Survival and separation in rustic France
April 23, 2015 10:51By Miranda Richmond Mouillot
Text Publishing, £12.99
As a 15-year-old, Miranda Richmond Mouillot was taken by her contrary, eccentric grandfather to visit a dilapidated property in rural France. Though she could not have known it then, it was to be the starting point on a decade-long journey back in time and into her family's complex, bleak history.
A Fifty-year Silence is Mouillot's memoir of researching her grandparents, Anna and Armand, polar-opposite personalities who somehow made it through the Holocaust as a unit and built a home together, only for their relationship to shatter irretrievably.
The book - moving, personal and engaging - is a tremendous accomplishment, and the story well deserves to see the light of day even though, as Anna complains, it makes "heroes of individuals who have experienced events… by chance."
Anna and Armand are fascinating protagonists - she a doctor before the war, with a warmth and feistiness that remains throughout her life; he a translator at the Nuremberg trials - and their passage through occupied France makes for compelling reading. This is both Holocaust testimony and love story, and Mouillot intersperses their escape from the Nazis with an attempt to uncover the truth behind their passionate, lifelong separation: "For Grandma… what was one more fate among all the ones she had resigned herself to never knowing".
But Mouillot does not accept this silence and has created a gripping tale full of the unbelievable, heart-stopping twists and turns that exist only in such true stories of survival against the odds. At times, it is impossibly sad; not least in the passages covering her grandfather's final years, haunted by the demons of Nuremberg.
Reflecting on her own American childhood, and her preoccupation with the Holocaust, Mouillot conveys the strangeness of being a third-generation survivor, forever linked to what happened and yet impossibly distanced from it. She learns that she was given three names because people "could only safely be traced by a second or third different name".
"I cannot let their story go," she writes. "I cannot let them disappear like this."
With this memoir, she has provided an important record of the past, and of two survivors out of the many, even as it serves as a bitter-sweet reminder that, of the remarkable stories from those years, many will never be told.
Jennifer Lipman is a freelance reviewer