A Souvenir from Paris

Jim,

How did you and your sister manage to pick up German while living on a US army base? Maybe from your maid, and from German radio and TV programs?

Did your knowledge of German remain after leaving Germany and switching back to English and perhaps other languages in other countries?

My two kids were born in Vienna in 1981 and 1983, and began talking German with each other quite quickly, though I and my wife, who was Austrian, mostly spoke English with each other and with them at home.

 

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Those are wonderful connections to Paris. Although my mother's family is from Luxembourg, the main to France I've found is my great-grandfather worked there for a period. I still have his log book/passport that lists exactly where he worked, what he did, and contains a recommendation from each employer. I should look again to see where he worked.

Interestingly, when I traced my family down to the 1500's through church records, my family remained primarily in Luxembourg. I would have thought given the porous borders that there would have been some mix, but I needed to go down to the 1700's to find a single example from Germany. This is remarkable considering that half of them came from Echternach, which is literally on the border with Germany. Evidently they felt those on their side of the river were cuter...

I do have family in France, but I have yet to look them up. My great-grandfather had a sister who moved there I believe after WWI. They corresponded and I have a letter from her to him, but even though I speak German I can't read the old script. I bought and read a book on it, but I can still only read the church records since they mostly wrote neatly.

 

When my wife and daughter went to Paris 3 years ago (pre-COVID), they got a room overlooking the Eiffel tower from their balcony.

 

Wow, what excellent photographs!!! Those are professional quality.


I see that you visited the Château at Chantilly. What I really would like to know is if you partook in some strawberries and (famous) Crème Chantilly while there too?

And of course; Chantilly is also well known for:



I've been fortunate enough to have been able to visit France a couple of times. It goes without the need to state that Paris is such a grand city. A person could spend a lifetime there, and still be able to discover something enriching every day.






While I've yet to acquire a 'souvenir' ancient coin, here's a coin from ancient France.

CELTIC, Northwest Gaul. Carnutes. Circa (100-50 BC). Æ
O: Celticized head to right
R: Two eagles flying right; to left, pentagram; between eagles, cross with pellet in each quarter; to right, serpent.

 

Hi All,

For those who have been there,



- Broucheion

 

Interested in your story about the long-lost 'Passage St. Pierre', I stumbled across this page (posted just this last week!). It gives some detailed history about the street.

https://parisianfields.com/2022/05/01/passage-st-pierre/

My wife and I dined one evening in an American Restaurant a few blocks away from there.

She's a somewhat finicky eater, rather, she can at times have a reluctance to try new foods. She knows what she likes, and she likes what she knows. For whatever reason, when I pulled up some images of various Parisian bistro fare, it didn't look very appetizing for her.

We weren't about to shell out for haute cuisine. So, after having spent some weeks cruising around Europe, I figured that a familiar 'taste of home' was in order.

We went to this Jewish Deli and got hamburgers and fries. In the restaurant, we noticed that every diner in there was eating their burgers/sandwiches with a knife & fork. There we were, the only Americans in the packed American restaurant of Parisians eating our (tasty, I might add) burgers with our hands.

We felt so uncouth, heh.


If I may suggest..

Don't wait too long for "someday" to make the trip.

 

I do not know if it is open yet to visitors, but yes, they are currently preparing a new museum in the BNF with some highlights. Not only coins, but also jewels, cameos, vases and works of art, manuscripts, etc.
https://www.bnf.fr/fr/le-nouveau-musee-de-la-bnf

 

Fascinating, and a fortuitous coincidence that someone would choose to research and write about the very same obscure Parisian street, torn down more than a century ago, where my grandfather was born in 1887. As you can see in this copy of his birth certificate (redacted to delete the surname), he was born at No. 1 Passage St. Pierre. The house numbers aren't visible in any of the photos I've seen, but presumably the building was at the beginning of the street:



Two years earlier, when my grandfather's older sister was born, they lived at No. 8 in the Rue d'Ormesson, another street in the Marais that still exists, although I doubt that their building is still there.

Here are photos of his parents, my great-grandparents, taken during the period they lived in Paris:





They were hardly prosperous, but they either had or borrowed decent clothing for these photos.

Here are some more photos of Passage St. Pierre, beginning with a postcard showing the entrance to the old charnel house that had been there for centuries:



A different etching of the Passage by the same artist who did the one posted in the blog:



Another print by a different artist, Jules-Adolphe Chauvet, dated
1865:



More postcards:







The copies I've saved of a couple of the photos by Atget:

 

Donna,
https://ruebeautreillis.blog/category/passage-saint-pierre/
Many links to consult "Continuer à lire" with photos of the Passage.

 

Thanks!

 

@Alwin, I read all 15(!) or so blog posts by M. Gaspard Landau about the Passage St. Pierre, where my grandfather was born in 1887, at the link you provided. It certainly seems that it was even worse than I imagined, given statements like these:

"Until its end, the Saint-Pierre passage was devoid of sewers, and the question of the flow and disposal of waste water will greatly contribute to giving it its reputation for insalubrity."

Regarding a neighboring building:

"Families included, more than fifty people lived in the building (56 counted in 1896 and 50 in 1900). In the 1880s, the two two-room dwellings on the 3rd floor where the widow Bazot and the widow Bulot had lived were divided in two to accommodate more tenants, and the 17 dwellings in the building, as well as the tavern under the vault, had a single water station on the ground floor. In the corridors of each floor and on the stairs, openings in the descents allowed the tenants to evacuate their waste water, and there was only one toilet.

As everywhere else in the Passage Saint-Pierre, which had no sewer network, the evacuation of waste water was done here too by three gutters, two of which were uncovered, which flowed into the passage."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the first person to die in the Paris cholera epidemic of 1884 was a young man who worked in a laundry in the Passage St. Pierre.

I doubt things were any worse in the tenements on the Lower East Side where the family lived after emigrating to the USA.

The blog had three different photos showing, at different times in the late 19th century up to about 1913, the building at No. 1 Passage St. Pierre where my grandfather lived with his parents and older sister for the first 13 months of his life. In each photo, it's the first door to the immediate right in the foreground of the photo, after one emerges from the vault covering the entrance to the Passage from the Rue St. Antoine:







The third photo was by Atget, circa 1900. The first seems to have
been taken in 1913. I don't know the date of the second.
or the identity of the photographer.

I was surprised to learn that the building at No. 1, as well as the one next to it, actually survived (with different entrances) the tear-down of the Passage St. Pierre and its other buildings. They lasted until the 1950s, when they were finally demolished. The history of the building at No. 1 (which already existed in 1796) is specifically discussed in detail at https://ruebeautreillis.blog/2019/0...erre-9-le-passage-saint-pierre-cote-impair-1/.

 

I know very well this area of Paris for this is where I was living in my childhood. My high school was the Lycée Charlemagne, just next to the Saint Paul church. This neighborhood (the 4th arrondissement) is called "le Marais" (the swamp) - because it was originally a swamp area, urbanized in the Middle Ages. It is a charming area, the old Paris of the 17th c., largely untouched by Baron Haussmann who extensively modernized the whole city, but not the "Marais"... Streets are narrow, 17th and 18th c. houses are still standing, even some medieval houses, with old churches and aristocratic mansions of the 17th c. called "hotels". There are also "passages" which are not real streets but passageways from a courtyard to another. The "Passage Saint Pierre" of your ancestor has been demolished and replaced with a real street, but there are still other "passages" 100 or 200 m from there, such as "Passage Saint Paul" and "Passage Charlemagne".

In the 19th c. the Marais was one of the most archaic areas of Paris, inhabited by poor people. No sewers, no running water, no light because the streets are narrow. It became a haven for poor immigrants from Eastern Europe, especially Jews from Austrian and Russian empires. It became a Jewish quarter and still is. When I was a schoolboy in Lycée Charlemagne a good half of my schoolmates were Jewish, most of them Ashkenazi. I remember the names : Rosenbaum, Klatzmann, Rachbenbach, Hagerman, Weil, Wasman, etc...They did not attend school on Jewish holidays, it was funny, the classroom was half empty on these days.

Many of these Jewish immigrants ran small tailor businesses. I see that your great-grandfather Jules was in the business too, for his occupation was "casquetier", that is "cap maker".

The Marais area has not changed much, it is still largely inhabited by Jewish families but, of course, housing and living conditions have been considerably improved during the 20th c. It is probably for this reason that the Passage Saint Pierre was demolished and replaced with a real street and decent buildings, while other sectors were just refurbished and modernized, keeping their romantic "old Paris" character.

Of course, during WW2, the Jewish community suffered much from persecution by German occupiers and French Vichyst collaborators. Fortunately not all of them were rounded up and deported, but many were : in the Marais there are inscriptions on school doors reminding how many children had been arrested in this school. Fortunately, some avoided arrest and deportation, or were lucky enough to come back from the camps in 1945...

Like many central urban popular areas, the neighborhood has been now gentrified but has kept its Jewish identity. Another minority, the gay community, is also living there. If you are Jewish AND gay (and don't mind dwelling in small but romantic and historical apartments), that's the place to live in Paris!

(EDIT) Before living in Passage Saint Pierre your great-grandparents lived 8 rue d'Ormesson. It's just 150 m from Passage Saint Pierre... The building 8 rue d'Ormesson is still there and is obviously a 19th c., if not even earlier building: these are not the standards of the 20th c. Of course it has been refurbished since the 1880s. No doubt, the modest apartment of your ancestors is still inhabited.


... and the former 1 Passage Saint Pierre, judging from the blog you found, was demolished c. 1950. There is a modern building in its place. The ground level is a Monoprix (a downtown supermarket), the Monoprix in which my own mother did most of her shopping since the 1970s !

 

Thanks so much, @GinoLR. It remains a small world, especially for me with respect to anyone living in Germany, France, or even England (where my mother spent most of the War), given my family background. I will have to let my son know that the building at 8 rue d'Ormesson still stands. I don't doubt that the building is old. And I suspect that the building at No. 1 Passage St. Pierre, already there in 1796, was already old then. Although probably not as old as the house where another of my grandparents (my maternal grandmother) was born, in a small village in the Black Forest: that house, which had been in her family since the 18th century, has been dated to approximately 1565 through dendrochronology! And has the remnants of a Roman wall in the back.

Yes, my great-grandfather was Jewish (like the rest of my family!) and a capmaker, and continued in that occupation on the Lower East Side. Unfortunately, he died young, in his 50s, after a long illness that resulted in my grandfather dropping out of school at 13 to go to work in the garment industry. The official cause of death was lung cancer, but the story in the family was always that it was some sort of occupational disease like mercury poisoning (the origin of the "Mad Hatter" concept). Comparing his signatures from the 1880s and 20 years later, the latter is certainly shaky enough for me to believe that he had neurological problems.

I always think of the various tenements where my grandfather lived with his family on the Lower East Side as slum housing, which it was. The first building they lived in, for a number of years after they arrived in 1888, was at 176 Suffolk Street, and actually still exists. It's still pretty shabby, although I'm sure it's been modernized:






Still, compared to the Marais, it probably seemed like luxury housing. I imagine that there were sewers, and running water, and some plumbing, at least.

Regarding what you said about the deportations during the War, my father's family was all long gone from France by then. But what happened very much affected my mother's family, many of whom had either fled from Baden across the Rhine to France during the 1930s, or were sent to camps in the Pyrenees in October 1940, when the Jews of Baden were all deported there. Most died, including my great-grandparents on that side. A few survived, including my mother's Uncle B. and his family, who narrowly escaped the Vel d'Hiv roundup and then lived with false papers in places like Dieulefit and Nice until the Liberation, after which they were able to reclaim their apartment at 18 Ave. de Versailles. Which I'm pretty sure was not in the Marais!

 

Sure, the 18 Avenue de Versailles is not in the Marais! It is in the XVIth Arrondissement, which is well-known for being the typical bourgeois area of Paris. The building has a quarry stone facade, typical of the 1930s: no doubt that in 1940 it was very recent and comfortable (unless you live at the ground floor, which is for the concierge, there were concierges at the time).


I don't like too much the 16th Arrondissement. The Marais, with its old Paris atmosphere, is much more pleasant.

 

Thanks for the photo and information, @GinoLR. If people will indulge one last story about Paris that has nothing to do with numismatics, the configuration of 18 Avenue de Versailles -- where my mother's first cousin Pierre lived until his death in 2008, so the apartment was in the family for more than 70 years -- was actually what allowed Uncle B. and his family to escape the Vel d'Hiv roundup, which I'm sure you must have read about. There was a decent movie about it, made in 2010, entitled "Sarah's Key" (French: Elle s'appelait Sarah).

This is a translation of an account in French, written many years later by B.'s older son, my mother's first cousin Alex [later Alexandre], who was then 17 years old and later became an attorney in Paris:

"Paris 1942. The telephone rang during the late afternoon of 15 July -- I remember that it was a work day. Papa picked up the receiver, and then after a few seconds he hung up without having spoken a word. He told us that he recognized the voice of Monsieur K., an official at police headquarters, whom Papa knew thanks to Uncle Gustav. [My grandmother’s brother Gustav, who did not survive.] Gustav had lived in Paris as a foreigner since 1933 and had formed an acquaintanceship [with the police official.] Without stating his name on the telephone, this official had said three words to my father: "Look out tonight!" Naturally, we understood that this man was warning us of imminent arrest.

Despite the innate optimism of my father, Mama insisted that we leave our apartment. After a brief consultation we decided that we would sleep all three in the small attic, which belonged to our rented apartment, and which is located on the 8th and last floor of the house at Avenue de Versailles No. 18. In the meantime, I hurried to take the metro to rue Claude Bernard no. 62, near the Quartier Latin, where all the activities of the [Jewish] Scouts were located. From the metro station, I ran to tell everyone who was present that there was something serious for that night. I do not know how many people I could warn and save in this way.

After my return, we put some blankets in the attic, so that we could sleep there on the floor, as the mansard [annex under a mansard roof] was only sparsely furnished. After supper we all went upstairs, we lay on the ground and tried to sleep, with as little noise as possible, so as not to attract the attention of the inhabitants of the adjoining mansards or the floor below. During the night we heard no alarming noise. That is why Papa went down to the concierge the next morning, July 16th. The latter told him that French policemen had come at four o'clock in the morning, and had rung and knocked at our apartment door for a long time. At one stroke it was clear: they had come to arrest us. And since you could not know if the police would return, we could not stay in our apartment again.

So we spent another three days and three nights in the attic, which had neither water nor toilet, everything [had to be done?] on the staircase, and were left to the concierge or a neighbor of the neighboring mansards who could have denounced us, which luckily did not happen. This was the first of a long series of circumstances which miraculously saved us from the tragic fate of so many others.

During the three days we spent in the attic, we were gradually informed by the concierge and some phone calls during the short times we were staying in our apartment that the police operation had been carried out under the name of " Rafle du Vel d'Hiv ", and about 10,000 Jews, all foreigners, were arrested by the French police on orders of the Germans. The arrested persons were first gathered in the old "Vélodrome d'Hiver", the winter velodrome, and then taken to the camp at Drancy, which was the starting point to a destination which was still unknown to us and whose existence the world learned much later: Auschwitz.

Let us return to our situation on July 20, 1942. We could not stay much longer in the attic. This was too dangerous because of the danger of denunciation by one of the neighbors, and besides, because we could neither eat anything (neither water nor gas) nor we could stop four of us there longer. It was just as dangerous to go out to buy provisions, as well as a return to our apartment, where the police could return at any moment. So we had to seek help elsewhere, and it was not denied us: Papa and Mama were well known to a non-Jewish couple, the husband was simply a business friend of Papa. Pierre [then age 14] found protection in the family of a Jewish friend who had not yet risked anything since he was of French nationality. As for me, I was warmly welcomed in the family of one of my Scout friends, Eddy Florentin (Totem [Resistance name]: Flamant), rue du Faubourg Poissionière). This family, of Turkish[-Jewish] origin, enjoyed a certain protection of the Turkish government (which did not prevent Eddy from being arrested two years later, towards the end of the occupation, as a member of the Resistance, and deported in a train from which he escaped). [See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_Florentin; he was a famous Resistance leader and later a successful writer of books on World War II. He escaped with some friends from Convoy 79 to Auschwitz.]

So we were hiding in three different places in Paris and could only communicate by telephone. We learned gradually of the catastrophic extent of the raid and the names of the arrested friends we should never see again. We were temporarily safe with the very courageous people who had taken us, but we were not allowed to leave the apartment or to let anyone see us: letters, gasmen, concierge, etc., for [we were] "Jews sought by the police." This was especially true for my parents, who were accommodated by people who were exclusively connected with non-Jews. For my part, as soon as someone rang the door of the Florentin family, I ran into my hiding place.


Early August 1942

[After fleeing Paris in late July,] we rented two rooms in the same hotel in Lyon. But only a few days after our arrival, rumors circulated that foreign Jews were even arrested in the unoccupied zone by the Germans under the administration of the Vichy government. That is why Papa and Mama preferred to live in a small, uninhabited apartment, to which the D's [friends from [my family's village in the Black Forest]; Alex later married their daughter] had the keys: the apartment of Zina and Lothar L. (alias "Ferragut") who were trying to cross the Pyrenees to reach Spain. (They failed in the attempt, however, and had to return to Lyon a few days later.) In his usual optimism, Papa said "they will not do anything to the children" and let us sleep in the hotel (Pierre and me).

In one of the following nights in August there was a knock on the door of our hotel room. French policemen wanted to see our papers. Since we had taken our real papers for foreigners with the stamp "JUIF", for Jew, Pierre and I were asked to get dressed and follow the policemen who took us to a commissariat where other people were already waiting. Afterwards, we were transported to the court of the small prison, which was located in the interior of the Justice Palace of Lyon, where many of the victims were already present and many more arrived. It was indeed, as we learned later, the great raid on foreign Jews of August [26-28] 1942 in the so-called "free" zone, which was modeled after the so-called "Vel d'Hiv", which took place a month earlier in Paris, and which we had escaped. The Vichy government obediently obeyed all the wishes of the Gestapo.

We stayed without food and without an explanation until the late afternoon in this prison yard. At that moment, Pierre and a few other young people were simply dismissed, for, according to the orders that had been enacted, anyone who was younger than 16 years of age was to be freed. [Later on, this limit was not observed.] Pierre returned to the hotel and gave the D's and my parents the news about me. The next morning we were sent into police cars, and escorted by French gendarmes, to a place a few kilometers out of Lyon, whose name I had never heard of. We were then enclosed in a sort of large hangar or unused factory hall, closed on all sides, and also with French gendarmes and policemen in uniform or plainclothes, both on the outside as well as the inside. I think we must have been 200 to 300 people. We could sleep on camp beds and got something to eat.

This situation, as far as I was concerned, lasted for three days, in which I mainly dealt with a plan of escape: I had noticed that one of the outside doors was clamped from the outside with an iron rod. I reckoned, with a broomstick I had found, to lift this iron rod through a crack in the door and open it in this way. It is more than likely that this attempt would have failed.

Fortunately, I did not need to carry out this plan, because on the fourth or fifth day I was freed by extraordinary luck in a different way: from the second day of the internment, I was able to begin a conversation with one of the police inspectors who guarded us. After exchanging some banalities, I had the impression that this man gave me a certain sympathy - probably because I was one of the youngest prisoners (I was not yet 18 years old), and because I was one of the few who spoke French perfectly, without a foreign accent, which was not the case with the majority of the prisoners, who were almost all older than me. From the third day the Inspector told me he was going to do something for me, and it would be good if I had a confirmation that I had been living in France for several years before the war. In the certainty of trusting him, I gave him the address where he could meet Papa (which was unwise in the case that this man had played a double game and wanted to arrest my parents too.) That same evening he made contact to Papa, who found the solution to ask for a telegraphic confirmation from the hotel proprietor . . . .. As soon as he was in possession of this telegram, the Inspector informed me that I was to be freed the same evening, which happened. I left the place as quickly as I could and returned to Lyon. I think I was one of the few who were released from the camp. [The story I always heard from my mother is that Alex’s parents had to bribe the Inspector to get him to set Alex free.]

Later, I learned that the other internees had been taken to Drancy soon, into the hands of the Germans, and they knew the fate that awaited them ... Many years later, when I was a lawyer, in the Justice Palace of Lyon. I found in a staircase a small window, through which one can see into the courtyard of the inner prison of Lyon. Every time I stopped, I saw this little courtyard where I had spent only a few hours as a prisoner destined for deportation and death-without knowing it.

When he told me of my release from the detention center, the police inspector added in a low voice that it was madness to continue to live with my real papers as a Jew and a foreigner. At the same time, he gave me his private phone number, where he could be contacted. In the plain text, he offered to help me get a wrong ID card. In the days that followed, this Inspector, Monsieur F ....., gave passports, not only for me, but also for Papa, Mama and Pierre, and gave us false identity cards, [with birth places in Alsace (to explain the rather German accent of Papa) and French nationality. . . . He assured us that they were actually registered in the police department, so that they did not pose a threat in the case of a check.. . . Thanks to Monsieur F ... we were born in France from now on and had French nationality, and we could hope to be safe from arrest. . . ."

The family spent the rest of the war living illegally with false papers, first in Dieulefit and then in Nice, and managed to survive the war. B. died at 96 in 1991, His wife L. at 83 in 1984. Pierre died at 71 in 2008, and Alex at 89 in 2013. Alex had two children, and many grandchildren and now great-grandchildren. None of them would have survived, if not for that one phone call from a sympathetic police official. And the assistance of friends who allowed the members of the family to hide with them. And much good fortune.