My father was Polish. He did industrial work and had been sent to Madrid, where he met my mother. After that, for his work, he came to France. When war broke out, they were both in Paris. As a Polish-German subject, he was regarded as German and was imprisoned. He was put in a detention centre with his wife and son, Louis. Detention was always atrocious. During that time, my sister was born. They were unable to give her enough food, and she starved to death. I think she must have been about a year old. Losing her deeply affected my mother.
It was awful because they were then moved to Saumur. The people of Saumur came out to abuse them, throwing stones through the bars. After that, they were locked up in the Seminary in Angers, requisitioned for that purpose. They were both in detention. My father was Polish-German, so he was regarded as an enemy of the French nation. This had a profound effect on my father and he never got over it.
I was born in Angers hospital in 1917. When my father was released from detention, they moved to the Rue Saint-Jacques in Angers. There, my father did odd jobs to earn a living. In Poland, my grandfather was a watchmaker. He repaired watches, and my father began repairing watches himself. One day, someone gave him a gold watch to repair. Two Americans came into the tiny room where he worked and stole it. You can understand how quickly rumours spread in the neighbourhood. My father worked himself to the bone to pay for the watch, but people saw us as thieves.
He felt humiliated. This convinced him he couldn’t remain in France. He wanted to leave, to go back to Poland. But my mother hesitated. She had known poverty and suffering, and because of her children, she didn’t want to take risks. So she refused to follow him at that point. Then one day, she lost track of my father. They separated not for family reasons, but because of all that life had done to them.
At first, my father went back to the Saarland. We heard from him for a while. He kept asking my mother to come and join him with the children. But you can understand that my mother didn’t want to take us on a journey into the unknown without anything to fall back on. So she kept hesitating, hesitating, and then one day, the letters stopped. Later, through enquiries, we learned he had gone back to Poland and had disappeared during the bombing of Danzig, now Gdansk. That is all we could find out.
So we lived with my mother. She was a formidable woman, someone who earned the respect of everyone around her not by complaining, but by making sure her children were well brought up. She knew how to use her intelligence. That’s why I’ve always fought for the children and young people we are involved with to learn how to make the best of their intelligence. People living in poverty can find no answers in impossible situations, and this is what destroys them. They can never move forward.
The huge obstacle they face is that they can’t think things through, grasp what’s happening to them, to seize opportunities. And they don’t know how or when to remain silent, when to step back, and when to put themselves forward. Can you understand that?
That’s one of the reasons why, when I arrived in the camp in Noisy-le-Grand, I was more concerned with creating a nursery school and a library to support the school than with distributing food or other necessities. My main concern was sharing knowledge. I saw boys and girls of extraordinary intelligence who, at school, just didn’t do a thing. They felt alienated, so out of place. I watched them grow up and thought that, anywhere else, these children might have become teachers, doctors, or priests. They completely lost their way in life because they couldn’t get a grip on their thinking.
This is a profound injustice.