their parents again. They would visit the Gare de l’Est in Paris daily and wait at the platform for trains carrying survivors from the concentration camps. Only a few years later did they learn that their parents were dead.
That is, I say to Epstein, an extraordinary story. ”It is anything but,” she tells me calmly. Epstein is a charming, articulate French grandmother — so French, in fact, that during the interview, she proves more than able to both smoke and talk me under the table.
”After the war, I met so many young Jewish people who had similar experiences. For me, life ended in 1942, and it was the same for many of them. Many Jewish children whose parents were killed in Auschwitz fell into amnesia. It was the only way they could make sense of what had happened, and also the absurdity of their survival.”
But it is what was in the suitcase that Epstein grabbed in those hurried moments in 1942 in a little Burgundian village called Issy l’Eveque, that makes her story stand out. That suitcase contained family photographs, diaries and a thick leather binder that had belonged to her mother. ”I knew the leather binder was important to my mother because she kept it close to herself all the time, but I didn’t know what it was she had written in it.”
At first Epstein thought it was her mother’s wartime diary. It turned out to be a novel that, since its publication last year in France, has been hailed as the French War and Peace. It has been translated into 30 languages and is now published in English (by Chatto & Windus).
Epstein’s mother, Irène Némirovsky, a Russian Jew who was already a well-known novelist in France before the war, wrote Suite Française in Issy l’Eveque, to which she had fled after the Germans occupied Paris. As the war was happening around her, she would go to the woods to write.
”At the time, paper and ink were very scarce. So she wrote the novel on very thin paper, almost like onion skins, in a very small hand. Words were little more than a millimetre high.”
Like War and Peace, Suite Française deals with a nation torn asunder by war. Tolstoy, though, had been writing about a war long finished — Napoleon’s 1812 Russian invasion. In 1939, Némirovsky attempted to write a war novel in much more difficult circumstances. She intended Suite Française to be a five-part novel chronicling World War II as it unfolded before her. ”It was, in a way, reportage, because she was writing about what she had just seen,” says Epstein.
But, even though she was a bestselling novelist whose books had been adapted into films, her position was hardly secure: Jewish writers were prohibited from publishing. Worse, Némirovsky had never become a French citizen and was known to be Russian, which raised fears that she might be a Bolshevik agitator. To cap it all, despite the fact that she and her daughters had converted to Catholicism early in 1939, it was known that she was Jewish.
The first book in the planned sequence of five, Storm in June, tells the stories of families and individuals during the summer of 1940, when half of France took to the road to flee the Nazis. The portrait of French people on the run, strafed by Stukas and often starving, is not straightforwardly sympathetic: she paints a picture of a people at each other’s throats and heaping ”layer upon layer of hatred” upon each other.
The second, Dolce, portrays a small village at the beginning of the Nazi occupation. It isn’t quite as bitter as the French film Le Corbeau (The Crow), by Henri-Georges Clouzot, which portrays an occupied French village teeming with vindictiveness; Némirovsky’s writing is much more restrained and forgiving than that. But the book has sent the French nation into a coruscating self-examination of its war record. Not only did the French and British armies collapse with alarming speed before the Nazi advance, but a significant minority of the French went on to collaborate with the Nazis and helped in the Holocaust.
Why are there no Jews in Suite Française? ”I get asked this a lot,” says Epstein. ”When she was writing, my mother didn’t know what the Nazis planned to do, so it would not have been clear to her that the fate of the Jews would be an important strand of the unfolding drama.”
But surely she knew that the German occupiers and the Vichy regime were anti-Semitic? ”Yes, but that’s not quite the same thing as the ‘final solution’, is it?”
Suite Française is only a fragment of the Tolstoyan epic its author envisaged. Némirovsky died in Auschwitz, aged 39. ”What you have in your hands,” says Epstein, ”is only two-fifths of what she planned to write. She had the idea of a symphony when she devised the architecture for the novel, with different tones and moods.”
Despite the echoes of Tolstoy, Epstein says that ”the writer she really admired was Turgenev. She modelled herself on him. Like Turgenev, she always wrote the most complete biographies and descriptions of characters, even if they were to appear in only two lines.”
Némirovsky was born in 1903 in Kiev, then part of an area known as Yiddishland, to which Russian Jews were confined. Her father was one of Russia’s richest bankers. During her adolescence, the Némirovskys lived in a huge house in St Petersburg and holidayed sumptuously in the Crimea and the French Riviera. The revolution changed all that: the Bolsheviks put a price on her father’s head, so the family fled, eventually settling in Paris. Once in the French capital, the Némirovskys assimilated quickly and resumed their lavish lifestyle.
”They really led the high life — balls, fashionable soirées, champagne dinners,” says Epstein. Némirovsky met her husband Mikhail (or Michel, as he was known in France), a Russian Jewish banker, at a ball. ”She loved dancing and would write in her journal how she would go from one ball to another, dancing through the night.”
But Némirovsky was also writing. At 26 she published her first novel, David Golder, which became a bestseller. She wrote nine more novels before war broke out. That world of material well-being fell apart after war began in 1939.
I ask Epstein what she remembers of her mother. ”She was always writing.” Does she think she had a presentiment of her fate, and so wrote more assiduously? ”No. It was her métier to write.”
During this time, Némirovsky started Suite Française, but also wrote a life of Chekhov, another novel and a number of short stories published under a pseudonym.
The big question is why it took so long for Epstein to publish the manuscript. ”For many years, I could not bear to read my mother’s words. There were too many memories I didn’t want to confront. I couldn’t bear to even open the suitcase.”
Finally, in 1975, she read it. ”The writing was so small that I needed a magnifying glass. It was only then that I realised it was a novel.”
Did she have a sense of how great it was? ”I did, but I thought I must be biased.” Only in 2004 was she ready to have it published. ”I also didn’t want people to think that her sufferings were greater than anybody else’s who died in the death camps. Because, more than a victim, she is a great writer with enormous talent.” — Â