Read Hitler Made Me a Jew for Free Online

That she should feel so strongly about her religion came to me as a surprise. We had just studied about France’s losses as it expelled its Protestants, and Jacqueline told me she was glad that it taught the French a lesson! I was exhilarated by her fervor. It made me feel that the history we learned from books was still alive. Her feelings of belonging to an outside group fascinated me. I didn’t have that feeling, yet, except in terms of my parents being foreigners.
    I joined the Cercle des Nageurs , a swimming club on the Corniche where professional swimmers exercised. There I made another friend Maribelle, a beautiful brown-skinned girl from Martinique. She was homesick and loved to tell me stories about the island where everything was easy and much better than in dirty Marseille. The pool at the club was ugly, and the water was too cold, she said. As far as I was concerned, the club was beautiful and the water warm. But to make her happy I agreed with her.
    I was a bad swimmer. I was always the last to arrive in the competitions. I lost the races with a smile that only I knew was false. Everyone agreed there had to be one loser. The coach said I lost because I plunged too far underwater and I took too much time surfacing, but he liked me because I was a good sport.
    It was at the swimming club that I began to read novels—long novels by Balzac and Stendhal. These readings triggered new emotions in me. I was moved to tears sometimes, and I was beginning to understand that nothing was the way it appeared. There were mysteries in people that I began to prize. The first book that made me feel the people in the story were more important than those in my life was the “Lys dans la Vallee” by Balzac. I found it amazing to escape the person I was and turn into others—men or women—to feel as they felt. I was astounded to see inner thoughts described in words and characters in the novels becoming as real as the people around me. I hated to finish reading a book, because it meant I had to let go of the characters.
    During my last summer in France, we visited Cassis. It was a short but memorable visit. We bicycled from Marseille, following the coastline. The blue sky and the breeze produced a perfect climate, which years later I recognized when we made a stop in Hawaii. We stayed in Cassis in a hotel tucked between two large rocks. As soon as we arrived I went to sleep on the white sand of the bay in front of the hotel. I had my head buried in a towel and was wearing for the first time the bikini my mother’s seamstress had made with leftover material. I couldn’t think of anything better happening to me. Then I heard a whisper in my ear, “Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?” I was paralyzed for a moment. “No,” I answered, feeling stupid. I couldn’t even see the face of the man who was talking to me, but I didn’t care I wanted to hear more even though I knew this couldn’t be true. I was not really beautiful. Or was I? I wondered, is this love? It made me warm and tingling all over my body. When I saw the young man’s face, the dream vanished.
    Cassis at that time was special, because we ate for three days, three times a day, fresh grilled sardines and grapes just picked off the vines. It was all so delicate and sublime. Also we didn’t have to give our ration tickets. Our food was rationed during the war. We went to a black market restaurant one night in the village and had their famous rabbit stew. As we were leaving we heard people say we had really eaten cat stew. They had seen the cat skulls in the kitchen. But it tasted like rabbit to me, and who knows what cat meat tastes like?
    In Marseille I began to be seriously interested in clothes. I loved wearing the plain cloche hat I had seen on Deana Durbin in the movies, and I wanted a bag and shoes of the same color. My mother had a coat made for me from a man’s used coat in thick wool