By the time we become curious about our grandparents, they are usually dead. The questions we never think to ask at twenty grow insistent the older we get – yet the people who could have answered them are gone. You cannot FaceTime someone in heaven.
Certainly that was so with me. My great-grandparents sat at opposite ends of a long dining table, communicating through their dogs. “Please tell my husband that…” Or: “Please tell my wife I shall be absent for a few days. I can be found at my club.” What was the source of their estrangement? My grandmother probably knew. I never asked.
Then there is my maternal grandfather. Once Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, he died in 1949, falling beneath a train on his way to meet my mother at Peter Jones. Some thought it suicide. Others that he had been pushed. Either way it remained a family taboo. Just talking about my grandfather made my mother sad. When my sister finally pressed her – Mum was in her late eighties.. She fled down the corridor in tears and slammed the door. Only at supper did she apologize and begin to talk.
A FIFTY-YEAR SILENCE
Perhaps this is why I was drawn to Miranda Richmond Mouillot’s memoir. Brought up in America, she knew her grandparents had separated after escaping from France. Neither spoke of their marriage, nor of the war.
She was close to her grandmother: “When I shut my eyes, I can still feel her silver hair, soft as silk and streaked with coal black. I can see her before her mirror in a pale pink slip, doing ‘face yoga’ to keep away the wrinkles, her gold and turquoise earrings quivering in her ears…”
Yet despite a deep bond with her granddaughter, she remained tight-lipped about her life in Europe. Nor did she explain what led her to flee the marriage. The breakthrough came when Miranda’s mother sent Miranda to boarding school near her grandfather in Switzerland. He drove her to the French village where he and her grandmother had once lived. In so doing he literally handed her the key to his past.
It took ten years to write the book that resulted. She became a historical family detective, tracking archival material across borders. She also plucked up her courage to confront whomever was left of relatives and friends so that a fuller picture could emerge.
One story handed down from mother to daughter was about a pair of gloves. She told her how Anna Munster – * Miranda’s grandmother *- while a medical student knitted her own gloves instead of forking out for leather gloves. Money was scarce and many people were struggling to stay warm so soon she had a small clientele.
Under German occupation, her landlady asked her to knit a pair for her nephew, a local policeman. Anna had also once treated he’d had an accident. Not long afterwards there was a round-up of Jews in the neighbourhood. The policeman knew exactly where Anna lived. He did not give her away. Anna always believed the gloves tipped the balance in her favour.
THE UNBEARABLE POSITION
In war stories abound; Narrow escapes. Persecution. Betrayal. And somewhere in the annals of her grandparents a monumental bust up.. Neither side gave the game away.
Her grandmother was more of a presence in her life. So stories like these were recycled occasionally. When it came to her grandfather, Armand Jacoubovitch, however, the past seemed completely cordoned off.
Initially all she really knew was that as an interpreter he had ended up playing a vital role in post war Europe.. Landing up in Court 1 at Nuremberg. Miranda recalls him lamenting Göring’s elaborate sentences, or the French judge who spoke through the camouflage of his moustache. Offhand observations. The larger picture he said little about. Only much later did Miranda realize that this experience could well have been the trigger for irreconcilable differences.
“In any situation where an interpreter and subject are able to observe each other, they both live, if only fleetingly, a moment of alliance, a moment when one of them hands a piece of themselves into the other’s care. Interpreter and subject, if only for an instant, have opened the door on their shared humanity”
Most of us learned about the Holocaust gradually, the details arriving in bearable increments. Armand and his fellow interpreters were confronted by a deluge of facts all at once. . He found himself voicing the thoughts and justifications of men who had ordered the death of people like him and his parents. He learnt their fate watching concentration camp footage in the courtroom.
Miranda breaks into rhetorical questions: “Who could wear a wedding band after learning of the stacks of them stripped off perished fingers? Who could read by the light cast through a lampshade?”
Writing the book brought her closer to her grandparents – her grandfather died the day it was published. She also came to understand her own inherited fear: the instinct to plan escape routes, shoes kept by the door, candles always within reach, her mother snapping off the radio at certain subjects.
WHY THIS MATTERS NOW
Most families do not have war crimes trials or border escapes in the vault. And yet a quick mental fly-past of today’s political map suggests we could be due for a seismic crash landing. In many countries, people are once again being asked where they stand, what they will tolerate, whom they will protect.
The choices our grandparents made under pressure may be more instructive than we imagined. My grandmother travelled to Paris hiding wads of cash when the daughter of a Russian diplomat arrived penniless after fleeing the Bolsheviks. My great-grandfather quarrelled with his son before he volunteered for the First World War. He died on the Somme. My grandfather never forgave himself.
Family narratives give us our bearings. Without knowing these stories, we assemble ourselves from fragments – or from nothing at all.
The message is simple: catch them while you can.
HOW TO START
Recording family memory can be as modest as a phone propped on a kitchen table. Ask questions that invite stories: Who was your favourite teacher? Did you ever accept a big dare? How did you and Dad meet? What was the best holiday – and the worst? As your parent’s child, you will know what makes them open up.
If the opportunity has passed, letters, diaries and archives can yield more than you expect. Miranda reconstructed much of her grandparents’ story that way. Harder work, but not impossible.
A PERSONAL CODA
I wish I had done this. I wish I had recorded my mother before her memory vanished, or asked my grandmother about those dogs and that silent dining table.
So preserve their memories as carefully as you do the antiques and jewellery.
