Rene Lichtman - August 13, 1998
Anne Lepage
Tell me a little bit more about your guardian. What, what, she sounds like she was a very caring, warm...
She was truly--yeah, she was truly a righteous gentile. Um, and I'm, I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that she was childless and, and she did want me to stay with her. She wanted me--but it was, it was, I mean, she was so, she was so good that she realized, she realized that, that the right thing to do was to give me back to my, my Jewish mother, whereas some other people, you know, you know, Abe Foxman's people, they wouldn't--didn't want to give them up. So um, um, so she, she gave me back. But she always had hopes. I mean, even when I visited her in, I mean, I visited them back, I went back to see them twice, in 1957, I think after I got out of high school and then I, I was there in 1960, um, well, no, more like, it was it '64 or '74? I'm not sure. Um, no, it was '64, '65, I went back to see her with--I was traveling through Europe. And um, she--especially the second time that I went to see her, I asked her questions, you know and, and she had, if something was going to happen to my mother, she had made plans so that, because I was so interested in drawing, for me to go into some kind of illustration type work, you know and, and, and she really saw me and there she was getting much older. By that time she was living in the South of France and getting frail. And I, I felt, I remember that, I remember, I remember thinking, well, maybe I, you know, I should stay with her now, she's getting old and thinking and then and my mother is back and I hadn't seen a--my relationship with my mother remained strained. Um, my mother was in, in, in New York and here, I said, you know, I felt torn, I felt guilty that she had sacrificed so much and here she was going to be dying by herself, because by that time her husband had already...
He'd already died?
He'd already died. And he was um, he was buried like one block away, in this little town in Maubec um, in the South. And so she and I went to visit his grave. But uh, so she was all alone now and um...
Did you think about bringing her back to the United States?
You know, I didn't think about that, because I was um, my life was pretty chaotic at the time. And it's not like my mother would have welcomed her or anything like that. Um, it--no, it didn't even enter, no, what I thought about was staying with her. And then I thought, you know...
You said that she, she sacrificed a lot for you. What do you remember about her?
Well...
Did she tell you, you were in danger, did she...
No.
You, you never knew that.
I never knew that I was in danger. I uh, so there was no, there was no f...fear that I was conscious of. You know, I was just conscious of restrictions. Uh, and, and when you're, when you're uh--and even that's an unconscious, if you don't know, if you have no comparison, you know, of what it's like. I mean, we had no TV. We, we didn't even, I don't think we even--I don't even recall reading the--listening to the radio. I think we, you know, had magazines and stuff like that, that would come, romance type magazines that she read. But I have--I was really, really quite isolated. That's why the shock and that's really the, the, I think the trauma for me was when I had to suddenly go into Paris and become, you know and, and take on a new identity, because I certainly, you know, to be a Jew with a, a different mother and to have this and people around me expect certain things of me. And that lasted five years. And then I came to the United States and that was another...
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