2024-09-06 14:29:11
With the publication of his book The beam of the living, Catherine Zittoun, a child psychiatrist, takes us on a journey through the folds of history and opens a window on life in insane asylums during the Occupation. As long as Jewish patients were kept hospitalized, they remained safe from arrest and deportation.
Can you shed some light on the fate of Jewish patients interned in the psychiatric hospital during the Occupation?
Catherine Zittoun : We are more or less familiar with the terrible fate that befell psychiatric patients during the Occupation. 45,000 to 50,000 mentally ill people died of hunger, deprivation, cold, and lack of care, except in a few places. Thus in Saint-Alban in Lozère, led by Lucien Bonnafé and François Tosquelles, people organized themselves, formed a community – these were the beginnings of institutional psychotherapy – and patients escaped drastic rationing by growing vegetable gardens and generating their own food resources.
But very little is known about the fate reserved for Jewish inmates. This part of the history of the occupation and the Holocaust deserves to be highlighted. Patients kept in confinement during the Occupation were saved from deportation, while Jewish patients declared recovered and leaving the psychiatric hospital were deported.
Hospital doctors were asked by the Paris Police Prefecture to keep it informed of Jewish patients who were interned or leaving the hospital; these patients were then invited by the doctors to report to the Prefecture to “regularize their foreign status”. Archive documents reveal the rest. Thus, patient OC, who came from the Drancy camp, was reinstated there after 14 months of internment at Saint-Anne. He was deported 5 days later to Auschwitz. Or Mrs. S., who left on May 31, 1942 after 3 months of internment at Sainte-Anne, was part of convoy No. 37 on September 25 to Auschwitz.
On the contrary, the patient Fanny P., interned on August 6, 1942 for a delusional state with themes of persecution, was kept hospitalized until 1944. In 1943, the doctor certified that she “is in a delusional state which, at present, contraindicates his conduct at the police station as well as his questioning by the police services.”. This stay in hospital undoubtedly saved her from deportation. Another exemplary case is that of Golda K., who was decompensating a psychiatric disorder when her husband and son were taken away by the police. At the initial examination in May 1943, Georges Heuyer, head physician of the Psychiatric Infirmary of the Police Prefecture, specified that her condition justified placement for “melancholy… sadness, asthenia, suicidal thoughts”. When he entered the hospital, the doctor noted that “her husband and eldest son are currently in the Drancy camp”. In the months that followed, we learned that she “knits, works at sewing, peels, sorts beans, mends stockings”She left the hospital on January 6, 1945, the only survivor of her family. It was to the extension of her internment, during which she quickly improved, that she owed her salvation.
Thus, as long as they were kept hospitalized, Jews were safe from arrest and deportation. But they were not spared from measures aimed at dispossessing them of their material goods. Intended to register the interned patients of the Jewish faith, a pre-filled form was sent to the provisional administrator of the property of the insane. The protective provisions of property provided for by the Law on the Insane were then diverted or even violated.
Your book is the story of Sophie’s relentless investigation after her mother’s death to reconnect with her origins and share it with her daughter Alice. A story of secrets, silence and transgenerational trauma?
Catherine Zittoun : The Beam of the Living intersects two paths, that of Aimée and that of Max. Both Jewish children hidden during the war, Aimée and Max each try in their own way to overcome this past. Reconstructing his history late in life, Max builds a genealogy with difficulty. His mother broke off ties with him when she entrusted him to the state to save him from the Shoah. Traumatized by the war, she was unable to reconnect with her son afterwards.
Until the threshold of her life, Aimée keeps the secret of her origins. On her deathbed, she reveals to her daughter Sophie that, contrary to what she told her, her grandmother Claire did not die in deportation. And Aimée dies, leaving Sophie alone to face this truth, like a suddenly opened chasm. Sophie launches into a quasi-police investigation on the traces of this buried past. She leads this research as much for herself as for her daughter Alice to whom she will later pass on what she has reconstructed of the family history. Because, she says, she must offer her daughter a sufficiently solid ground on which Alice can move forward and launch herself towards her future.
To know where you are going, you have to remember where you come from, say the elders. So, when raising a child, it is important to pass on to them the history of their ancestors, as it is reconstructed in each generation. But it is not always easy. We know that many Holocaust survivors kept quiet. Those who tried to talk about it were made to understand that silence was preferable. In France, this past was intolerable for everyone and risked opening the cracks in collaboration. For more personal reasons (survivor guilt, shame, psychotrauma, denial, etc.) many Holocaust survivors could not talk about it, or only very late. In all cases, it is something that remains with them until the end. Fewer are those who talk about it. I remember Jules Fainzang with whom I am making this pilgrimage to Auschwitz Birkenau. A Holocaust survivor, Jules accompanied trips to these sites three times a year and gave testimony. The whole trip from Krakow to Auschwitz, this small, beautiful, elderly gentleman, stood on the bus, talking loudly into the microphone and recounting the cattle car, getting off the train, the screams of the Germans, the barking of the dogs, and as he recounted, he began to scream; clearly he was being transported to the scene of the crime.
Other survivors, such as Shelomo Selinger [1]sculptor, have sublimated this trauma through their art. Shelomo’s sculptures in bronze, wood or granite are representations of love and motherhood. Some of Shelomo’s drawings carry the memory of the death marches and the atrocities of the Shoah.
Whether it is kept secret, abreacted, overcome or sublimated, this trauma remains forever inscribed in the memory of the survivors, their children but also in the family unconscious and can thus affect, through games of identification and/or projection, the following generations. I met a little girl on a few occasions who, clearly, had symptoms falling within the autistic spectrum (great rigidity of thought, difficulty in managing her emotions, disorders of social interactions, especially within the family, feeling of injustice and jealousy pushed to the extreme). Relations were particularly difficult with her father who complained of her verbal and physical violence and who spoke of her as a quasi monster who persecuted him. The little girl quickly no longer wanted to come to the consultation but I followed her two parents for a long time and I am still her father, the mother having declared that the little girl who has become a teenager is doing better. During the face-to-face consultations, her father revealed that her maternal great-grandfather, deported, had died at Auschwitz. As for his mother, she learned of her Jewish origins very late. For him, these revelations at the age of 18 acted as a trauma. And it appears that his daughter is for her father a surface of projections of deadly fantasies.
These transgenerational transmissions of trauma are not limited to the Holocaust. Many of the young patients we treat in the 19th arrondissement of Paris have autism spectrum disorders. For some, there is clearly a link between the child’s disorder and the parents’ past – they are often single-parent families. They have experienced traumatic events, such as the loss of a child or, for migrants, trauma in their country of origin or during migration. These psychological traumas act like a magnet in the relationship with the young child and remove the parent from quality early interactions that are necessary for development.
Poet, this book is your first novel, why this book now? (autobiographical novel?)
Catherine Zittoun : I have been a poet since childhood. In primary school, I always volunteered to recite poems because I wanted to share with my classmates the emotions I felt when reading the poem. Being a poet was not part of any will on my part. Rather, the poems chose me to put them into voice. They passed through me. I quickly started writing poetry and even more so in adolescence, it was a necessity. As I left adolescence, desires jostled in my head, desires to travel, desires to meet people and cultures, desires to care for, to practice psychiatry with children and adolescents. In short, a thousand things attracted me and also stories that I wanted to tell. I had the idea of writing novels. But life took me elsewhere, scientific articles, research in psychiatry, meetings with artists who led me to theater production – I was then one of the pioneers of multimedia shows – then to artists’ books. I was able to produce, thanks to the publisher Bernard Dumerchez, and other publishers too, artists’ books with Zao Wou-Ki, Vladimir Velickovic, Takesada Matsutani, Emmanuel Fillot, other artists too. That left little time for writing a novel.
One day, Michel Caire, a historian of psychiatry, put me on the trail of these Jewish patients hidden during the war in psychiatric hospitals. This part of history was unknown to me at the time but resonated in me in a curious way. During the same period, I lost my grandmother Claire, a very beautiful person. So little by little, this obvious fact became clear: I would write these stories of these patients saved from the Shoah, and of their children, many of them Jewish children hidden during the war in foster families. Responsible for 20 years for a therapeutic family reception, I was also very sensitive to these issues. And one day something stronger than me pushed me towards writing the novel, a loom for weaving stories. Was it also a tomb that I was shaping for my grandmother? In Hebrew, the words: “the name” and “the story” have the same numerical value. History would thus be a ship which, in a certain way, keeps our dead alive.
[1] Shelomo Selinger is the author of the cover drawing of the Faisceau des Vivants
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