Geneviève Brisac

Shortly after moving into a Paris apartment, the narrator is buttonholed by one of her new neighbours, an elderly lady. "I want to talk to you about Charlotte Delbo," she says, "I heard you talking about her centenary, and I knew her."

The narrator doesn't need asking a second time: she's very excited to talk to someone who can tell her more about the Auschwitz survivor and political activist Delbo, who means a lot to her as a poet. She goes to tea with her neighbour, they talk about Delbo and her times and the Holocaust, and gradually the narrator manages to persuade her neighbour to tell something about herself as well. It's the life-story of the neighbour, Jenny Plocki, that eventually gives her the core for this book.

It turns out that Jenny was born in 1925, her parents Polish Jews who had emigrated to work in France, both of them active in left-wing political organisations. They had a market-stall selling hosiery in Vincennes. When the family are arrested in the "Vel d'hiv round-up" of 16 July 1942, Jenny and her brother are saved from deportation by their French birth, but the parents are sent to Auschwitz. Teenage Jenny survives in Paris with the help of a non-Jewish schoolfriend and her mother. After the Liberation, she becomes a left-wing activist and is involved in feminist causes, whilst working as a primary-school teacher and campaigning for progressive education. Her life-partner is the prominent Trotskyist Jean-René Chauvin, himself an Auschwitz survivor.

A lovely little memoir dealing sensitively with unlovely times — with echoes of Modiano's Paris — and a reminder that we really ought to take the time to listen to other people's stories. And a book that is likely to send you off chasing another reading list!… (mer)