Meet Madame Carrive of La Girade

Press, 17 June 1988, Page 14

Meet Madame Carrive of La Girade

Jew by race, Protestant by religion, a German hiding Jews in occupied France, this 80-year-old and her home are unforgettable.

ROBIN ROBILLIARD

concludes her

series of articles on France and the French.

Madame Carrive of La Girade — the names of owner and house are inseparable — is 80, but runs not walks, springing off the balls of her feet. She lives at Saint-Quentin-de-Caplong in France. “I do not choose the people that come into my life, they just come by,” she says. As a child she read a story that said ‘pick up what God puts on your threshold.’ “I liked that very much.” She was born in Berlin, of Jewish parents who had converted to Protestantism. At school; in the mid-19205, she felt “different,” grasped things more quickly. “As my classmates joined the Nazi Youth, going on trips, smoking, flatting together, they dropped me, saying I was too young, too innocent. Older ones sneered at my culture.” She met her husband, the French surrealist poet Jean Carrive, when he came to Berlin to study Kafka, the German novelist. She was studying law. “Jean had told my mother he was not the marrying kind, but there were new laws about Aryans and non-Aryans. My father and brother, architects, lost their jobs. I could not work as a lawyer. My mother wanted me out of Germany. ‘You are engaged,’ she announced.” They were married at La Girade, the Carrives’ country house, in 1934. Mother-in-law soon died, and father-in-law, a history professor, retired to take up portrait painting — useful to exchange for a bag of beans during the war, but earning little otherwise. Jean Carrive was “half married, half sick.” His brother was also frail. "To teach German literature I needed a French degree. Father-in-law was so proud when my marks topped all of. France. “With this family of Protestant intellectuals, it was a love relationship from the beginning. I found here the feelings and instincts of my youth, of belonging to a minority group with high-quality life. French Huguenots, like the : Jews, had experienced persecution and discrimination in their history, needing to develop more intelligence and moral superiority to survive.” And there was the love affair with this eighteenth-century house, its crumbling stone the same colour as its summer-dry meadows. “La Girade became my equilibrium, my key. My profession is to keep up this house as long as I live, and to make people happy in it.” A Wellingtonian, Christopher Hainsworth, who performs baroque music in France, had sent me to meet Madame Carrive. New Zealander Martin Lodge has also stayed here, to compose music to a Russian poem. The rooms are lined with books, and many of the paintings' are of the house, as its endless stream of visitors sought to recapture its magic. There is a blue glass knob at the bottom of the bannisters. “I love that knob,” says my hostess, dancing her way to the kitchen, where she had prepared a midnight Wvette, the Italian ma@, aged

63, appears before breakfast, in spite of having a day off, to check on pregnant ducks. “Noone calls her a Macaroni,” Madame Carrive announces. Yvette says gold is falling from the sky — rain needed for the garden. She makes juice from beetles to put on plants. Until France fell to its German invaders in 1940, and the Vichy government prevented Jews and foreigners being employed, Madame Carrive taught at a Lycee in Bordeaux, where she and her husband lived during the week. “I sought pupils amongst Bordeaux shopkeepers, who wanted to speak German to sell to the German occupiers, but Jean said this was dangerous. Then, like a miracle, news came of an American inheritance, to replace exactly the salary I had lost.” News also came that her old Jewish aunt was arriving from Germany. “Jean told me to keep her in bed in our Bordeaux flat, which I did for a year, but it was risky. The French delivered 76,000 Jews to Germany during the war. Old Aunt and I fled through the forest to La Girade, in the unoccupied zone. Within a week friends wrote saying the 85-year-old aunt was happy&to be

around. We had nowhere else to go ... and no soldiers came.” Another letter came, from a Rumanian Jew, who had escaped from the French army. “Dear friends,” he wrote, “only in the brothel can I get a bed, if I wait til 3 a.m. Please take me, or I will commit suicide.” “This was an awkward situation. We already had Old Aunt, and the Jewish mother of Balthus, the famous French painter, and not much to eat. My husband was generous in general, but not in detail. I told God he had to help us, and He did. The village Secretary was a member of the Resistance. Knowing there were Jews at La Girade she neglected to forward the incriminating papers to the prefecture. “Students used to ask, after the war, how the Germans had allowed such Nazi behaviour. I told of the millions of Frenchmen, sent to work on German farms, spoilt by German housewives, for whom Hitler did not matter. Educated Frenchmen also noticed nothing. “In short,” says Madame Carrive, “the French are realists, preferring to accommodate to reality, than to change it.” But sov raw were the wounds that Mar-0

cel Ophul’s epic film, “The Sorrow and the Pity,” was banned from French television for half a generation. Officials argued that certain myths must be preserved. It was 1981 before French text books began to discuss the Vichy government’s treatment of Jews.

Its collaboration Madame Carrive finds hard to forgive. “According to official records, 2200 German Gestapo agents were sent to France. The French working for them were more numerous, and sometimes more zealous. I used to ask French policemen if they were not ashamed.

“When for once war had a noble purpose, to oppose Nazism, even noble French minds could not grasp it. For example, father-in-law refused to believe what happened in concentration camps. He lived in another time, not barbaric like now.”

And German behaviour became increasingly barbaric, as the Resistance, with Allied victory in sight, suddenly swelled to hundreds and thousands. “Anyone sheltering or burying a resister was shot. But Blondel, our village mayor, wrapped the French flag around three Resistance corpses, and buried them, to be denounced, arrested and shot. After Liberation, when they erected a memorial to Blondel, his widow was not impressed. “All that for nothing,” she snapped. "And do you know, I discovered through teaching Blondel’s granddaughter, that she had never been told of her grandfather’s noble deed. Incredible! And there are many stories dike this. I can understand why Germans do not speak, but why not the wives and mothers of French heroes? They thought their deeds were nothing.” Jean Carrive carried out spiritual resistance during the war. He translated letters from German bishops, to be read in French churches. Germany’s bishops were the first to resist Hitler, to be sent to concentration camps. “Brother-in-law was not a surrealist. He wanted to be like other people, to sleep in the mountains and ride a motorbike. He had me drag him out of hospital, with tubes in his chest, to see his first Boche. Through negotiations I obtained him a motorbike. But the day Paris was liberated he was careless, travelling by train with messages for the Resistance. The Germans shot him.”

Her relationship with her father-in-law she describes as “delicious.” “It made me so happy to spoil him when he was ill. As quarrels raced between rooms, on theology, domestic matters, he did not interfere, but whispered on his death bed, ‘you were always right’.”

“At Father-in-law’s burial I had the pastor read from the Book of Ruth: ‘Your house is my house, your country is my country, your God is my God, where you are buried I shall be buried too.’ “Jean was not so tender, except when writing me letters, telling me, before he died in 1963, that he was no longer unsure about his decision to marry me. I loved him for that. An Italian literary critic, living in the valley, sent for me recently, to say my husband had been the greatest. I agreed, but said Jean had not published much. ‘Just for that,’ the Italian said. I liked that very much.” As Professor of German literature at Bordeaux University, Madame Carrive experienced the 1968 student revolution. “Students occupied the university, forming more and more committees, which couldn’t agree on anything. The role they won, to have a say in university administration, they do not take responsibly. I sympathised with their need for more personal contact with professors, but all they really want is to be fed the basic facts to spit back for exams, without having to read a book. They have my successor handing out his correct version of an essay, before the students write it.” For five years from 1968, as student unrest continued, with disruption of courses, Madame Carrive invited 30 students at a time to La Girade for vacation courses. “My colleagues were angry, because I did this work for nothing, but all the students passed their exams.” We go to the John Borst Foundation, to visit mentally

handicapped patients. Also to church where the visiting black preacher, looking at the congregation of four, asks where all the Christians are. “In my opinion,” says Madame Carrive, driving home, “most people in Europe are no longer Christianised, in fact they are quite heathenised. Quite good people, but very confused in their minds.” She still teaches, part-time at the village lycee. "Compared to Third Worldtchildren, who are so

eager for the chance, French children don’t want to learn. France is too old-civilised. When the State first took over education there was great achievement and brightness. But now my colleagues don’t love their profession, won’t teach unless paid, don’t think about their pupils, only a new car and strikes.” The exception is Bernard, who teaches in Bordeaux. “The best student I ever had, the son of a farm but very digni-

fied. Bernard is married, with a child: my ‘granddaughter.’ It’s Bernard who is interested in my husband’s library, paints and sculptures, who mends La Girade’s roof and does masonry. He will carry on hare after I’m gone." -;

Bernard, when I met him, said evenings at La Girade seem longer than in tbwn| “It seems,” he said, "that I never arrive, and I never go away.” I know how.be feels. * !

Resistance swelled