You’re eight years old. Your father wakes you up in the middle of the night and tells you to get dressed. Soon you find yourself, your four-year-old brother, and three-year-old sister bundled up, [laced in a car, and taken away by two women you’ve never seen before. They take you to a state-run home for orphaned children, and they tell you will never see your parents or your older brother again.
This is what happened to Ariella Palacz. She was living in Paris. The year was 1942. Her family was Jewish. What she will find out years later is that her mother had disappeared from a psychiatric hospital, her father and young-teenaged brother were going into hiding, and she and her two younger siblings were placed in the orphanage in an effort to save them from deportation by the German Nazis occupying Paris.
“I Love You My Child, I’m Abandoning You” is Palacz’s story of that time and what happened afterward. It is a moving, often disturbing, and sometimes horrifying account of what happened to a Jewish girl and her family during the Holocaust.
Palacz spent several months in the orphanage before being sent south to a foster family. On the train, she discovers her younger brother and sister, but they’re once again separated and sent to different families. She won’t see them again for years. She’s housed with an older couple in a small town south of Paris. They did not know she was Jewish; had they found out, her fate might have been very different. Her treatment varied from cruel to kind. She was raised as a Christian, and attended both school and church, where she was enrolled in catechism classes.
Sometime after the end of the war, her father finds her and brings her home to Paris. He and her older brother successfully remained hidden during the occupation. Her mother was killed by the Nazis; like in Germany, psychiatric institutions were emptied and closed, their patients and inmates sent to the extermination camps. The family’s large number of Polish relatives did not survive; most died in the Treblinka camp.
Palacz tells her story from both a first-person, “this is happening now” perspective that alternates with the years in Jersualem when she’s actually writing the account. Evoking the memories of that time is especially painful, and finds respites in a rare snowfall, a pine tree outside her window, and the beauty she sees in Jerusalem.
In 1970, some 15 years after she marries, she, her husband, and her two children emigrate to Israel. A third child is born there. A woman who had largely rejected her faith or any belief, Palacz eventually convinces herself, and then her husband, to move to Israel. Her account was written in the 1999-2003 times period. A mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, she died in 2017.
“I Love You My Child, I’m Abandoning You” is the story of one woman, what happened to her as a girl during a terrible time, how she survived, and the psychological scars that time left on her. It’s also the story of human resilience in the face of cruelty and horror.
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Claire Spurling
The past and present intertwined.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 9, 2021
