Hélène Mengin
by Mathilde Amigorena

We found out by chance. Marion took a class taught by a tiny woman. She had short grey hair and a voice like tires on gravel. She taught History. In the woman’s office, Marion mentioned her mother -my aunt- ’s name, “Mengin”, and the woman recognized it. I can imagine that her eye twinkled when she heard the name, but the rest of her face stayed perfectly still when she said, “You’re from the family of Hélène Mengin, the traitor.”

World War II looms in my family. In the summer, as children, we ran, and swung, and raced and laid in the garden of a large family house where my grandmother spent the years between 1940 and 1945. Even though the house back then was overcrowded with family members, and run by her mean grandmother, it was a haven from the bombs. In 1939, in the suburbs of Paris, my grandmother, and many others, stayed awake through a nightmare. No one can be rocked to sleep by the sound of explosions, never knowing when to expect the next one, no rhythm, just random terror. It froze her, a chill she still feels when she hears of people, somewhere in the world, living under air raids. So the beat of her grandmother’s heels, on the hardwood floor, waking her up on her way to mass on Sunday mornings, the memory of it still brings a sweet taste of almond and peace to her tongue.

My grandfather, also, was tucked away to safety during the war, but none of my cousins or I have ever been to that place in Normandy. My grandfather doesn’t speak much. He yells. He yells to shut the doors so they don’t slam in the wind in a terrifying boom that reminds him of things we don’t know. He yells between gritted teeth to put shoes on when we run barefoot on the gravel in the driveway to the house because we’re going to hurt yourselves! We watch as his fists close and he boils, we wait to see the fumes spur out. We’ve all grown up with Pano’s anger. Most of us don’t get hurt by it anymore. We know where it comes from, the violence in him.

My grandfather did not only come out of the war without the ability to control his anger, he came out of the war without parents. On a summer morning in 1944, Suzanne and Emile Mengin were getting ready to take a train somewhere, somewhere where they would continue the fight -when the Gestapo came. They arrested everyone in the Parisian apartment, everyone but one person.

The person whose name was on the lease.

The person who was my great-grandfather’s sister.

The person who the tiny gray woman accused of being a nazi spy, of having called the Gestapo on her own brother.

Hélène Mengin.