A Cryptic Message on a Postcard Leads to a Message from the Past

The title of this book, The Postcard by Anne Berest, is simplicity that belies the complexities and mysteries of a population of people born during the chaos of any Nazi occupied country during WWII. A postcard is the simplest form of mail to send or receive, and in this case a cryptic message received on one prompts a search spanning generations. For those born during the confusion of the war years, made more inscrutable due to deaths, fears of documentation, and destruction of buildings housing records, all caused by existing wartime conditions, a segment of humanity is left without genealogical connections intact, exacerbated by fears of that period that exact knowledge and record keeping might escalate risks. A daughter begins an odyssey of discovery seeking answers related to a mysterious postcard her mother received from Paris in January 2003, that ultimately leads to a precious gift.  

Pile on top of a generation desperately seeking more information about their origins, a smug unkind class system develops based upon speculation of how authentically Jewish such a person might be, much like that which occurred following the civil war where degree of blackness was a basis for scrutiny or condemnation on all sides of the racial spectrum. The narrator later imagines how she might have responded to a recent cruel comment, “You said I’m only Jewish when it suits me. But, Déborah, when my daughter was born, when I held her for the first time, do you know what I thought of? The first image that went through my mind? It was the mothers who were breastfeeding when they were sent to the gas chambers. So yes, it would suit me not to think about Auschwitz every day. It would suit me for things to be different. It would suit me not to be afraid of the government, afraid of gas, afraid of losing my identity papers, afraid of enclosed spaces, afraid of dog bites, afraid of crossing borders, afraid of traveling by airplane, afraid of crowds and the glorification of virility, afraid of men in groups, afraid of my children being taken from me, afraid of people who obey orders, afraid of uniforms, afraid of being late, afraid of being stopped by the police, afraid whenever I have to renew my passport. Afraid of saying that I’m Jewish.” 

The story this book tells, against the backdrop of massive repatriation efforts of war refugees in the period immediately following the allied liberation of many camps, is a stunning and unforgettable landmark truth telling long overdue. Can one even imagine diaries received by descendants more than half a century after they were so carefully written. A gift of time and circumstance facilitated by a search initiated so many years after pen was put to paper? It is an inviolable strand of love for those whose voices were silenced that draws the past, with all its injustice, horror, and violation, into the present, all because a grandmother “…knew her memory was failing, and she said to me, I can’t forget them. If I do, there will be no one left to remember that they ever existed.’” Years later a promise is kept, a postcard of the Paris Opera House is mailed from Paris, and a search for answers begins,  precipitating new genealogical connections to lives that might otherwise have stayed buried by wartime confusion. Later a parcel arrives: “I unsealed the envelope. Something went through the room then, a kind of silent, electric exhalation. A letting-out of breath. Both of us felt it. I gently extracted two notebooks…Every page was full; not a single line was left empty. I opened the first notebook…I began to read aloud to my mother.”