If I invite you over for dinner with my family, be warned, it tends to go like this: we have wine, and then we start talking about the Holocaust. Most of the time my family has a sarcastic allergy to the serious, so when I try to warn friends, they rarely believe me. I grew up with only a vague sense that my paternal grandfather, who we all knew as George, was from some other place across Europe, somewhere cold and far away. Confused by our surname, when I was very young I would tell people he was German.
My dad soon corrected me: George was Polish. I was a happily self-absorbed child and only half-listened to his stories, which would meander between a childhood in Krakow, the RAF in Egypt, moving to the UK. Sometimes he spoke of Karolina, his mother and a poet who, he told us, had let herself be blown up in Warsaw rather than let the Nazis take her.
He died in his nineties, but not before my parents, aware time was running out, sat with him over a week or two at his home in Sussex and recorded all of his stories. At some point the tapes were lost in a house move. I had never made time to listen to them. My parents came to visit, and between eating patisserie and sweating up the endless flights of stairs to my apartment, we went to the Holocaust memorial.
There was our name: Wasserberg, Ignace. My dad stroked the letters on the black marble and went uncharacteristically quiet. Later, in a tiny bistro in Pigalle, we talked through the details, my Mum supplying things George had told her when they recorded the tapes. Ignace had been safe in Switzerland, but inexplicably travelled to France in , into the mouth of the tiger.
Perhaps to check on a property there, George had thought. He was arrested as a Jew, sent to Paris, then Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz. We sat together obsessing over the moment Ignace realised his catastrophic mistake.
