Uncounted Victim

Foreword

These are the memoirs as told to me by my mother. I have attempted to tell her story as accurately as she presented them to me, piecing together her own written journals, along with various anecdotes that supplemented and peppered stories over my lifetime, without embellishing by interposing my own interpretations of events. This is not a suspense novel, although certainly the events recounted herein were suspenseful to those who experienced them. They certainly sounded suspenseful to me as I heard and read them. So as to avert embarrassment to anyone reading these words, I have on occasion chosen to use pseudonyms, while trying to keep the gist of the story true to form.

My mother was French, and occasionally some French words and phrases appear throughout the text. I have included translations wherever appropriate. She also lived and studied in Italy before moving to Israel, and eventually to the United States. Again, where words and phrases are included in those languages, and I have included translations to the best of my ability.

I wish I could bid the reader enjoy the story; but it is admittedly too terrible to be enjoyed. My heart aches for my mother – and for so many others who have suffered similar experiences, and worse.

Yael Eylat-Tanaka

Tampa 2016

Prologue

This is not an autobiography. Every word written here is as truthful as my memories can be, filtered through the passage of time and my experiences. Yet much has been omitted out of respect to those no longer with us who cannot correct whatever events can be seen only from their own point of view. Other situations have been left out to avoid any embarrassment to those who are still among us.

The purpose of these pages is to record salient portions of my life that I never had the opportunity to describe fully. I am thinking in particular about my daughter whom I did not wish to tire with stories of events that happened before she was born or while she was growing up. Then, more pressing life problems came to the fore, and it seemed that these reminiscences always took a back seat to more immediate concerns. Yet our past is forever imprinted in my memory, at times in convoluted and distorted schemes, to be sure, but nevertheless, our memories are the fabric of what makes us who we are, permeating every cell of our being. I have endeavored to always look ahead to a brighter future rather than dwell on the past, and yet the past has always been an inescapable part of who I had become. We cannot change the events themselves; at best, we can only reframe our outlook and understanding of those events. I have not always been successful.

Chapter 1

Childhood

I know very little of my grandparents. I have only vague memories of the maternal side of the family, but have a much more vivid memory of my paternal grandmother, Memé, who was a very strong presence in our family. My father was deeply attached to her. She was the matriarch in the family, eclipsing my own mother to the latter’s deep frustration. When my own daughter was kidnapped by her father, Memé told me that she, herself, had been divorced from her first unhappy marriage.

My family hailed from Turkey, and my memories of childhood stories include the life of my predecessors and their culture. My father told the story of my grandfather bringing Sultan Hamid, to whom he had been counselor, a beautiful parrot that he had caught on his land, or of returning from the vineyards after the grape harvest, with the children perched atop donkeys, and as they passed the cemetery at dusk, the adults would tell them stories of the dead and the children would blanch in terror at what they imagined what going on.

Although I didn’t know my grandfather, he was a very religious Jew, and as such observed the tradition of never shaving his beard. If a single hair fell from it, he would conserve it in his prayer book. He took a new wife, my grandmother Memé, after she divorced her first abusive husband and had abandoned her first born son. He, himself, had grown children who were older than she, who persecuted her, but he, himself, treated her with love and respect.

These flimsy memories are all I have of my origins. Tiny threads of my childhood, perhaps peppered with some photographs and anecdotes from other members of my family.

My mother was also Turkish. From her stories of her youth in Izmir, she and her family lived in the Greek and Armenian Quarter of Izmir. My grandfather owned a china and glass shop and sent his children to a missionary school headed by Scottish Protestant missionaries. I remember how my mother glowed when she sang the hymns she had learned at school and spoke of Mr. Murray, the principal, who used to call for her to come and stand in the front row so that he could better hear her singing. Of course, those were religious hymns, and the name of Jesus was frequently heard in the house, which displeased my father deeply.

Living among the Greeks and Armenians, my mother learned to speak those languages and sing their songs, which thrilled me as a little girl. I still remember some of them, even though I never learned their meaning. Those songs sounded very romantic to me, and I would often ask my mother to teach me Greek. Since she attended a Scottish missionary school, all her schooling was held in English and she remained fluent in this language her entire life.

Naturally, she also spoke fluent Turkish. When the grownups at home did not want the children to understand something, they would switch to Turkish when speaking among themselves, until the children began to understand the gist of their conversations.

As a young woman, my mother’s best friend in Izmir was Allegra Romano. The two did everything together. I found some photographs of the two with some inscriptions on the back from my mother to Allegra written in French. My mother and her family emigrated to France after World War I, as did her friend, Allegra, and the two remained friends, eventually marrying two brothers, my father and my uncle, Raphael. However, because my father was so much in love with my mother and my uncle, Raphael was rather a rake, my aunt Allegra became deeply jealous and resentful of my mother, and their friendship floundered. I believe that my mother still loved her and missed her deeply in spite of the deterioration of their relationship.

When my mother and her family were still living in Izmir during the Great War, they witnessed the terrible massacres of the Greek and Armenian communities by the Turks, which event has since been called genocide. This frightened them so much that my mother suffered for a long time with stomach ulcers and nightmares. The savagery of the Turks toward the Greeks and Armenians living in Turkey caused a tremendous exodus of the Jewish population who had lived there since their expulsion from Spain in 1492 by Isabel of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon at the behest of the Inquisition. The Jewish community in Turkey realized that the previous five centuries of more or less tranquil life in Turkey had come to an end, and all those who had the means emigrated. Many fled to the Americas. My extended family emigrated to France, and settled in Lyon.

My mother and her family arrived in France about 1920, and went to live with her married brother, Vidal, in Lyon. My uncle was quite friendly with two young men, Henri and Raphael, who had also emigrated to France from Turkey around the same time as he had. My uncle liked one of the brothers, Henri, and decided to introduce him to his sister, and so invited him to his home. My mother told me later that she was doing some needlework in the living room, and my father started teasing her and playing with her threads. That was their introduction. They courted and married shortly afterward.

Since they had been newcomers to France, the newlyweds were of meager means, so they began their married life in the same apartment that the two brothers shared with their mother. My mother’s best friend, Allegra, was eventually introduced to Henri’s brother, Raphael, when she visited my mother after her marriage, and eventually they married too. They also lived in the same apartment with their mother, my grandmother, Memé, who had a veritable court over which to rule. Imagine: Two sons who both married and both chose to share a single apartment. From what I understand, life was not always very easy for the two young couples, particularly because my grandmother favored Raphael who was much less serious than his brother. I remember him always joking and laughing. He also played around a lot. From the stories I heard as a child, he frequently did not come home in the evenings, to the great chagrin of his bride. My father, by contrast, was very much in love with my mother, and was home every evening, being always very affectionate with her. She became pregnant with my oldest brother almost immediately.

The two young couples lived with their mother in the same apartment. Slowly, however, my mother’s friendship with Allegra began to deteriorate and frictions developed. Compounding the tensions, my grandmother favored Raphael and his jovial and irresponsible manner, and harbored a corresponding antipathy toward my mother. That my mother was pregnant and Allegra was not only added to Allegra’s resentment.

Fortunately, my mother’s first born was a boy, my brother, René, whose Jewish name was Salomon, and everyone started calling him Momon, and later, simply Momo. Shortly afterward, my mother became pregnant again, this time with me. By then, Allegra had become pregnant. The two young brides had to contend with their mother-in-law who decreed that my mother should not have a second baby so soon after the first. From the family stories I heard, I understand that Memé was quite unpleasant to my mother during her second pregnancy with me, while being very attentive toward Allegra who was carrying her favorite son’s child. It may be that my grandmother’s dislike of me began even before I was born, and diminished only when she became senile. I was later told by my grandfather that Memé did not visit my mother in the hospital when I was born, and when I was brought home, she never even approached my crib to look at her new granddaughter.

When I was five or six, my mother told us that I was born at Hotel-Dieu Hospital in Lyon. As all small children, my two brothers and I were quite curious and excited to learn about our own beginnings. This was the kind of rare adult conversation destined to keep us quiet and mesmerized at least for a few minutes. Our mother went on telling her young audience that this hospital was run by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, and that one of the sisters shook her in her bed, urging her to “Wake up, my chubby one, you have a beautiful baby girl.” I felt extremely proud to have been characterized as a beautiful baby girl, not realizing at that time that no nurse would call a newborn beautiful. While basking in that gratifying emotion, I vaguely wondered whether babies were born during the night when their mothers slept, and why would my mother sleep in a hospital? These questions were never answered to my satisfaction.

On and off while still very young, I garnered some snippets of information about my early childhood. Maman always used to say that I had been a very easy baby who could quietly play with a toy for hours. She mentioned that because of my quietness, she once forgot a medicated plaster she had applied to my back when I was ill, and when she finally remembered and ran to my crib, my back was all swollen and red hot; yet I had not cried to alert her. Of course, I did not remember the incident. By contrast, the rest of my childhood was anything but quiet.

The seeds of self-esteem and self-worth are sown early. I wonder now if that incident had infused in me the concept that I was not worth remembering, even by my own mother …

When I was about three, my family moved to Valence, about one hundred kilometers south of Lyon, a medieval city on the river Rhône, where two of my uncles had previously settled. That is where I grew up, sandwiched between my two brothers, René, a year and a half older, and Jacques, two years younger. My paternal grandmother, Memé, lived with us, and occasionally, my paternal grandfather would stay with us for extended visits. He was extremely affectionate with us three children. He was a religious Jew, and I can still see him in my mind’s eye praying every morning turned toward Jerusalem, his head covered with his tallith and tefillim on his left arm. We are Sephardic Jews, and as such, the Jewish laws and way of life were observed at home, particularly by my mother and grandmother. No work was done on Shabbat or during the Holy Days. This is curious, considering my parents’ education and exposure at a young age to Christian missionaries.

I recall how Maman used to light the candles on on the mantle of the fireplace in her bedroom on Shabbat eve. For the Holy Days, she would cover the beds with lace bedspreads and pillows. To this day, the scent of hyacinths, carnations and mimosa transports me over the years to our apartment at Passover time when Maman used to decorate the rooms with these flowers and the precious handmade lace bedspread made by my uncle’s mother-in-law.

I had been introduced to that lacework on a trip to Lyon one day during childhood. My mother took the three of us to stay a while with her brother, and when my mother saw the intricate lacework done by his mother-in-law, she ordered a bedspread especially for her. She received it sometime later, and used it only on the High Holy Days. I later learned that it was because the poor woman and her son had seen their entire families deported by the Germans to Drancy, a concentration camp south of Paris, and no one ever heard any more about them. My poor aunt must have had a broken heart thinking about the agonizing death of her poor mother and father, her many brothers, and then, in 1944, the death of her own son at 17 in a bombardment as he was saving people in a shelter. My aunt’s son was later decorated by their town posthumously, but I am sure she would have rather had her son than the medal. How many times did I thank God that my own parents died in their beds and not in the horrors of the Holocaust …

Many years later, when my brother, René, went to Israel to visit our parents, my mother gave that gorgeous lace bedspread to his wife as a gift, who later gave it to me as a remembrance of my mother.

****

It is Hannukah 1991. I was lighting the candles this evening when a childhood memory suddenly emerged. It is again Hannukah, this time before World War II, and we are all gathered in our kitchen in Bourg-les-Valence around the hannukiah. I must have been around nine or ten years old. We had a visitor with the family, a Mr. Yerushalmi, probably a friend of my parents, but I had never met him before. That evening, it was my turn to light the hannukiah, as we three children took turns each evening. As I was about to light the first candle and we were starting to say the blessing, Mr. Yerushalmi suddenly stopped everything with an anguished appeal to my parents: “Certainly, the girl is not going to light the hannukiah; she might be impure!” I was so ignorant of adult things that beside the humiliation of being called “impure” with its dirty connotation, particularly in public and in the presence of my father and brothers, that I did not understand what our guest meant. Being his hosts, my parents asked me to pass the taper to one of my brothers, and I was left to wonder what had been my sin, if any. I do not recall having had any explanation later, but the incident reinforced in me a feeling of ostracism I had always felt, since I was constantly reminded that I, being a girl, could not do what my brothers were allowed to do.

I did eventually understand what our guest meant. He must have been one of the very Orthodox Jews who look upon women as “impure vessels.” Many years later, in Israel, when my father and brother, Jacques, were so immersed in their study of Buddhism and used to read aloud to each other from their books, I happened to pass by the room where they sat and heard of them reading, “…car la femme est impure …” (…because woman is impure). I ran out of the room shocked that even with my mother, my daughter and myself in the house, they did not hesitate to read such insulting material aloud. Naturally, such experience would not endear the study of this philosophy to me, much as my father encouraged me to.

We were taught very little about Judaism, yet certain traditions were deeply ingrained in our family. We knew we were Jews, and when we occasionally returned home from school crying that children had called us filthy Jew, our father would tell us that we should be proud to be Jews. In spite of his assertion, we felt different from the other children, and sometimes disliked by them. Our festivals were not those of our friends, and we did not go to church or catechism as they did, and our day of rest was Saturday instead of Sunday.

At Passover, after the house had been given a thorough cleaning of all traces of leavened foodstuff, we ate matzoh for eight days. The first night was always devoted to the Seder with the long Haggadah recounting the deliverance of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt read by my father.

At the time, particularly for my family with its emphasis on tradition, there was no question that I would celebrate my Bat Mitzvah. I was not even aware that such a ceremony was conducted for young girls in other countries, but my brother, René, started studying for his Bar Mitzvah that would mark his entry into manhood and the Jewish community when he reached the age of 13. I loved him very much and felt very close to him, and I aped everything he did. Listening to him memorize his lessons about Maimonides’ Thirteen Articles of Faith, I learned them too and the first lines of one prayer in particular are still clear in my mind: “Oui, je promets du fonds de mon âme de te rester fidèle, o, mon père et mon dieu …” (Yes, I promise from the depth of my soul to stay faithful to you, oh, my father and my God …)

We fasted on Yom Kippur, the children as long as we could last, and when the goodies prepared for us on the kitchen table tempted us beyond control, we broke the fast, sneaking rechicas and the delicious trovados, the traditional cookies dipped in honey that our grandmother had baked for the breaking of the fast.

That was more or less the extent of our religious upbringing. Maman and Memé taught us what they had been taught, but our father preferred that we learn in a more enlightened way. He did not believe that all traditions were worth living by. Today, his outlook would have been considered that of a reform Jew, allowing his mind to question and to interpret the Scriptures more intellectually. As a result, my father was less orthodox in his understanding of his own Jewish faith than either my mother or grandmother, and rather than seeing his children taught religion in what he viewed as a narrow way, he decreed that no religion at all was to be imparted to us. The unforeseen consequences of that decision would be revealed in the not too distant future with a tragedy that would rock our family.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

There were so few Jews in Valence before World War II that there was no temple or synagogue in the city. One year, however, my parents decided to conduct services in our apartment during the High Holy Days. Since a quorum of ten men is necessary to conduct the prayers, barely that number of Jewish men was found in Valence and invited to our home. My parents moved most of the furniture out of the dining room and covered the armoire with a white sheet. A Torah had been brought in from one of the temples in Lyon and placed in that makeshift Ark. The women sat in the other rooms and looked on from the doorways as the men prayed in the “sanctuary.” I vaguely remember an incident during those Holy Days when one of the men sat in the sanctuary during services and crossed his legs, putting one foot atop the opposite knee. This created quite a stir among the other men who reproached him for his lack of respect in this “holy” place. I mention this as an instance of how sacred Judaism was to my family in spite of my father’s modern attitude and edict that the children not be given any particular religious education.

That year, since we were going to have a “temple” in our home, along with many guests, my mother had my aunt, Allegra, sew a new silk dress for me. It was light blue and the skirt finely pleated. The fittings at my aunt’s house and my joy at having to wear such a delightful new dress during the Holy Days knew no bounds! Sadly, I had disobeyed my parents or gotten into some mischief the week before the festival, and I was punished where it really hurt: my vanity. I was forbidden to wear my new dress which hung ready and gorgeous for all to see on the hanger, but not on me! And I never did wear it, for I suddenly outgrew it and the dress became much too small. This disappointment marked me quite deeply, for I realized that I must have been not only a handful for my parents, but certainly quite vain. I can still hear my mother’s friends commenting what a beautiful little girl she had, and Maman trying to curb what evidently had gone to my head. My best friend had a mirror in which I admired my long curls, to my father’s despair, to the point that he vowed to cut off all my hair while I slept if I did not stop gazing into that mirror! I cannot believe that he meant it, even though I believed him then.

I never did stop looking at myself in the mirror.

When we were still very small, Maman took the three of us to Lyon to stay with her brother’s family. They lived in the old picturesque part of Lyon, Place St. Jean, and I still have a few disconnected memories of those days, feeding the pigeons on Place des Terreaux, or sitting on the potty in one of the bedrooms. One Saturday morning, when leaving the Temple du Quai Tilsitt, Maman stopped to talk with a gentleman of her acquaintance on the steps of the temple, and I jumped and hugged and kissed him because he said something nice to me. I was sternly reminded that little girls do not hug and kiss strange gentlemen. I already was impulsive, but I never could resist a smile and kindness. Many years later, Maman told me that she had temporarily left my father when she took us to Lyon because her mother-in-law, Memé, was making her life miserable and my father seemed more attentive to his mother than to her. He wrote her some love letters, begging her to return and telling her how empty the house felt without her and the children. He missed hearing her sing, he wrote, and he loved her. We were already back at home and many years had passed when she showed me those letters.