Life is full of interesting coincidences. Ben Parket, the hero and author of the memoir book ‘The Courtyard’ written in collaboration with Alexa Morris, was born and lived until the age of 16 in a four-story plus an attic building, in the shape of the letter U, with a courtyard in its center. I was also born and grew up until the age of 17 in such a building, with 5 floors and a long courtyard in the shape of the letter U. The addresses of the two buildings are both at number 5 of the respective streets. Ben Parket (then Biniem Parkiet) lived at 5, Rue de Charonne, in Paris. I grew up in the center of Bucharest, on Lutherana Street number 5. Our destinies are separated by 20 years, a war and the survival of the Holocaust which is the central theme of Ben Parket’s memoir. What we share is the feeling of the courtyard as a formative space, as a paradise (at least for a while) of childhood, as a perimeter populated by people with whom over time friendships are established or romances are formed, who end up being your neighbors and, in extreme cases, on whom your life ends up depending. ‘The Courtyard’ is a book that gives a new meaning to the word ‘courtyard’, not so much as a topographical notion as that of an interior space of salvation. ‘The Courtyard’ is a story of survival, a testimony that was published in the ‘Holocaust Survivors Memoirs World War II’ series by Amsterdam Publishers. It is dedicated to the many and anonymous humans who, at the risk of their lives and freedom, helped and saved Jews during the Holocaust, and has as its motto a quote from the Bible: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’.
The Parkiet family (the vowel ‘i’ in the family name was lost in the transcriptions of names due to various migrations) had come to France from Poland after the First World War. The rebirth of the Polish nation at the crossroads of Western and Eastern Europe also meant a resurgence of nationalism and anti-Semitism, and France, with its population decimated after the First World War, had opened its doors to imigrants, as it had so many times throughout history, to the persecuted. The father was a furniture varnisher, a sought-after profession that would support the family for decades. Biniem, or Bernard as his French friends and neighbors called him, was the youngest of three brothers and the only one born in France. The parents had never managed to learn French well, Yiddish was spoken at home, but they were fairly well assimilated economically and socially, and proud to feel French and to educate their children as French. One of the first chapters of the book recounts a visit, in 1937, to the great World Exhibition organized that year on the immense esplanade between Trocadero Square and the Eiffel Tower. The six-year-old child gets lost in the crowd and is found, playing and being taken care by friendly policemen at the exhibition’s police station. Could they have guessed that just a few years later, from that esplanade, Hitler would admire occupied Paris, and that the sympathetic policemen of 1937 could be the same ones who, during the occupation, were accomplices of the Germans, carrying out raids in which they hunted down and arrested those whose only fault was being Jewish?
The courtyard is described in the book, according to the child’s memories, above all as a space for play, for discoveries, for the formation of friendships and even for the first love.
‘When I was a young boy not yet old enough to go to school, I liked nothing more than watching the courtyard’s artisans, especially my father, at work. The courtyard was a hive of activity, tradesmen buzzing in and out of the stairways, or doorways, and I loved being in the center of it, amazed by the industry whirling around me. And if the courtyard was a hive, the queen bee was our concierge. Known affectionately as La Pipelette [The Concierge], Madame Raymond was the unofficial matron of 5 rue de Charonne. Built like an armoire with dark, caterpillar brows, she lived on the ground floor of Stairway 1 with her husband and two grown children, René and Paulette.
There were 13 stairways to the various ateliers. They ran counterclockwise around the courtyard, with Stairway 1 at the northeast corner. We lived on the second floor of Stairway 1, two flights up a spiral staircase. While other stairways mostly led to commercial ateliers, Stairway 1 was the notable exception, with most of its units being apartments.’ (pag. 11)
Everything changes when the war breaks out. The child’s memories first include tense discussions between his parents and the previously unknown feeling of fear, of the incomprehensible fact that the parents can no longer protect their children, losing control over what is happening around. They are tormented by worry for the family left in Poland, now occupied by the Nazis, a family that would almost entirely perish in the horrors of the Holocaust. Then their lives begin to change with the occupation, the racial laws, the prohibitions and restrictions imposed on Jews and especially with the arrest of the father, who is a prisoner for several months in the infamous Drancy camp which was the last enprisonment station for Jews in France before the deportations to the death camps, escaping from there by a miracle. In 1942, the imminent danger reaches the doors of the building on Rue de Charonne. And then something extraordinary happens. The residents of the building, the French neighbors of the Polish Jewish immigrant family, hide them in an uninhabited apartment. A neighbor who works for the police warns the Parkiet family that they are on the lists of those who will be arrested and deported. Other neighbors will help the family with food for two years and will provide work for the father, so that he can continue to earn a living.
‘ Kind Madame Nicolas. Brave Madame Nicolas. Our upstairs neighbor, the one who used to help my pregnant mother carry groceries upstairs, was helping us again. With the simple action of slipping out of her office at the police station to warn us, she risked her life. Only a lucky few received such warnings. What she did was illegal in the eyes of the Vichy regime, and if she’d been caught she almost certainly would have been killed: yanked from her home and dragged down the street, her black dress flailing behind her, to be lined up against a wall with other “traitors.” A member of the police – maybe even someone with whom she worked every day – would have shot a bullet into her brain.’ (pag. 70)
‘Monsieur Roger didn’t know Yiddish, so he spoke to my parents in a sort of pidgin French that they could understand. To my brothers and me, he spoke a common French, as you would to a native, and my parents could not always follow the conversation. But there was no mistaking him when he loudly proclaimed, “Je suis un homme!” Even my mother understood him quite clearly and, behind his back, she gently rolled her eyes. Sometimes we pretended to be Monsieur Roger after he’d gone; Mama was often the most enthusiastic, making her voice low and thumping her own chest for emphasis as she strode around our small space.
We laughed a bit at Monsieur Roger’s expense, but we were immensely grateful for his visits and company. He took a significant risk because those who aided Jews, even if they were simply aware of their existence and failed to turn them in, became, in the eyes of the Germans, no better than Jews themselves. Had he been caught, Monsieur Roger would almost have certainly ended up in Drancy and perhaps Auschwitz. So there is no question that Monsieur Roger was doing us a great service by visiting each day. He came to see us because he cared about us and hated the Germans. But he also came for the wine.’ (pag. 93)
The book is a combination of narrative and historical prose, written with talent and carefully documented. Some of the episodes can be read as true pages of suspense literature. A German officer enters the yard, looking for something or someone, to the terror of the hidden Jews. It turns out that he is waiting for the mechanic who was going to fix something on his car. Several times, the ten-year-old boy leaves the house to buy food or, together with his protective neighbors, for a short escapist interlude at the movies or at a picnic on the bank of a river. The risks are immense, but so is the longing for freedom and the need to breathe fresh air. When a collaborationist neighbor, a militiaman of the Vichy regime, moves into the building, the Resistance is alerted and ‘takes care of him’. The neighbor disappears and no one asks questions. The documentary insertions are precise, made from the perspective of the mature man who will become Ben Parker. They provide important information to understand the context of the memoirs. Coming to age is fast and tough. The narrator’s childhood and his siblings’ adolescence are stolen forever.
‘We sang this song about yearning for a lost childhood on many subsequent Sundays. I can’t speak to what Severin or Henri were thinking as they sang, but I know that, at ten years old, I did not understand its meaning. It did not resonate that I was experiencing the loss of my own childhood, that I would never be able to indulge in the pleasurable if melancholy nostalgia of Monsieur Kreisman’s song. My brothers, too, were missing out on life experiences that would have been happy memories in later years. Severin, 19, and Henri, 17, were young men who should have been entering the world and planning a life beyond the lycée, courting girls in the neighborhood. They should have been sneaking chaste kisses in the dark of a movie theater, emerging love-dazed with tousled hair. Or been out carousing with friends on Saturday nights, dancing until the sky turned gray with dawn, stumbling home with wine-stained lips. Instead, they were
leading diminished lives in a cramped warehouse. My brothers had dreamed of adventure, of travel, and just when their world should have been expanding, it contracted. Our carefree years, and those of my brothers, were being stolen. Gone forever.’ (pag. 113)
A few moving pages describe the days of the Liberation. The courtyard had been forbidden for two years to those who had lived day and night, hour by hour, under the threat of arrest, deportation, death. The very regaining of the right to step into familiar space is a victory.
‘Back in the courtyard we were surrounded by neighbors we’d not seen or spoken to in years. Men clapped each other on the back and women, who’d previously passed each other on the stairs without so much as a greeting, now embraced each other like they were long lost relatives, reluctant to let go. The day workers put down their tools in silent agreement: Labor was done for the day. All of these familiar faces, beaming with joy – the mechanic took a large swig of wine, then handed the bottle to the Italian painter. Even Monsieur Herbin seemed delighted, his face red from happiness, or maybe champagne. Had they known we were in hiding? Were they surprised to see us? I don’t actually know. But the moment was larger than us, larger than any one person or family, and the courtyard erupted into a celebration that included us. Madame Raymond enveloped my mother in a hug, almost swallowing her, then released her and disappeared into her apartment, returning with chairs, and wine. Other women from the courtyard, including Madame Nicolas – who had saved us and whom we had not seen since the day she warned us to leave our apartment – brought out chairs, dragging them over the bumpy cobblestones to form a circle. The women sat together, a ring of black dresses, laughing and crying. I stood off to the side and watched them. A brown tabby with a long scar on its nose wandered into the circle, winding itself around the legs of anyone who’d tolerate it. The cat meowed incessantly for milk, and eventually, Madame Raymond’s daughter, Paulette, got a saucer and placed it on the ground; today was a day for generosity. Yes, the courtyard took care of its own.’ (pag. 156)
The years after the war were not easy for the Parkiet family. They returned to their apartment, but it had been completely ransacked. They found only a small part of their family, those who had been refugees in Belgium, but learned that all those who remained in Poland had perished in the Holocaust. The feeling that a large part of those they lived among had collaborated with the occupiers and had a part in their suffering and that of all the Jews in France constantly followed them. A new war, the one in Indochina, threatened France and the young people of the family were of the age when they could be called up to arms. All of this contributed to the family’s decision to emigrate to Israel. There too, accommodation was not easy, the Hebrew language was equally difficult for the parents, but the three brothers adapted much more easily. Bimen went to study in America, where he met his future wife, and the two, after an attempt to live together in Israel, decided to stay in America. Becoming Ben Parket, building a family and a beautiful career as an architect, he will never forget the Courtyard. Having reached the age of memories, he will evoke his experiences in this book.
Testimonies about survival in the Holocaust have a common model and reference and comparisons are difficult to avoid. ‘The Courtyard’ tells the true history of a family whose fate could easily have been similar to that of Anne Frank’s family. The difference, that is, survival, was due to chance, but especially to the people to whom this book is dedicated.
‘Righteous Among the Nations is an honorific used to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jewish people. Recipients of this recognition are awarded a medal and their names are added to the Wall of Honor, which is actually a series of stone walls nestled among the carob trees in the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem. If I could, I would have all our neighbors listed on the Wall of Honor. They were each crucial to keeping us safe and alive. At the very least, Monsieur Thibou and Madame Nicolas, who risked the most, should be counted as righteous. Their names should be inscribed on the wall. These kind, brave people weren’t family. They weren’t even friends, not by most people’s definition.We had little in common. We didn’t share a religion or heritage. In the case of my parents, we barely spoke the same language. Taught to be respectful of adults, I never even knew their first names. We never had a meal together,
and we didn’t visit each other’s homes. They were our neighbors. And, for
them, that was enough.’ (pag. 188)
To these anonymous people Ben Parket and Alexa Morris have built a monument in words. ‘The Courtyard’ is a document and a tribute to these anonymous Righteous Among Nations. Those of Ben Parket’s generation are becoming fewer and fewer, but their stories stand as proof that humanity can defeat Evil, but also as a warning to the generations that followed them and those to come.
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