As the lift door clattered behind him, Henri looked into an apartment filled with dark blue uniformed police, members of the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) then entered to a shambles of opened cupboards , ransacked drawers, and bugging devices hanging from their installations. After the DST arrested him, he recalled years later, he collected some gear, left a note for Yvette and watched by the Guardien and neighbours, was led out into the street and locked into the waiting van.
The drive took him past familiar places, though he could not see them. The Pitie, where years before he had installed his brother David for medical treatment and, just before the van turned into the bronzing chestnut -lined Boulevard Arego to enter the Sante prison, the beautiful old Observatoire building. Nor could he see the two plaques on the high stone studded walls of the prison; plaques which would have inspired a confusion of emotions in the Cold War warrior about to be locked inside. One, on the corner of Boulevard Arego and rue de la Sante, commemorates those students who were the first Parisians to rise up against the Nazi occupation at the call of General de Gaulle. The other , on the corner of rue de la Sante and Jean Dolent, reminds Frenchmen never to forget the eighteen anti-fascist patriots imprisoned and executed behind these prison walls, “by orders of a government working for the enemy.” Through the heavy gates Henri was delivered into the cells of one of the nineteenth century buildings of the prison , the very cells where, in the spring, Adam Rayski had been locked by the same police.
Ten days later, after interrogation by the examining magistrate, a van collected Henri again and drove him south eastward from Paris along unfamiliar roads to the town of Fresnes in the department of Val du Marne. On September 241959 the gates of a new prison closed behind him.
Adam Rayski, when he arrived at Fresnes three weeks later felt “ as though the sky had fallen on my head and on my loved ones”. And despite dubbing this prison the” University of Fresnes” (he gained a university diploma for his studies and learnt much besides), he had suffered fits of black depression and misery while inside.
Scraps of a diary that Henri kept at Fresnes reveal renewed suffering and its glimpses of Yvette, the passion and anguish she once more aroused.
“Y. has found happiness in my imprisonment” he had written,” my absence satisfies her senses. And her “devotion” (visiting room, linen, documents etc) enables her to bustle about and give herself the air of glorious kindness.”
And later, a cry from the heart: “Your virtue stifles me.”
The pain almost overwhelmed him: “My child, my child inhabits me entirely” he wrote. ”It is she, at present, who gives me the courage to get through the day. Ten days without news of Helene! To control myself at all cost, I must dispel the weakness of hatred from my heart. Dispel all idea of vengeance. Despite all the evidence which makes me weep and breaks my heart, I must say to myself again and again ‘She is good, she is intelligent, she is a friend.’ Lohengrin.
And later:“ No letters. Alone. As I am neither a strong man nor a saint, I am broken hearted.’ And then, “What would Helene’s reaction be if she were to learn that her father had killed himself in prison?”
No longer is he trying to impress or inspire Yvette with his ardour; no longer agonising about a dead future, as he had in 1946; the bleak brevity of the entries is striking. Yvette’s love had unlocked Henri’s heart and allowed his emotions and beliefs to flow freely; that love had been withdrawn and from now on concealment was his life’s habit.
**** ****
Henri was brought to trial in 1961, 21 months after his arrest. That had been news to me on my first evening in Paris in 1968 when Henri had pointed to some low windows in the Palais de Justice (which to my casual eye had looked, until that moment, like a castle in some Fairy tale) and said, “that’s where I was tried”. I had heard no more on that first visit. Later he told me a little about prison: that he had been allowed visitors and worked in the library but about his trial told me the year it had been held and nothing more. Not even that he had been tried before a Military Tribunal. He could not have forgotten. Was his habit of secrecy too deeply ingrained? Or did he consider his punishment part of the life of a spy and his silence part of his penance?
While awaiting trial he must have heard enough about the inhuman treatment suffered by his Polish colleagues to appreciate his good fortune to inhabit French prisons – even if he had never heard of Hermann Field – for he never once complained to anyone about his captivity.
During my stay at the Cite in 1999 I had expected to find documents to illuminate Henri’s arrest, to read transcripts of his trial and conviction, to pick up information about his imprisonment from the usual government archives.
I spent my first weeks composing letters to the Central Depot of the Archives of Military Justice and to the Ministry of Defence. Waiting for replies and enrolled as a reader at the Research Centre of the National Archives, CARAN, my walks through the gentrified Marais were a daily delight. Along rue des Archives, a street sparkling with sequins, buttons, hats and other wholesale accessories, past the elegant art and decorators’ shops lining rue Quatre Fils, or sometimes down the fabulous rue Francs Bourgeois I strolled to reach the quiet pleasantly wood panelled rooms of the National Archives, there to read through the several boxes waiting for me . The knowledgeable and obliging staff had suggested a range of files and helped me to apply for “derogations”, waivers , to read classified ones. Through these files and those of the Prefecture of Police in the 5th arrondissement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs , I travelled into a poorer Paris and harsher years, learnt something about Henri’s life and times , learnt about French traditions, systems and protocol and had a greater awareness than ever of language barriers.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs guards its own archives, and those who would work there must assemble in the foyer of the grand old building on the quai d’Orsay. There they hand in their IDs before being rounded up by a staff member and led briskly up flights of stairs and along corridors and past doors opening on to busy Ministry officials, first to have their bags and coats locked in an old wooden cupboard and then to be locked themselves in the charming little reading room opposite.
The 7th, in which the Ministry stands, is an arrondissement packed with equally imposing and beautiful old buildings, each guarded by gendarmes fingering machine guns , surprisingly sweet faced and friendly men whose bullet proof vests conceal helpful street maps. The gilded dome of Les Invalides glistens as you emerge from the metro, the Palais Bourbon, meeting place of the National Assembly, stands next door, the Ministry of Defence just down the road, half a dozen other ministries in nearby blocks and a short walk away, in rue de Varenne near the Musee Rodin and the Paris home of Edith Wharton, Palais Matignon, the residence of the Prime Minister of France.
I could imagine Henri in Warsaw , a Lieutenant-Colonel in Military Intelligence , moving daily in a similarly exalted environment, albeit in a Warsaw whose buildings were replicas of those almost totally destroyed by war.
I expected that the trial documents would be open to me because so many Australian Security documents are available; I had not read Military Intelligence as spying or a Colonel in Military Intelligence as a spy, rather as diplomat. The first reply to my request from the Ministry of Defence, (Central Archives of Military Justice) had confirmed this expectation. The Magistrate General wrote on May 26; he asked for evidence of my relationship with Henryk Adler, for a precise account of the object of my research and how far it had advanced. I complied immediately and when the next letter arrived after some weeks confidently opened it. The Magistrate General had “the honour of informing” me that, “according to article 7-3 of the law 79-18 of 3 January 1979”, one hundred years must pass after the last action of the trial before any documents can be released.” Since the last action in uncle Henri’s trial had taken place on 4 July 1962, thirty years before….
The letter from Central Archives informed me with the same honour, regret, quoting the same article of the same law, but in passing delivered some specks of real gold. Thanks to Central Archives I learned the date Henri was arrested, the name of the force which arrested him, the exact date of his trial, the names of the prisons and dates during which he had been held. Departmental archives were even more forthcoming; the first letter which did not regret to inform me of the law of 1979 came from the Departement of Eure, the home of Henri’s second prison.
***** ******
Almost two years after his arrest and imprisonment, Henri was taken from Fresnes and delivered, with others, into the underground cells of the Palais de Justice to await trial.
For information about the trial I have relied almost entirely on Adam Rayski’s account in Nos Illusions Perdus of his own trial a few months later before the same Permanent Tribunal of the Armed Forces. The Military Tribunal, composed of representatives of all the armed forces and presided over by a civil magistrate, tried violations of State security in times of war and peace. Against Rayski, the charge was complicity with foreign agents during the years 1945-1947. In his group awaiting trial were Francoise, the French wife of Jerzy Bryn, the man who had defected in Okinawa, and Andre Cassagnol, the husband of Yvette’s sister, employed in the stores section of the Ministry of the Navy , who had supplied Henri with information during 1947 –1949. Yvette’s sister was absent; either Bryn had not given her name , or she had not worked for Henri as her nephew had believed.
The charge against Henri was espionage, committed from 1947 to 1949 and connected somehow with that of a Frenchman named Herman Bertele, arrested, according to Adam Rayski, while acting as a spy for “the East”. How long Henri’s trial lasted, what evidence was presented and who were the witnesses, all these facts remain locked in the archives.
I presume that Henri’s group , like Rayski and his fellow accused, was obliged to stand in the elegantly panelled courtroom, with his back to the bench as the judges entered the room and again to turn around not to see their faces when the verdict was read. Was he as appalled as Rayski by such a bizarre ceremonial? If so, he never said so. Françoise Bryn was released, Cassagnol received the lightest sentence and Rayski himself was condemned to seven years imprisonment. There is no account of the trial of Henri’s group in Adam Rayski’s book.
*** ***
‘En effet j’ai connu votre oncle a Paris.” “As a matter of fact, I knew your uncle in Paris.” These words appeared on my computer screen one day in 1999. Signed by Adam Rayski, whose idealistic, brave and disappointed parallel twentieth century life story I had been sharing for the past week. Here was a man who could fill me in on details. I immediately replied asking if we could meet. And M.Rayski agreed.
I expected great things from our meeting and was disappointed and anxious when he postponed it several times, for different reasons. Finally he proposed a time and in an enchanting and elegant corner of Paris new to me, off the Champs d’Elysees and within sight of the Arc de Triomphe, I finally arrived at his building. A code to tap, four flights of wooden stairs to climb and at an open door a small, vigorous white haired old man, who ushers me in with a powerful handshake, to the large, light, book- lined room with high ceilings and long windows that I have come to expect in Paris apartments. Recently re-married, I have been told, and as active as ever. he is now editor in chief of a regular “Newsletter of Jewish Resistants and Deportees”. He sits at his desk, computer nearby, and places me opposite for our interview. Though he understands English, he speaks only French.
“ I met your uncle, in about 1954, at the home of friends. He was in the ‘Service des renseigement de l’Armee polonais”, (Intelligence Service of the Polish Army. ) “I was in charge of the Polish press and though we didn’t move in the same circles, we occasionally met at the home of mutual friends.” He said he had heard nothing about Henri’s activities, or even that he had left Poland, until they both found themselves in the same French prisons. The war of independence was delivering many Algerian prisoners to Fresnes, he said , and they succeeded in winning political prisoners’ privileges so he and his fellow Military Tribunal prisoners were now permitted daily walks. And it was on these walks that he became friendly with Cassagnol and learned of Henri’s fate.
Rayski could not have sounded more helpful. He assured me he would find and let me read his own papers from the trial, which he had obtained from the Ministry of Justice. That must have been before law of 1979, I thought. Some months after the trial, he told me, he and his group had all been moved from the comparative freedom of Fresnes to Evreux, in Normandie, and a prison without any special treatment for politicals. Why? He had no idea. To my surprise, he baulked at my use of the word “spy” when talking of Henri or the other Poles, and urged “agent” instead. His memory had Henri released from Evreux much earlier than he was, but I said nothing. Nor did I ask why he had not mentioned Henri’s trial and conviction in his book, or under what circumstances he had known my uncle in Paris. I believed we could talk over these such matters at our next meeting when I would have prepared a more informed list of questions and listened with interest as he changed the subject and told me about his current work with the former Resistance fighters and deportees. We parted cordially, agreeing we would meet again soon.
Some days later, on May 6, I received a phone call from the friend who had led me to Rayski and who had lunched with him that day. “He didn’t like to tell you, because Henri was your uncle, but he told me that he believed Henri was a traitor.”
“A traitor? But to whom or what? Does he mean he thinks Henri gave people away to the French police? “
“Yes. He told me his friend Cassagnol said that Yvette divorced Henri because he had named her brother. And besides, how else to explain that Henri’s sentence was only three years?”
This had never been a reason Yvette gave in talking or writing for divorcing Henri. Moreover Henri’s sentence was for five years, not three, and he had not been released as early as Rayski said. If something sinister explained Henri’s early release, it applied to all of them,for none had remained in prison for their full terms. Henri was released on 4 July 1962 after serving 2 years and 10 months of his five years sentence; Rayski on 8 March 1963, after serving 2 years and 5 months of his seven.
I never had a chance to put all this to Rayski. Nor to ask him more about Henri. He never invited me to see him again; nor did he reply to my emails.
********* *******************
During his last months of incarceration Henri was dealt two terrible blows, one by the French state, the other , even more terrible, by his wife. Both blows I learnt of from documents produced by the government departments which had administered them.
On February 23 1962, while imprisoned at Evreux, he was served with an order that had been issued by the Minister of the Interior a week before while he had been still at Fresnes. This was an order for his expulsion from France and surrender of his foreigner’s papers. As the week-old order had not been carried out, Henri immediately and hopefully appealed against his expulsion. Before two members of the National Police who came to Evreux to take down his statement, Henri outlined the facts of his case and of the judgement against him. He was due to be released, he stated, in September 1964 – 5 years after his arrest – unless his requests for remission, pardon or conditional freedom were heeded. Whatever the date of his release , he trusted that he would not be expelled from France and above all not to Poland, since “My ideological break with the existing regime of my country of origin is well known to the DTS.” Half an hour later, he had signed the statement and was returned to his cell.
A diary entry, undated but evidently written during the summer, may be the first intimation of the second blow. “She is here for a day from the colony. I have been to the very limit of my moral strength and needed only friendly support; on that day she killed me.” Re-living in his prison cell the anguish of their war time separations, he wrote:“My reflections at the station, her face at the window” and ended with a puzzling cry: ”Ah, what enormous load of venality is at the base of ideology”. Did he mean his communist faith? Or Yvette’s ideology?
In the writ for divorce against Henri on 8 June, Yvette claimed that she had already ten years before brought divorce proceedings against her husband . Could that have been the venality?
Yvette’s writ could not have come at a crueller time and she knew it.“I have been much criticised for asking for this divorce,” she explained in her death bed memoirs. “I had a perfect motive for doing it at the moment when it was impossible for him to exercise emotional blackmail because he was in an inferior position. For once it was I who profited by the situation. Much too often, the position had been the other way round”.
But, as the war time letters have made so constantly clear, the stories told in her memoirs are as false as the fictitious characters that inhabit them. Now, as years before, Henri did everything possible to help her towards happiness; once more prepared to take all the blame on himself. He had no lawyer and did not argue with the statement that while in Fresnes he had written several letters to Yvette.” In this correspondence”, the decree stated “he forbade her to come and see him in the prison visiting room and told her that when his sentence was over, he would not resume a common life with her, an existence which is odious to her.” I suspect that as before he was simply being saintly. In any case, he was brought in handcuffs before the judge, presented with the decree of divorce and returned to his cell.
Custody of their child was naturally granted to her mother and Henri was ordered to pay Yvette eighty new francs a month towards her upkeep , “in advance and beginning from the third month of his liberation” from prison. When that finally occurred on 4 July 1962, perhaps because his requests for remission had been heeded , perhaps because government policy had changed, he was in one sense at least, free. But only in one sense.
Henri’s first thought on leaving Evreux was for his daughter, who was spending the summer with her grandmother at Belmont, and he set off directly to see her at the house where in 1945 he had received his first real blow from Yvette. The emotional reunion of father and daughter was held outside, for the unforgiving Helene la Guerre refused him entry. Her earliest angry rejection of Henri had revived. Her namesake Helene in 1999, re-lived the day vividly:“I remember the day he came out of prison. A sunny day, a garden in the countryside with grandmother. I was reading. .. There was another little girl there too, maybe my cousin, and we were playing outside, when I saw a man coming towards me. Grandmother didn’t like Henri”. And she added sadly, “I rejected my father when he came out of jail.”
By the time the divorce was finally registered in June 1963 Helene had moved with Yvette and her new love into a charming and tiny Montmartre apartment in rue Lepic and Henri had returned alone to 3 Adolphe Cherioux, Issy les Moulineaux. How miserable he must have been there we can now understand, after sharing the long rapturous love letters, the terrible emotions of his first rupture with Yvette and the ecstasy of their reunion. In every room of the flat remained evidence of her home making skills that he had so admired and for ten years so enjoyed. His personality as well as his life had been deformed and would remain so . Everyone who knew him has agreed that he was never the same man after his prison years.
**** ****
But according to the letter I received from the Ministry of Justice in 1999 , “Il etait elargi de cet etablissement le 4 juillet 1962 et expulse du territoire francais.” He was released from this establishment (Evreux) on July 4th 1962 and expelled from French territory. I knew that this was not so. Expelled from France, where would he have gone? Surely not back to Poland; that would have meant another prison sentence. Israel? Only his nephew Jules was still there for his father Jacob Adler had died of a heart attack in 1954 while Henri was in Poland. Whether Henri had remained as hostile to the State of Israel after the war there is no way of telling, but he hated the desert and had always been a European. Belgium? A possibility. Szymeck had stuck by him and travelled from Brussels to visit him in Fresnes; both he and his daughter Annette would have welcomed him there. Zurich? That was even more of a possibility. One of the Ministry of Justice letters had mentioned Zurich, which did suggest that Henri must have put that name down on some form. But David had died in 1957. Years later Henri told me the story he had heard from Yvette and Szymeck of David’s funeral service. A Christian service it had been, with a pastor who had transformed David into a Colonel in the Tsarist army that fought against the Bolsheviks and rejoiced in the “ miracle” of his conversion to Christianity. After the service, David’s sons Jules and Willy and his brother Szymeck had remained while Jules intoned, at Szymeck’s insistance, kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
“You know what? he’s smiling!” called Jules, when he finished. Every Adler knew that David had never been a Colonel in any army and had never been religious. He had converted for Friedi’s sake. And they all both enjoyed and approved the photograph she sent them of David’s tomb on which she had had engraved a cross and a Star of David. Zurich without David? Unlikely.
Willy, after a time in the United States after the Second world war , was settled in West Germany and from Mannheim drove often to Paris for weekends where he had learnt of Henri’s fate from Yvette. Mannheim would have been another possible haven. And his sister would gladly have tried to bring him to Australia.
But never again would Henri willingly have left Helene and Yvette. Or Paris. He lived in France for the rest of his life, grounded there until the late 70’s’s when he was granted a form of ID which authorized him to leave and re-enter the country. Had he been expelled in 1962 he would never had been allowed back into France. Alerted now against taking documents as gospel, I nevertheless tried again for a derogation, a waiver, of the law which would provide me with the prison documents and waited hopefully for an answer to this puzzle. But it never came
**** *****
When Willy and his wife visited Henri on his release from jail, they found him a man damaged in body and spirit. They persuaded him to go out with them to a restaurant, they said, and even to order his favourite bouillabaisse, but when it was served, he could not eat it. He refused to speak about prison, except to insist that he had been treated “very correctly and with respect”. His significant life had ended with the heart break of Yvette’s departure, with his loss of communist faith and his political disillusions; the years in prison were a minor matter.
I never did learn from documents what Henri actually did for the Polish government and finally gave up trying. He had paid dearly for it and atoned. It was not until many years after Henri’s death, when I read for the first time John le Carre’s great novel and met Alec Leamas , the spy who came out of the cold, that Henri’s world and his work finally opened to me. Organising networks of people in France and Italy and paying them for information, like the best of le Carre’s characters, this idealistic, strong and generous man who had earlier gone to the aid of the Spanish Republicans and fought with the British against fascism, saw his work for the Polish government as a continuation of those good causes and ground work for the “singing tomorrows.”
************ ************
Henri’s ability and character had attracted the attention of prison people, especially a visiting priest, impressed by his qualities and concerned for his life after release. They helped the 50 year old out into the world again; the new world of the giant electrical firm of Thomson-Brandt. The revolutionary student, the volunteer soldier in two hot wars and one cold one, now turned himself into a commercial traveller. Again his days were spent behind the wheel, but this time driving around the region, from shop to shop, to sell television sets and other domestic equipment. His honesty , charming nature and ability made him successful. He enjoyed his job for its human contact, its harmlessness and its income.
The care of Helene had harnessed Henri and Yvette with the unpleasant and difficult task of managing a dependent daughter. They continued to provide her with money after she left home, and when drug addiction threatened to land her in jail, shipped her across the channel with her boyfriend to settle, during the swinging seventies, in London. Henri, as he had long ago assured Yvette, would never share his life with another woman and those women friends he acquired with ease were always peripheral. Fixed at the centre of his life were Helene and Yvette. While Yvette’s new man was at her side when Helene returned with her child from London and separated from his father, Henri was at the other end of the phone.
Both parents remained filled with guilt. Yvette’s guilt turned to lies in her final manifesto. “No one has the right to have a child with a man she doesn’t love. I ask Helene’s pardon for it. I can no longer speak of her except for her childhood; to invoke her problems is infinitely too sad for me. My tears fall in speaking of her. The degradation that she lives in and spreads around her cut me to the heart. I feel at the hour of my death that I caused it; not by my behaviour once she was born but because of her conception” (unpublished ms)
Perhaps it was his guilt that prevented Henri from admitting the exact nature of his daughter’s difficulties. No member of his Australian family ever heard him use the words heroin or alcohol. Perhaps he felt that by not mentioning the words, the deeds might disappear.
Focus of her parents’ deep concern, Helene soon became the focus of family disapproval. “Have you heard?…. What’s to be done? How can he put up with her!” sang the constant cousinly chorus.
Drama attended every stay in Paris.
Henri had bought Helene a flat in Montmartre but sold it later to finance her a half share in the boutique beer shop established by her new boy friend.
In 1975, after we had left Papua New Guinea, Ken and I spent many months in France, the first one a hot August in Paris, studying French every day while living in the Cassagnol’s Montmartre flat.
Henri always loved the Australian connection, and that year was at his most happy, lively and amiable. Together we visited Helene at her boutique beer shop. We met regularly in his favourite Montparnasse bar to drink coffee, practise our idiomatic French, discuss politics, literature, food and films with him , his friend Arega and a young woman friend. We rode on his Metro, strolled to his favourite cafes. Together we visited Yvette in her Fontainebleau apartment, part of a modern block that had been built for American troops and filled with un-French mod-cons; we ate her delicious meals walked through the lush forest nearby and with Helene’s three year old son, who spoke a fluent baby French, we discovered the Zoo.
At the end of our stay in Europe when we were at 3 Adolphe Cherioux Henri called out incredulously one morning after listening to the early news: ”The Queen has dismissed your Prime Minister!” Later he read it in the paper: the Dismissal had for a moment launched Australia on to the French front page of the French papers and the Governor General into Henri’s mind. But his first thought was always fear for Helene.
At first the boutique beer shop was a success. Helene enjoyed being stylishly dressed , skilfully made up and sexy and revelled in the shop’s social life, She was pleased to one- up her older Australian cousins with a knowledge of brands of malt whisky and to shock the next generation of cousins, as they arrived on the European pilgrimage, with her drug-taking stories. 3 Adolphe Cherrioux was the Australian family’s base in Europe and he welcomed them and their friends , as he wrote, “with joy and with all my usual hospitality”. Throughout his working life he managed his life adequately, sometimes enjoyably; affectionate to visiting family, always anticipating visits and writing with often provocative wit to keep in touch. He had written in 1976 to tell us of Yvette’s inoperable cancer with profound sadness mixed with admiration for her courage and without a tinge of bitterness “I had always imagined I would go first -and it could still happen – and that others would have to solve all these problems. But after my tormented life”, he wrote to me “ I may still have to witness the death of my daughter’s mother, the woman to whom I was once bound by so much.” New problems rose up. What would become of Helene’s son being cared for by his grandmother, “on account of Helene’s health”? “I regard the future with anxiety, even anguish,” he wrote later in the same year as he contemplated life after the retirement due at the end of 1977. When the time came, he would have to give up his car and his French wage and subsist on a modest pension. Life would grow harder.Two deaths over the following two years added to his misery. First his sister Manka, my mother, who died suddenly of a stroke in July 1977, far away in Melbourne; in the following year in Paris, his old and dear friend Arega who died of cancer. About his sister, he wrote, “I am in too much pain to express my feelings;” but he was able to express them in person when a young member of his Australian family, working in Normandy, came to share his grief and comfort him. At the end of the seventies he wrote, sadly, “ My retirement, you know, is not very peaceful. Problems all the time that will probably last until the end. The most serious is my daughter, Helene. Always something happens to brutally interrupt my psychic equilibrium”. Little by little she had worked less in the shop and her drug dependence increased. Henri tried everything to set her up, watched, broken hearted, as she slid or jumped, off every platform he built for her. Helene’s drug usage was becoming more addictive though stubborn pride would never allow him to admit it. Yvette had moved from the apartment in Fontainebleau to a small cottage in Recloses, a village nearby, to make a permanent home for her grandson and cope with her addicted daughter. “Helene is my cross” she sighed to me one day, lapsing into the images of the faith she and her family had long ago rejected.
With her cancer in remission she was doing remarkably well, well enough to allow Henri to consider leaving France for some weeks and since no member of his far off family planned to visit for the next couple of years, Henri’s role as head of the Adler family led him to think seriously about taking up their offer to bring him to Australia. “I already have a valid passport” he wrote early in July 1980 “ and from then on began to plan the journey. “I have my visa for Australia, valid for a year with permission for a three months stay.” Adding in English, “HIP HIP HOURRAH”.
“If all goes well, I will soon make the journey of my dreams , joyfully but mixed with bitterness and sadness that you no doubt will understand.” Sadness above all at being in Melbourne without Manka; even the peaks of his life were now darkened.
Before taking off in the European winter of 1980 he devoted himself to the drawers full of those letters that he had exchanged with Yvette. How they had survived is a mystery. When she had handed them over to Henri is another. That they had survived is the strongest evidence against the “Beni” of Yvette’s Souvenirs, the man who could hardly have written any letters, let alone these.
Henri now re-read and sorted the letters chronologically, tied them into yearly bundles and gave a title to each. He then wrote a long letter to Helene, explaining himself and the letters. A farewell letter, it reads as though he feared he might never return.
****** ******
November 17 1980. 8 am. The sun is glaring, the temperature already high. At Kingsford Smith airport , excited in anticipation, Ken and I await the appearance of uncle Henri. He would have preferred to land in Melbourne but this did not suit that part of family, so the Canberrans will meet him in Sydney and he will spend his first weeks with them, move on to the larger Melbourne contingent and with them explore parts of the exotic continent. He had hoped to see the Centre and the great red rock but none of us could face Uluru in mid-summer so Uluru was not in our plan. Hundreds of passengers push trolleys through the great doors. Where is Henri.? As everyone has come out and we are about to make enquiries, we spot the short frame and cocky stroll of the sixty eight year old uncle, chuckling at the Australian welcome he has just been given. He had arrived carrying a bag full of French cheeses to find that Customs prohibited them. What to do? The Customs officer had offered him the alternative of eating the cheeses or collecting them at the end of his two months’ stay. Henri urged the Customs officer to take such excellent French cheese home for himself and left them behind, smiling.
His thoughtful niece has booked a harbourside apartment at McMahon’s Point so that he can taste the glories of Sydney Harbour while recovering from his journey across the world. But recovering from the journey is just a waste of time; looking out the window Henri ignores the sparkling harbour and the shining opera house and staring at the sterile high rise buildings declares coldly, “All big cities are the same!” He did find what seemed to his Australian hosts strange pleasures on the drive to Canberra. In Mittagong he is enchanted at the unimagined combination of hairdresser and tobacconist and enjoys a delightfully noisy cement beer “garden”. The national capital, however, appals him. “All those trees! All those little gardens! All those empty streets!” And after a day or so, “ It feels like a retirement village!” And then he and I set off for short bush tour, over the mountains to the south coast, exploring towns and villages, to stay overnight with a young friend then drive back up the coast to Sydney. Our journey began well with a visit to Lanyon, near Canberra, a historic farmhouse now a museum. Henri admired the 1840’s architecture and the furniture, the garden and the bush, the remnants of colonial life in the back sheds. Heading towards Cooma he listened amiably to my potted history, which included a recitation of the Man from Snowy River. His appreciative response to country pubs was quite opposite to mine. ”C’est propre, si propre! So clean! he remarked at Bredbo. “In France it would be filthy.” I had noticed only the smell of stale beer and the two old sad and ugly drunks propping up the bar. Our drive was well punctuated with stops for Gauloises. Henri’s iron self control was impressive; he never lit up in the car and never once asked for a cigarette stop. Had if I decided to punish him and drive without a break for four hours, he would not have admitted that he wanted a smoke; on the few occasions when I forgot and drove too long, he would ask about our next stop, without ever mentioning fags! He was entertained by the Aboriginal names of Merimbula, Pambula and we approached the Ben Boyd National Park and our friend’s house in happy anticipation.The evening was a great success. Our hostess Kate had prepared a delicious meal and served it with style on a verandah lit by candlelight and looking into bush; among the fellow guests was a young, attractive, pleasant and responsive young woman, with her current partner and several children. Henri was at his charming best. Later that night , wakened by Henri’s voice, quite scared, calling: “Kate, an officer is here!” I heard serious voices, the word “accident” and talk of horses. I decided to stay put and listened as Henri and the male guest drove off following our hostess and the officer and heard them later discussing the episode over cups of tea. A horse from our property that had escaped on to the highway was hit by a passing Volkswagen; the law was holding Kate responsible. Luckily no serious damage had been done.Early next morning, spruced up and smoking on the verandah, Henri was quite un-ruffled by the broken night’s alarms and excursions. Bursting with pleasure at the large rabbit, the blue wren and the colourful parrots he had just seen and the night’s exciting and unplanned close up of Australian country life which was exactly to his taste, he cheerfully accepted the weak tea he was served for breakfast and enjoyed everything he was given. Again at his most charming . In the car again, driving north, Henri gloomily reflected on the household’s disorder and bohemian relationships with its effect on the children, but cheered up as he came upon his two favourite aboriginal place names. It was then that the words Lill-y Pill-y and Ooll-ah –Dooll -ah first rolled happily in French off his tongue to remain in Australian family use for ever after.
The long, cigaretteless and foggy drive back to Sydney delivered us both rather edgily to bustling King’s Cross, an area I expected would be more sympathetic to Henri’s taste. But Sydney seemed to transform the charming Henri of the bush. When we dined with old and dear friends of his sister, former communist leaders, he tried to provoke them with anti communist taunts, and our own relations declined. “ We ware both being horrible.” I wrote home. The source of all our troubles seemed to be decision making: I asked him to choose what he would like to do and he refused. Now I see that it went far deeper: he did not want to be in Sydney at all or see anything of the city that I was so keen to show him. Never did I imagine that he would fall in love with Sydney as I had with Paris, but I had expected that he would respond appreciatively. But he was not interested in the Australia he saw as a pathetic imitation of Europe. Galleries and museums he would see better in Paris; only the distinctive bush, the pubs the landscape, the aboriginal names. I wanted him also to appreciate the Australia of buildings, books, films and paintings; the Australia of convicts, settlers and migrants. As it may have rankled with him that we had not taken him to Uluru, it began to rankle with me that he refused to even glance at my choices. Bringing him back to Sydney, I realise now, was asking for trouble. I wonder at myself. Knowing him so well, why did I press him in a way that would cause trouble? Late one afternoon , on a bench near Circular Quay, we are looking at the sunset and discussing what we would do that evening. I make two or three suggestions; again Henri refuses to choose. “Look, tell me what you want to do!! Silence. Suddenly, the people around us disappear, my mind goes blank, blood roars to my head and I lunge forward, furiously grabbing one of his ears in each hand and twist them both as powerfully as I can. Shouting with anger and pain, Henri, startled, leaps back, and I, just as startled and shouting abuse, drop my hands. Seconds later, still shaking , I apologise in wonderment and try to salvage the evening. But Henri wants nothing more to do with me. And how could I blame him? He stalks off. I visit sympathetic friends across the harbour for comfort, but eventually have to face the music. Henri is in the Kings Cross flat; his door is shut and next day he icily informs me that he wants to leave for Canberra. We drive almost 300 kilometres in silence, and in the few days before he leaves for Melbourne he speaks to me only through Ken. I have puzzled ever since over this ear episode and the violent person who had never appeared before and never appeared again. How had she learnt to twist ears? What if she’d had a knife in her hand?
To assault one of my girlhood heroes; was this uncontrollable anger a result of my lost illusions? The Lord, I recently re discovered, laid down the law to Moses: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and a hand for a hand. And for an ear ? Wonder and guilt never left me. But if uncle Henri remembered the episode, he never mentioned it and in the years after his one and only Australian visit, he continued to express thanks to his Australian family, observing happily, as he gazed at photographs of the children of the next generation, that the Adlers and Gutstadts, coming from grey, sad and martyred Poland had nevertheless “enriched the lovely Australian soil.”
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Months after his return from Australia, in March 1981, Yvette died; a calm and perfectly organised death, hastening the inevitable by her own hand . If she ever mentioned her love for Henri in the thoughtful, emotional and beautifully written final letters addressed to her friends and family, that did not appear among those published in the book produced by her dear friend Aline in the following year.
“Chez- moi, rien de nouveau”, nothing new at my place, began one of Henri’s letters in 1982 in a tone that expressed much of his last ten years. In1985, en route to Spain, following the tracks of Australians who had fought alongside him for the Republic during the Civil war, I spent time again with Henri in Paris. “I am fragile in health, my morale is pretty low and I’m filled with melancholy all along the line. Solitude weighs more and more heavily on me.” he had written to me the year before. I found this to be more than accurate; in a letter home wrote, “Everything about him is joyless. He is very low at the moment, aggressive and argumentative and refuses to be cheered up by me.” On this occasion again my good deeds produced only conflict. “Belligerent and ‘un peu masochist?)”, I wrote in my diary on 14July that year , before I learnt about his recent crisis of the heart, when he may have lost his life had it not been for the swift response of his doctor and the Sapeurs Pompiers, luckily based at the end of Adolphe Cherioux. I had been ignorant too of Adam Rayski’s book, which had appeared that year to awaken Henri’s lost illusions and perhaps re-awaken the problems of his Polish life.
Back in Paris again a few years later. “Only a small salad in the fridge” I note, “ and half a small bread on the table”. He had spent his last sou and explained that his pension money would not arrive for another few days. Even the most tolerant of his nephews and nieces agreed that he was starving because he had been cleaned out of even the small amount he kept back for himself from his pension money. Most of that he was saving to leave for Helene. “He should cut her off without a penny”, says an unforgiving cousin, “throw her off the raft and let her swim!”
Helene was in Paris on this occasion and urged me to ring her every day to report on Henri’s health. ‘I’m his daughter, darling. But he mustn’t know how ill I am darling. A quarter of my heart is dead and the rest is like a balloon but when he fell in the bath I came over to see him every day! I bought his bread!” “You’re wonderful!” I coo, hypocritically. “Not at all, he is my father!” It had been almost ten years since we last met and I found the new garrulous Helene puzzling.On this visit I heard Henri speaking every morning on the phone, softly and in his sweetest most persuasive voice; he was waking up Helene. He had persuaded her to enrol in a government typing and shorthand course for the unemployed, and though she rarely made it – both kept up the fiction of the bad heart – at least she was trying. Which may be why he was at his most charming that year. “This morning”, I wrote home, the dear uncle (!!) and I took breakfast on rue de Rivoli and strolled over to the Louvre to inspect I.M.Pei’s splendid new pyramids. He was as pleasant as though I was one of my brother’s girlfriends.”
In the summer of 1993, when I rolled my suitcase again from the Metro Mairie d’Issy , it was along the newly laid footpath of a gentrified rue Danton. Changes everywhere. Next to the shiny BMW showroom on the corner, a newly opened Italian restaurant and under the gold painted horse’s head that had gleamed for decades over the horse butcher’s, now an empty shop on the way to being transformed into a smart ladies’ hairdresser. “A pretty tough winter” Henri had written at the end of the last year, “A grey and stormy sky, like the grey and difficult political and social situation in France and in the rest of the world. And here am I, in my comfortable arm chair, wandering. Sometimes a book, sometimes a newspaper or the TV with my heavy heart (it remains the part of my body that works best) and my thick head. Filled with memories, shame and questions without answers about the “glorious” past, the equivocal present and a future unclear and impossible to predict. And on top of it all, nothing but solitude; for the most part, a solitude I have willed on myself. Strange? Not really.” It was strange, I thought, as was the marked difference between Henri the open and affectionate letter- writer and day to day Henri; the man who graciously mentioned the chair, a gift from the Australian family and the man who had coldly thrown down the francs I had tucked in his wallet on a previous visit. Turning into Adolphe Cherioux, I dropped in first, as usual, on uncle Henri’s friend, the Moroccan cordonnier who always enjoyed a chat as he mended the neighbourhood’s shoes. From him I received bad news. “Henri is not in his flat; he has been taken to the local hospital.” I let myself into the flat with the heavy brass keys that Henri had made for me once befor, that hang now on our Canberra kitchen wall. His cleaning lady had left for her home in Algeria some time before and “Issy le Moulineaux Plage”, as he had jokingly dubbed our grubby summer resort, was now dustier, more tattered and more squalid than ever. Later, I walked up the hill to the hospital to find Henri lying in the shiningly clean and unnatural setting, physically weak and devastated at lying here helpless instead of waiting at home to welcome me. Helene arrives. “Great hugs and affectionate bullshit mix with a genuine concern about Henri’s health.” I note in my diary, cynically asking whether her deepest concern may not be that if he is no more she will be left to her brother, who will not so easily be twisted round her finger. “He is generally tres sympa, even keeping his temper with the overwhelming Helene who is an awful composite of her mother and father” I noted and though her visits were often conflictual, she did visit and sometimes brought her son, a fine looking , tall twenty one year old. On this occasion Henri for the first time talked of dying and remarked, with his strong sense of Adlerness, that I would be the head of the family. Willy? “ Yes, yes, you and Willy.” I felt he had had enough, oppressed by insoluble problems in a world without hope either. But I was under-estimating the strength of his will, his fear for Helene’s future and the romanticism that still moved his heart even though the revolutionary path it had led him along had brought him to such a dead end. (add Lesley’s 1992 letter) His constant daily theme , continued during Willy’s nightly phone calls from Mannheim, was his determination, almost an obsession, to die a French citizen. His fervour for France had increased, despite his prison term, and every day he reminds me not to leave the apartment before the first mail and to return to the hospital each afternoon with the second, in case the papers he craves have been delivered. They never are. Dependence doesn’t suit him, his brusqueness doesn’t suit me; I have a struggle to respond coolly when he assails me on my afternoon visit: “You are late! Why are you so late?” I am leaving Paris for a while and urge Helene to keep Henri’s flat clean for him while I am gone. “Ho! Ho! Clean!” Have you seen it!!!” “What a mess that relationship is,” I tell my diary. “And what a pathetic woman she has turned out. Bluster, big talk. But at least we embrace warmly.” Henri is back at home the next time we meet, after convalescence with the Gorochovs in Normandy, shortened by his impatience with bourgeois country comfort and his need to return and prepare more documents for his citizenship application. Installed again on that arm chair in front of the TV, he looks forward once again to arrival of his Australian and European family and their friends. His health and spirits both improved by his quiet stay in Normandy. Why will he not admit it? As we walk to the Metro one summer evening , chatting pleasantly, he talks about DARTY the chain store, his clients in the travelling days, whose clever posters adorn every Metro station this year. As always, when the mood is right, Henri has much of interest to tell. The Dartys were a father and 3 sons Polish Jews who had survived Auschwitz but lost their wife and mother there. They had started in the late 1940s with nothing , now they were the biggest retailers of electrical goods in the country. The three sons took over the firm, and when one of them was killed in a car accident, Henri in retirement had attended his funeral and was warmly greeted by the brothers. At the funeral he heard this story about the dead brother. Hearing that a Darty employe had told another that it was a pity all the Jews didn’t finish in gas ovens, he had called in the man , paid him off and dismissed him, adding “If I ever see you on the street, I’ll break your neck”. The brothers repeated the story with pride and so did Henri. The same summer, when he shared his beloved city also with his “god-daughter” Judy and her children, bumps and misunderstandings mixed with affection, generosity and fun. One night after dinner as we strolled to Port de Versailles, Henri smilingly demonstrated how to cheat the Metro, pushing us through a turnstile as though he was again a poor student.He pressed money on everyone, hired taxis to the airport, insisted on paying for a large lunch and altogether fussed as though this were a very special occasion. And indeed it was, for his god daughter and her children would never see him again. Today I can recognise with pure pity the masochistic passion for the Immortal Beloved, so furiously boiling in him long ago, cooled down now and possibly diverted into the sometimes cloying affection he lavished on great nieces and their daughters. At the time, pity mingled with discomfort at such an excess of sensibility.
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As his neighbourhood improved, Henri’s domestic situation declined and new drama was played at Adolphe Cherrioux. Again Helene rings every day. On one occasion she talks wildly about her son coming to Australia and asks me to swear that I’ll look after him. I am puzzled and silent as I come away from the phone, but Henri insists I tell him what Helene wanted. “She’s drunk!”, I suddenly blurt out. “Oh I don’t think so”, he replied, but without conviction. The last time I stayed with Henri was in 1995. Helene was not in Paris. “Where is she?” I asked. Staying with a boyfriend in a hotel at Deauville, Henri replied calmly as though Deauville were not the resort of film stars.
“ Deauville! How come?”
“Oh, Christian finally paid out her share of the shop.”
As Helene had worked less and less, her boutique beer shop partner had dismissed her and now after some legal wrangling, her share- Henri’s share- of the money had been returned. And against all advice he had handed it all over to Helene. That was the summer when Willy, wearing his U.S. veterans’ cap, marched with the thousands who thronged the Champs Elysees for the 50th anniversary of the end of the European war and later lunched happily with his son, his cousin and uncle at Goldenberg’s restaurant in the Marais, an old haunt. The photos that capture the last meeting of three generations of Adlers reveal an old, pale, unsmiling Henri .We said goodbye with tears each knowing that it could be our last time together.
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Helene Adler, Thomas Champon, Ouri Gorochow et sa famille Ses enfants, petits-enfants,
Les familles Adler, Gust, Inglis, Nesher, Turner,Ses neveux, nieces;
Vous font part du deces de Monsieur Henri ADLER
Ancien Combattant des Brigades Internationales en Espagne,Ancien Combattant des Armees Alliees pendant la 2eme Guerre Mondiale.Survenu le 25 Juillet 1995, a l’age de 82 ans.
This formal announcement of Henri’s death had been composed and sent out to the scattered family by the good Ouri who described himself as Henri’s son and published only the peaks of Henri’s life. When he saw that Henri could no longer look after himself, he had gathered him up and driven him once more to Normandy. Unwilling to leave Adolphe Cherioux, but too weak to do more than grumble and complain and quite soon, too weak for anything Henri spent all day in bed, cared for lovingly by his step- son and daughter in law. I telephoned him from Canberra and wept to hear his gentle, grateful and painfully affectionate voice. Days after, he was dead.
Henri’s funeral was in faraway Normandy. The mayor addressed the small gathering of family and neighbours in the little old churchyard at La Gonfriere, the village where the Gorochows had spent years of summers and providence brought his Australian nephew my brother Ian, who happened to be in England. All the nephews and nieces had subscribed to buy the plain white tombstone, inscribed simply with his name and dates engraved in gold.
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“Were you there”, Helene asked me one day in May 1999.
“No”, I was in Australia. Ian represented all of us.”
“ My father loved only two flowers, lilac and yellow roses. I put yellow roses on his grave. Not at the funeral. I didn’t go, because I was completely drunk. After his death I was mad for a month, lost my mind. I copied some words from a book that I’d been reading and laid the paper on his grave when I visited it.” She rummaged in the bookshelves and found the book. “ I changed ‘Belle’ into ‘Papa,” she explained, then read, beautifully, from Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, the following words that made an eloquent epitaph for the man and his beliefs.
“the dawning of a new world, Papa, a free country, Papa, above religion because secular, above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened, above hatred because loving, above vengeance because forgiving, above tribe because unifying, above language because many-tongued, above colour because multi coloured, above poverty because victorious over it, above ignorance because literate, above stupidity because brilliant. Freedom, Papa, the freedom express, soon we will stand upon the platform and cheer the coming of the train.’ (P51 Vintage)
“I knew the freedom express was not coming soon, but that didn’t worry me as I stood at his grave alone with the paper, trying to work out where his head was, where his feet were. My brother had asked me if I wanted a Jewish burial; I said no, but after I put down the words and flowers, I made a Cross of David with stones and put it on the grave.”
The cross of David was not there when I saw Henri’s grave. It had gone, no doubt with the gravestone that the stonemason took it back after the funeral to repair a crack. When he was told that an Australian niece was coming to her uncle’s grave, the good man returned from the nearby town of l’Aigle and laid the cracked stone temporarily on the grave.
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Helene was at her most affectionate before I left Paris early in November 1999; her last words were “write to me, darling”. And I did, as soon as I arrived home but doubt she ever read the letter.
- December 1999 1.08 am our time, a message landed on the answering machine that I picked up in the morning. “’Allo Amirah!” a high, strained French voice brought the news that Helene was dead.
It seemed that she had been asking for lots of money for some time. She needed all her money, she insisted, to go away for Christmas. After her brother and his family returned from their holiday house to find that she had not drawn money from the account for some days, Zou anxiously rang the neighbour. He had not seen Helene for days. Again as before, her borhter, the Sapeurs Pompiers and the police broke into her flat. Again she was lying on her disordered and filthy bed. But this time, a syringe was sticking out of her leg and she was dead. Though deeply saddened by the news, I felt relieved that Henri at least was spared her end.
The funeral, delayed for an autopsy, was attended by her son, her brother and his wife and her cousin Annette who came from Brussels to represent the Adler family; Helene had no friends in Paris.
In the cemetery at La Recloses, alongside her mother, they laid the fifty year old girl. Three simple tombstones now stand side by side on one wide grave planted with a bushy shrub. “Love one another and think of me” are the words chosen by Yvette engraved on that of her mother Helene Laguerre. On Yvette Raymond’s, “Courageous Mimi” -the name her grand daughters had given her. On the most recent, simply “Helene Adler 1949-1999.” What else was there to say?
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As I journey at my desk through her father’s life, I see Helene smoking and drinking beside me, I hear her husky voice and recall the many surprisingly friendly passages in our times together. I regret I have no recent photograph, not that she wanted me to photograph her. As she had remarked one day, “My face is fucked”.
As I hear Helene’s laughing question : “But who was Sarah Poch? Where did the name come from? And who am I?” I recall that in the town of Sosnowiecz no record had been found of Henri’s birth and wonder now if the clerks had been searching for the son of Bernard Adler and Sarah Poch. I wish I could have sent Helene the news that came recently from a second cousin in Israel, a man I found on the Internet. Then she would have learnt that our grandmother Hannah had a sister Miriam – our second cousin’s grandmother- and that she had married a man called Moshe Haim Poch.
So it was his aunt’s name that came to Henri’s mind when he needed to conceal his mother, probably the most beautiful aunt who had made such an impression on him as a boy as he journeyed from Poland to Palestine.
“A spectre is haunting Europe -the spectre of Communism” wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. Their Manifesto laying down steps for a new society where all activities were directed to the public good, instantly inspired idealists all over the world and continued to do so. History wiped out some parts of Marx and Engels’ plan and the success of their predicted revolution in Russia, the most unlikely of countries, transformed that idealism into a reality which, for good and ill, haunted the world for almost the whole of the 20th century. Men and women who in other ages would have been inspired by faith in God to renounce personal gain for the good of others, now followed the ideals of communism. Henri was one of those. A romantic idealist , a “stupid humanist”, the “Don Quixote of universal socialism”, as other communists described him during the war, a man whose passion was as powerful as his revolutionary fervour, doubly disillusioned by Yvette and by communism but despite everything , to the end loving and compassionate and optimistic for the world, if not for himself.
He wrote towards the end of his life to a young Australian student friend of his family he had befriended in Paris, “Now in the twilight of my life I must tell you that in my youth I was also attracted to Maths and although later I leant towards philosophy and sociology, I am still fascinated for that science at once logical and romantic. … My romanticism led me along other paths which left me lamentably stranded in a bitter situation from which there was no escape… C’est la vie.” 10,838 words
tom rigby - melbourne 