The Little One

In When Memory Comes, Saul Friedländer, an Israeli historian and political scientist, intersperses a diary of life in present-day Israel with the real core of his book: an account of his childhood as a Jewish orphan in occupied France —much of it spent in a French Catholic school which hides his identity to save his life. His story is riddled with paradoxes, with questions that have no answers, and perhaps for that reason has a unique contemporaneity among recent Holocaust books. There are five name-changes (Pavel, Paul, Paul-Henri, Shaul, Saul), which contribute to a lifelong alienation and rootlessness; an intense Catholic education coupled with a dim awareness that he had been Jewish; the murder of his parents in Auschwitz, unknown to him (he felt only abandonment and confusion); and a feeling of strangeness among traditional Jews, owing to his assimilated family’s having observed no Jewish customs whatsoever. Early in the book he is placed in a Jewish boarding school in France. He is attacked by the other students for being “different”:

I was a non-Jew, a goy. … I was tied to a tree and beaten. … A sunny day, flowerbeds, mown lawns. Beaten by Jewish children because they thought I was different from them. So I belonged nowhere. … I screamed in terror and knocked my head against the tree trunk.

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David Evanier

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In When Memory Comes, Saul Friedländer, an Israeli historian and political scientist, intersperses a diary of life in present-day Israel with the real core of his book: an account of his childhood as a Jewish orphan in occupied France —much of it spent in a French Catholic school which hides his identity to save his life. His story is riddled with paradoxes, with questions that have no answers, and perhaps for that reason has a unique contemporaneity among recent Holocaust books. There are five name-changes (Pavel, Paul, Paul-Henri, Shaul, Saul), which contribute to a lifelong alienation and rootlessness; an intense Catholic education coupled with a dim awareness that he had been Jewish; the murder of his parents in Auschwitz, unknown to him (he felt only abandonment and confusion); and a feeling of strangeness among traditional Jews, owing to his assimilated family’s having observed no Jewish customs whatsoever. Early in the book he is placed in a Jewish boarding school in France. He is attacked by the other students for being “different”:

I was a non-Jew, a goy. … I was tied to a tree and beaten. … A sunny day, flowerbeds, mown lawns. Beaten by Jewish children because they thought I was different from them. So I belonged nowhere. … I screamed in terror and knocked my head against the tree trunk.