And on that limb, I'm willing to venture, at least rhetorically. But you are too self-effacing a presence for me to go on much longer about you. Last summer, during a visit to Le Chambon for the services in honor of the late Magda Trocm , I ran into one of the Theis' eight daughters, and admitted my verbal slovenliness. I am a Jew born in Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944. Nobody's ever challenged me on those words.
Nobody wants to nitpick in such a context.
Indeed, there was an American experience of the Holocaust too, although we either don't know it or pretend otherwise. And yes, of course, there were some Americans who cared. Like good people everywhere and at any time, they are the ultimate challenge to us. As it happens, the story I am now addressing is, in a sense, yet another chapter in my own life, although my life before I was born, the life of my parents after they left Paris ahead of the Nazis and fled, like so many others, to France's second city, the bustling port of Marseille in the still unoccupied Southern zone of France. Marseille in 1940-1941 was, to make a movie reference that many of us resonate to, the real Casablanca .