Saturday, April 19, 2014
Lake Arrowhead, CA, USA
The ridge is always alive. This morning the oak leaves, the color of peaches and chestnuts, reflect the early sun—small curved hands opening to birdsong and bells. It is Easter week. I’ve just reread the prologue to Paula McLain’s captivating book, The Paris Wife, born again to words unfolding the Paris of the time between the great wars, describing the weight of despair felt everywhere, a place “full of ghosts and the walking wounded.” Yet also a place where “On any given night, you could see Picasso walking from Saint-Germain to his apartment in the rue des Grands Augustins, always exactly the same route and always looking quietly at everyone and everything. Nearly anyone might feel like a painter walking the streets of Paris then because the light brought it out in you, the shadows alongside the buildings, and the bridges which seemed to want to break your heart…”
Over ninety years later, Paris is not so different, nor the world. Such a lovely place to suffer. Loving, seeking, and undergoing the process of constructing a life wherever we might be. Breathing. I am not in Paris now, nor anywhere like it, but having been there, if you were one who walked the streets as an artist, means you keep it always, tucked safely close to your poet’s heart, drawing on the images and the memories of those exquisitely crowded streets.
It can be intimidating to write after that. How does one earn a credential that in essence joins your mean scratchings to the great ones’? Better to stay home, you sometimes think. Give up these grand ideas and dreams and do something practical.
So you do, something practical that is. But you never actually become practical. A cloud never goes unnoticed, nor a perfectly expressed thought, nor a moment of harmony. Well, you can, at least, keep a diary. Sometimes years go by in this way. Practically. But the inner search never stops, never quite gives up on you. Reading feeds your urge to write. A drive alone. The heartbreak in your child’s cry. Your divorce. Your mother dying. The hummingbird glimmering near your head, begging for nectar, as you drink your morning coffee.
Somehow, if you can steal some time to write it down, you know you will capture some of it, store it away in your poet’s heart right next to the spot where you keep Paris. So it is this morning, in Lake Arrowhead, California, on my daughter’s deck. My home here is no more. Soon I will steal away from these ridges, and the mighty oaks, and the pines. Away from many happy years spent teaching, raising children, and welcoming grandchildren into the world, going toward the once known, now foreign place of my childhood, toward a future day where I will sit at a desk near a river in Salem, Wisconsin, my husband by my side, being practical no more.
©Rachel “Lori” Pohlman, 2014
LakeArrowheadLadyWriter 
What I’m Reading
Tatiana De Rosnay’s Historical Fiction Novel, Sarah’s Key, A Review
Sarah’s Key tells the intertwined stories of two fictional inhabitants of Paris; Sarah, a ten-year-old girl caught in the terror of Nazi-occupied France, an innocent Jewish child desperate to protect her little brother, and Julia, the journalist destined to discover Sarah’s story sixty years later. Though Sarah and Julia are fictional characters, the situations of the story are sadly all too real.
Before reading Sarah’s Key, I hadn’t known of the Velodrome d’Hiver roundup, which was ordered by Nazis, and carried out by French police officers, but as with all events relating to this terrible time of human history, the story is by equal measure unimaginably catastrophic and yet characteristically illustrative of the horrors of the systematic application of the NAZI party’s stated objective to eradicate Jews in what they termed “A Final Solution to the Jewish Question” at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942.
The Velodrome d’Hiver roundup in Paris, France is one example of the implementation of that horrific policy.
Here is a brief summary of the real events:
“Beginning in the early hours of July 16 [1942], French police rounded up thousands of men, women, and children throughout Paris. By the end of the day, the police had taken 2,573 men, 5,165 women, and 3,625 children from their homes. The roundup continued the following day, but with a much smaller number of arrests.
Approximately 6,000 of those rounded up were immediately transported to Drancy, in the northern suburbs of Paris. Drancy was at that point a transit camp for Jews being deported from France. The rest of the arrestees were detained at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Winter Cycling Track), an indoor sporting arena in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement.
After five days, Jews incarcerated at the Vél d’Hiv were transferred to other transit camps outside Paris. At Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande, French police guarded these men, women, and children until transport to concentration camps and killing centers in the east. At the end of July, the remaining adults were separated from their children and deported to Auschwitz.
Over 3,000 children remained interned without their parents until they were deported, among adult strangers, to Auschwitz as well.
German authorities continued the deportations of Jews from French soil until August 1944.
In all, some 77,000 Jews living on French territory perished in concentration camps and killing centers—the overwhelming majority of them at Auschwitz.”
From: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Velodrome D’Hiver (Vel d’ Hiv) Roundup”. Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-velodrome-dhiver-vel-dhiv-roundup#july-2. Accessed on May 20, 2023.
De Rosnay’s novel expertly weaves the stories of her two heroines, as one suffers through the event and the other learns of it in a surprisingly intimate way many years later. This book reminds me of the importance of historical scholarship—true scholarship that doesn’t shy away from the painful realities of the past—and of the absolute necessity of bearing witness to the suffering of the innocent—as a way to honor them, of course, and also as a way to teach each new generation the lessons that seem so easy to forget, so fragile, and always under attack. We need to hear the stories. We cannot be allowed to forget.
Sarah’s Key is one of those books that takes us on an unforgettable journey, touches our hearts and souls, and joins us to the hearts and souls of others who were forced from this world before their natural times, and in terrible ways. It is both deeply dark and sweetly hopeful. A strange truth about literature, and part of its magic, is that you can enjoy it even while it is hurting you. Sarah’s Key is worth it.
Paris Photos by Lori Pohlman
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