My uncle, who has lived in New York for decades, has said of Paris: “If you can’t find anything interesting when walking down the street, look to your left, to your right, or above you.” Living in the City of Lights has certainly allowed more time for this now that I study here. But on that morning in late January, it was not the Sorbonne campus at the far north of Paris I was headed towards, but the Piscine des Amiraux, a nearby Art Deco swimming pool.
I was making my way down the rue de Clignancourt to dodge the bustle of the Boulevard Barbès thoroughfare that this smaller street is perpendicular to, when I turned my head and glimpsed an apartment at number 103. Above the door was a plaque that began with the following words: “ici vécut [here lived] Lazare Pytkowicz, dit [aka] ‘Louis Picot,’ 29 février 1928 – 12 octobre 2004.” The plaque went on to say that this Lazare Pytkowicz was the son of immigrants – their nationality was not specified – that he had been in the French Resistance at fourteen, fled the mass Jewish roundup of the Vélodrome d’Hiver in July 1942, decorated with the Legion of Honor (France’s highest military honor) and, aged only seventeen, made a Compagnon de la Libération – an honor instated after the Second Word War and bestowed on resisters against Nazi occupation.
I looked twice to make sure that I had not misread any of this. History, it seemed, had reached out again and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. After a lengthy swim, I started back towards my apartment and passed the plaque a second time. This only confirmed that I had to learn something more about this man to understand the plaque’s story.
The first thing I noticed when I began my research, via a platform called Cairn to which my university allowed free access, was a similarity between Mr. Pytkowicz’s first name and that of a key figure in the religion I was raised in. Lazarus of Bethany, according to the Gospel of John, was a man whom Christ restored to life four days after his death. The story at hand is not quite the same, although Lazare – or “Petit Louis” as the Resistance later codenamed him – confronted death several times, yet escaped each time. At every point where it appeared that Lazare’s story would end, it continued, which is something tragically rare in the case of any narrative intersecting with the Holocaust. I therefore hope that my words will succinctly convey the singularity of Lazare Pytkowicz’s life.
At every point where it appeared that Lazare’s story would end, it continued, which is something tragically rare in the case of any narrative intersecting with the Holocaust.
His story did not begin on the rue de Clignancourt, but in Warsaw, Poland. This was where Lazare’s parents met and were married, and was the birthplace of his two sisters and brother. “Vel d’Hiv” is the colloquial diminutive of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a former indoor cycling arena built in 1909 that held, on July 16, 1942, the roundup of 13,000 Jews assembled by the Nazi administration in France with the collaboration of the French police. “Vent printanier,” or “Springtime wind,” was its euphemistic codename. I will return to this event later in Lazare’s story.
Poland was a nation experiencing growing pains, having been resurrected by the 1919 Versailles Treaty before facing xenophobic backlash and pogroms in the early 1920s. These factors made staying dangerous for Lazare’s father, Jankiel, and his young family. He left Warsaw for Paris, where he sought work in the craft he had mastered in his native country: cabinetmaking. Fortunately, work was easy to come by and his family followed soon after, settling in the Jewish neighborhood of the Marais in central Paris.
Jankiel Pytkowicz quickly a regular at the St. Ouen flea market in the northernmost tip of Paris, incidentally near where my Sorbonne campus now is. After Lazare’s birth at the Rothschild Hospital on February 29th, 1928 – “my birthday was only celebrated every four years,” he would later jest – the family moved into an apartment in the sixth arrondissement (urban district), near Saint Germain des Prés, where they would remain until the beginning of the war. The place had no running water and minimal comfort but Lazare nonetheless remembered his childhood as being a happy and abundant one: his parents strove despite their limited means for good lives for their four children and especially in the years following the 1929 stock market crash.
Lazare’s childhood was not religious – both his parents were agnostic and spoke Polish and Yiddish interchangeably. He grew up playing cops and robbers or floating sailboats in the nearby Luxembourg Garden with his closest friend, Jean Haut, or accompanying his father in his Citroën B12 to pick up antiques to sell.
The move to rue de Clignancourt occurred around 1939, the year in which Adolf Hitler and the Luftwaffe attacked Poland on September 3. Jankiel Pytkowicz and his brother Charles both enlisted in the army. Thus began a period termed by historians as the drôle de guerre (or “phony war” in English) during which battles were scarce. Colonnades of Polish refugees flooded the boulevard d’Ornano, the northern portion of boulevard Barbès, advancing on foot, on horseback or by bicycle. Only a few months later, the procession would be of an altogether different nature, since it was that of the German army following its successful offensive on May 10, 1940, culminating in France’s quickest military defeat. On June 20, the First World War marshal Philippe Pétain, a known antisemite who had been given full constitutional powers as President of the Counsel, requested an armistice with Germany, which took place on June 22. The shift towards wholehearted collaboration with the Nazis was symbolized by Hitler and Pétain’s handshake at the town of Montoir in October 1940.
German presence in Paris seems hard to imagine today, particularly in Montmartre, the area near to where the Pytkowiczes lived and where I now live, with its apparently idyllic postcard charm. The Nazis still considered Paris the beating heart of the Northern occupied zone and Montmartre was one of their many centers for “rest and relaxation.” The Pytkowicz family became engaged in small, multi-formed acts of resistance, spurred on by Charles de Gaulle’s call from London on June 18. One of Lazare’s earliest experiences as a resister was deliberately pointing a German soldier asking directions to Montmartre in the wrong direction. Later, Lazare’s sister Rosine, his brother, Bernard and their schoolfriends would distribute anti-Nazi tracts through the open windows of the elevated metro at Barbès-Rochechouart, a stop still widely used today, or clandestinely deposit pro-Resistance newspapers beneath doors or in mailboxes after having folded them in four.
The family was active in this resistance while subjected to antisemitic legislation, reflected by the 1940 Statut des Juifs which barred Jews in France from exercising any public function and the revival of medieval measures with the obligation to wear a distinctive sign, a yellow star marked JUIF (“Jew”). Prior to these restrictions, the family’s Jewishness had not been a discriminatory social factor, save the fact that Lazare’s last name had been shortened to “Picot” by schoolteachers since “Pytkowicz” was too hard for them to pronounce. Lazare summed up his perspective by saying that before the radically different meaning brought by the Holocaust, “being a Jew, to me (…) meant nothing.”
Shortly after his father and uncle returned from the front, Lazare’s maternal uncle, a professional photographer residing in the eleventh arrondissement, was raflé – rounded up and taken to the Drancy camp in Northern France from which separate convoys to concentration camps then departed. Bernard and Rosine Pytkowicz were next to be arrested, but instead of being deported, were sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment in the now-defunct prison de la Roquette (Northeastern Paris). A greater threat to Lazare’s very life came on July 16, 1942.
On that day, two years after the Pytkowicz family had been forced to register for the census and wear the yellow star, two French policemen knocked on the door at 103 rue de Clignancourt. Coldly and politely, they ordered Mrs. Pytkowicz, Lazare, and his sister Fanny to pack lightly and follow them. Rumors of a mass roundup had been relayed by the Jewish resistance networks in Paris weeks before the event, yet it was inconceivable that the authorities would target women and children in addition to men; this was why Jankiel Pytkowicz had been hiding in the basement upon the police’s arrival, but showed himself as soon he knew his family would not be spared. Few locals, except for the concierge, opposed the proceedings.
The Pytkowiczes and many other Jewish families in the neighborhood traveled Southwest towards the Vélodrome in the fifteenth arrondissement. Conversation in the vehicles was confused, a jumble of fears and rumors about their destination doubled by the fact that much of it was in Yiddish, a language that Lazare barely spoke. What awaited them was a hellish scene: thousands of families clustered on bleachers using their suitcases as pillows, a suffocating July heat, a stench provoked by unusable lavatories, the harried comings and goings of a few doctors and Red Cross staff.
Lazare quickly began to consider escape and asked his parents’ permission. His mother refused; his father, after much persuasion, accepted. His son discreetly tore off his yellow star and escaped thanks to an altercation provoked by hundreds of mothers trying to push past guards. This was the last time Lazare saw his parents and sister. They would later be killed in Auschwitz. He was fourteen.
Once outside, there was no ostentatious sign that he was Jewish. He lived in hiding, including in an orphanage run by the Union Générale des Israélites de France or UGIF and with the family of his best friend, Jean Haut. Jean’s uncle, Etienne, secured Lazare with fake identity papers in the name of “Picot” to enable his crossing into the “free” Southern zone of France. Following Etienne’s arrest, and in honor of his surviving siblings who were continuing their acts of resistance, Lazare decided to join the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance, or MUR, an assembly of Resistance networks consolidated in 1943 by Jean Moulin. One of Lazare’s earliest missions as “Petit Louis” was establishing contact with the wife of a guard at Montluc prison, where Moulin and some of his fellow resisters were incarcerated, to gain information concerning the prison’s exits and entrances and thereby facilitate Moulin’s escape. At age fifteen, Lazare was arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated by the SS officer Klaus Barbie, known as “The Butcher of Lyon” because of his torture methods: Lazare would serve as one of many witnesses at Barbie’s trial in 1987. Between 1943 and 1944, he was arrested three times, including for his participation in an assassination attempt on Joseph Darnand, leader of the Milice (a French paramilitary corps specialized in the tracking of Jews, gypsies and resisters).
In July 1944, barely a month after the Allied landings in Normandy (only an hour or so from where I was raised), Lazare had been detained in the Moulins prison in central France. The Germans’ priority, as in the concentration and death camps, was evacuation: hence their plan to transfer all Moulins prisoners to Paris’ Gare de Lyon. From thence, they would be deported in cattle wagons to Germany. Lazare’s story could have ended there, but like Lazarus of Bethany, he shook off death. He did it this time by using his size to his advantage and escaping through the dense crowd in the train station. This was on July 14th, a day commemorating the taking of the Bastille prison and France’s freedom from the monarchy: here, the freedom took on a different meaning.
Following the liberation of Paris in August 1945, Lazare returned to rue de Clignancourt and started his life anew. In hopes of getting news from his deported family, he and countless others returned daily to the Lutetia, a luxury hotel on the Left Bank which had housed the Abwehr (the Nazi counter-espionage unit) before serving as a repatriation center for Holocaust survivors and displaced persons. He was taken in by the family that had previously sheltered him and went to business school. One day in the middle of classes, he was summoned to the principal’s office to be informed of his decoration as a Compagnon de la Libération. He accepted the news calmly and returned to class.
One day in the middle of classes, he was summoned to the principal’s office to be informed of his decoration as a Compagnon de la Libération.
I also found out that the list of awards on the plaque on rue de Clignancourt was not exhaustive: in addition to the Legion of Honor, he was granted the 1939-1945 Croix de Guerre for outstanding fighters of the Second World War, the Médaille des Evadés (awarded to French fugitives from enemy camps), a voluntary Resistance fighter’s cross and the Médaille de la Déportation et d’internement pour faits de Résistance (“Medal for Deportation and Internment on account of Resistance”). Lazare received the bulk of these honors before he reached the age of twenty, a fact that this nineteen-year-old writer of Jewish descent can only stand in awe of. Just as astounding is the fact that Lazare graduated and lived out his life modestly, entering the Monoprix supermarket company while being active in an eighteenth arrondissement branch of the French Communist Party. He died, as the plaque said, on October 12, 2004, aged seventy-six. His final resting place is the Saint-Vincent cemetery, a discreet plot of land near where I frequently walk.
I have not yet had the chance to go to his grave, but I hope to. In the same way as I look up at the numerous plaques on the side of Montmartre schools honoring the memory of deported schoolchildren, I hope to see stones on it, in accordance with the Jewish tradition of remembrance after burial. I hope to say that storytelling, histoire with a small “h,” and history, l’Histoire with a capital “h,” have combined to tell his story.
And when this article is finished, I hope to sit in silence and murmur, “Shalom, Lazare.”
