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“… and the dead / Are but as pictures”
In a basement room, discreetly lit, in the Memorial du Martyr juif inconnu (Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr) in Paris, I am surrounded by photographs of children.1 Most of them were born in the decade of the 1930s. All were French. All were Jewish. All were seized in the infamous Vel'd'Hiv' roundup by the Nazis in mid-July of 1942 and deported later that summer, and all were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Every single child.
I look around me. Each face, body, and expression is unique. Every child carefully dressed for his or her portrait photograph. Some smile coyly; others seem serious. A tough-looking fellow folds his arms across his chest and glares daringly out at the world; his arrogance reminds me of that Bronzino portrait of a young Florentine nobleman of the early cinquecento I revisited just weeks ago at the Frick Collection in New York. A proud mother offers her two smartly dressed sons to the camera as if, like the ancient Roman matron Cornelia, she wants to say of them: “Look! These are my jewels.” A small curly-haired girl in white with patent-leather shoes brings back snapshots of my younger sister Connie, whose blond ringlets were once the object of my intensest envy. Planted on a bench too high for her so that her fat legs dangle, her miniature body is balanced by a ceramic pot of flowers no larger than she. Near her, on the wall to the left, a chubby fellow perches perilously on a table covered with a checkered cloth, his fuzzy white toy lamb resting lopsided in his arms. He looks a bit belligerent, as though he might want more than anything else to get down and run around. I can almost tell the lamb was handed to him in exasperation to keep him still.