Mélanie's Blog | Henri Muller
Saturday, June 15, 2019
This afternoon, I had an appointment with Samuel Muller -son of Michel- whom I contacted in February via Facebook so that he could connect me with his aunt (I knew that his dad had passed away) hoping to be able to organize a meeting with the group of students that I will accompany to Paris next January. He told me that unfortunately Annette was seriously ill but that he was willing to answer my questions about his family's story.
I went to Menilmontant early this morning to try to recognize the places Annette described in her testimony and to retrace the path Rachel and the children took on the morning of July 16, 1942, from 3 rue de l'Avenir to La Bellevilloise. I had never been to this neighborhood.
Rue de l'Avenir (Future Street) is an impasse. On the 1940 plan, it is called Passage de l'Avenir. Rue, Passage, Future are urban anomalies as much as historical ones for the Mullers. On July 16, 1942, this place was indeed a dead end for them, and certainly the starting point of the narrowing of their future.
Visiteurs circulant sur la plate-forme mobile installée lors de l'Exposition universelle de 1900, found on Vimeo
Upon leaving Rue de l'Avenir, I turned left and walked down therue Pixérécourt.I recognized the haberdashery where Rachel had sent Annette that morning supposedly to buy a comb but certainly in a desperate attempt to allow her little one to run away. On the other hand, I could not recognize the bakery whose owners had applauded the sad spectacle of the raid.
I wasn't sure which way to go, but the street seemed ready to usher me along. The sign of a restaurant named Là-Haut (Over There) convinced me to go straight.
I then turned right on rue de Ménilmontant and started walking down in search of the Bellevilloise. As I went too far, I had to find a shortcut to catch up with rue Boyer. The name of the street I cut through was appropriate to our story this time: rue Juillet (July street). I finally arrived in front of the Bellevilloise where Rachel and the children were locked up and from which Henri and Jean had fled. Like a Greek chorus, the city reminded me of the objective of my project with these red banners stretched across the front of the establishment and whispering to me "ZONE SILENCE".
Addendum
When we filmed Henri, I discovered that I had been mistaken about the haberdashery. He explained the store with the blue front was a dry cleaner's back then. The haberdashery was located further down, at 14 rue Pixérécourt. Today it is a physiotherapist's office whose facade has erased all external traces of the old store.
Nevertheless, the Streetview function of Google map allows us to go back in time to 2008 and to find the different appearances that a place has had since. On the photo of 14 rue Pixérécourt taken in 2008, we discover wooden panels that remind us of the commercial past of the place and let us imagine the store where Annette went.
Monday 31 January 2022
While researching the story of Sarah Montard (née Lichtsztejn), I found myself on Rue des Rigoles on Google Map. Although the building I was looking for no longer exists, I nevertheless found myself nose-to-nose with a mirage, a place straight out of Georges Perec’s universe.
At 28 rue des Rigoles, a haberdashery is still there. In words only. And these words are getting shorter by the day. The screenshots below allow us to see what the store on rue Pixérécourt must have looked like. But above all, they allow us to preserve this future non-place from the ultimate erasure.
As for the bakery, it was at the corner of Rue de Pixérécourt and Rue de l'Est. This East that Rachel had left and where she was ineluctably brought back to be murdered. Henri was happy to point out to me that the famous bakery was now a very private club. "That'll teach those good people as they say!" he quipped, with a mischievous smile, referring to the bakers. "I have a picture from when it was still a bakery. I'll show it to you."
Later, I met Samuel Muller at 3 rue de l'Avenir. We ended at the P'tit Bistrot located at 108 rue de Ménilmontant.
During the conversation, Samuel mentioned his uncle Henri, the last survivor of the siblings but who, unlike Michel and Annette, rarely testified in public.
I told him about my project to retrace the steps of his grandmother and her children on the day of the Vel d'Hiv round-up with a 360-degree camera. By going from the door of the Muller's apartment rue de l'Avenir to the Bellevilloise, this film would allow us to tell the story of the family but also of History by reviving the sound of footsteps on the staircase, the sound of the door closing, by making the façades of the city , which have certainly changed but which know how to whisper what they have seen to those who lend an ear, speak. What if Henri was part of the film? He could be our guide who scrapes the newer layers of paint off the walls and reveals a bit what they looked like on that day... Samuel promised to call his uncle and tell him about the video project. We'll see... [the rest of this post is on Rachel Jedinak’s website]
Sunday, June 16, 2019
Received a text from Samuel. Henri Muller agrees to meet me and participate in the film! Samuel gave me his phone number.
[Later in the day]
Meeting with Henri at 3 rue de l'Avenir on July 10th...
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Henri arrived with a plastic bag in which was a folder filled with documents about his family and the Vel d'Hiv roundup.
We filmed him alone as he followed the path he took with his mother, brothers and little sister on that July 16. All along the way, he commented on the places he passed: where the store where Rachel sent Annette to buy a comb was, where the bakers applauded the procession, where he went to the cinema, where he'd meet the gang he was the leader of, etc.
The arrival at the Bellevilloise was particularly moving. How can one imagine that within the walls of the hipster establishment, whose brunch is praised by some tourist sites, hundreds of women and children were locked up before buses drove them to the Vélodrome d'Hiver?
We had lunch at the P'tit Bistrot. After eating, Henri took out of his pocket a small metal box meticulously closed with a rubber band rolled up twice. "These are the pills that help me digest as they say. Would you like one? They are Vichy lozenges."
It made me think of the book Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas
[...] What is unbearable about "Vichy" is not so much the collaboration or the organized political crime as what was at the very foundation of the Petainist ideology and which was, for a time, favored by the majority: the will to put an entire people out of the war and the course of History in brackets. [...]
Wednesday October 21, 2020
More than a year since we filmed Henri. As if fate was determined to keep his story in brackets, the audio file was corrupted, one of the SD cards disappeared from my suitcase... and to top it all off Covid. Thanks to a sabbatical semester, I was able to return to Paris, which, with its curfew and laissez-passer, is vaguely reminiscent of another era.
Today, wearing a mask and carrying my necessary lockdown travel certificate, I went to visit Henri and his wife, Rose. Henri, sitting upright on his sofa, kindly agreed to be interviewed. I didn't dare tell him that the video we filmed last year never saw the light of day. It would take a lot of Vichy lozenges to help him digest the news!
Henri wants me to come back and show me the letters he received from his father and Annette during the war.
Friday, October 30, 2020
I went back to Henri's. Rose had prepared mint tea and cookies for us. Henri arrived with a box full of letters, postcards, Catholic announcements. "Go ahead and rummage through, as they say!"
Annette and Michel's testimonies had already told me about their mother: a funny woman, a protective mother. In turn, the letters revealed to me a brave father, loving and protective at all costs. How did Manek manage to keep writing to his children? He could have been arrested. How did he find the means to send them packages when he had nothing left? His courage amazes me.
And how moving it is to read these handwritten cards, whose words are often a phonetic transcription of the way he pronounced them. As you read them, you can hear his sweet accent from another land. There are also cards impeccably written by his friend Marc. Henri told me that Marc had "a great education and a very good job, as they say. That's why he wrote well." Manek dictated to Marc, who then rephrased in "good French." A card written in July 1942 suggests that Manek dictated it to the concierge who hid him the night of July 15-16. We noticed with Henri that the French of Marc the immigrant is better than that of the French concierge.
In his letters to his father, Henri constantly tries to reassure his father and tells him to be careful. Annette is a little girl with a strong temperament. I'm not surprised!
The Church is present in this correspondence, whether it is in the front line or between the lines, as evidenced by the communion announcements and the photos of Jean and Henri in their ceremonial garb. And of course, there is Sister Clotilde, the guardian angel, whom I discover was really tall in the photos.
-Henri, can I take pictures of the letters?
-Take, take! And have some more tea!
Sunday, June 20, 2021
Still masked, Henri and I met at the exit of the Place-des-Fêtes metro station. He was just the same, with his plastic bag in one hand and his box of Vichy lozenges firmly tucked in his pocket.
We went up Olivier-Métra street. The elementary school was open as it is a voting station. We took the opportunity to enter in the schoolyard. Suddenly, Henri disappeared. I found him trying to open a door:
-Come on, Melanie! I'll show you something.
I snuck into the building, which was pitch black. You couldn't see anything. I could only hear the clacking of Henry's sandals on the floor and the rustling of his bag. I was looking for the light switch. Swiftly, Henri had already stepped down the stairs. The concierge, alarmed by suspicious noises, came out of his room. Henri disarmed him with his smile and especially with the story of the marble plaque on the wall.
-You see these names? They were all my buddies.
First on the list, I recognized the name of Joseph Brandwayn, who had escaped from the Bellevilloise with Henri and Jean, but who unfortunately had preferred to rejoin his mother at the Vel d'Hiv.
I took a picture of Henri in front of a triptych "Liberté-Egalité-Fraternité" painted on a wall of the playground. In front of the colorful painting and behind the little man in the beige jacket, I caught a glimpse of the pupil Henri Muller, first in his class, who was puffing up his chest and staring at the camera with his mischievous look.
We went back on our way and walked along the road he once took every day to get home from school. A jogger came out of 3 rue de l'Avenir. We told her Henri's story and she kindly let us go back up the stairs he had run down on July 17, 1942.
-I'm ready when you are, Mélanie.
-Okay, Henri!
-So, let's go, as they say!
Henri walked down the stairs, straight as an arrow, despite his slippery sandals. Less sure of myself, I followed him with my camera in hand, listening carefully to the cracking of the wood under our steps. "It was already cracking at the time", he had told me.
Once out of the dead end, we turned left on rue Pixérécourt and headed for the Bellevilloise. Just like in 1942.
Like in 2019 too, but this time the video will see the light of day.
The film was supposed to stop at the Bellevilloise because I didn't want Henri to get tired. Outside of the old gathering place, I was going to turn off my camera.
-So now we escape to the Place du Guignier where I found my father?
-We go wherever you want, Henri. I follow you.
(...)
-Then full speed ahead!
I turned the camera back on and we continued our race through time.
Monday, June 21, 2021
I went back to 3 rue de l'Avenir in the late afternoon to film again the route I took yesterday with Henri. I prefer to have as many shots as possible for the final version.
Guinguettes were set up all around. The heart of the neighborhood was beating to the rhythm of improvised concerts in the street. The air was joyful and light. I had forgotten that it was the Fête de la Musique and therefore the first day of summer. On Rue Boyer, the Café des Sports and L'Echappée (The Escape) had only kept their names from the story that took place on July 16, 1942. Gone were the buses that were parked in front that day and that were going to drive their freight to the Palais des Sports where the little ones were expecting to see a cyclist make an incredible breakaway. Fortunately, the city knows how to be mischievous and to remind the walker who is ready to listen . On its walls, it writes in sympathetic ink texts that we thought forgotten or that we wanted to forget: Café des Sports, L'Echappée. Of course, no cyclist appeared on the Vel d'Hiv track, but Henri, Jean and their friend Joseph did accomplished an incredible breakaway.
Joseph preferred to go around the track once and back to where he came from. I was thinking of this child lost without his mother when, on the wall of the Bellevilloise, two steps away from the current commemorative plaque, I read: Je ne pense COVID qui nous sépare (I can only think of the void that separates us with a play on the word Covid). New wink of the city. Despite the signifier only our current time knows, the tag screams the emptiness Joseph must have felt then so that it does not fall into oblivion.
Place du Guignier, I imagined Rachel and Manek twirling in a frenzied waltz under the lanterns, loving each other madly while Annette, Henri, Jean and Michel played with their friends...
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
At the end of the 1942 school year, Henri received as a prize La Vie de Guynemer written by Henri Bordeaux and published in 1920. As Annette explained in her testimonies, Henri read a few pages every night and put the book under his pillow for the next day. This is what he did on the evening of July 15. When the police came to arrest them in the early morning, Henri was not allowed to take his prize with him and the reading of the aviator's adventures stopped there too.
I found a copy of the book and sent it to Henri this morning with a note:
Summer 2021
“Honor to the Mullers!”
My dear Henri,
You started this book in July 1942. History did not let you finish it. It remained under your pillow and then?
I found a copy that I am sending you so that the little boy who became an old man can continue reading it.
With all my regards,
Mélanie
Letter from Henri dated August 14, 2021
Monday, August 30, 2021
But I had Henry on the phone yesterday to thank him for his letter and he didn't say anything about it!
I called him on the spot to offer my condolences and to apologize for perhaps not giving him room to tell me about his sister's death during our conversation yesterday.
-I didn't want to spoil your last days of vacation. Indeed, Annette left us on August 9. She swallowed something that took the wrong path as they say.
The wrong path. Like when she didn't understand her mother's ruse and came home. Like when the family obeyed the police officers' orders and went down the stairs. Annette dreamed so often that she walked back up those stairs.
The wrong path. Like that Avenir street which is a dead end. Like this Avenir (Future) of which Rachel was deprived. Like this street to which the Memorial's tribute to Annette preferred the Rue des Envierges.
With this familiar expression, Henri had just unraveled the main thread of their story. And all the Vichy lozenges he has in his pocket will never be enough to make it go away "as they say".
Letter by Henri dated October 4, 2021
Translation:
Dear Mélanie,
We hope this letter finds you and your family in good shape.
For both of us on the health front, we are due to receive our 3rd vaccine towards the end of October. For you, does this pandemic not disturb you too much for all the work you have to do in addition to your private life [?]
For us, life goes on despite Annette's departure. It is now that her absence is felt much more during family gatherings. But she will always be the "Little girl of the Vel d'Hiv".
Of course, if you come to Paris, it would be a pleasure for us to welcome you at our house and do not hesitate to prepare for us the questions of your students.
We look forward to seeing you.
We send you our best wishes.
Rose and Henri