Family hell hidden in a box
HOUSE OF GLASS: The Story And Secrets Of A TwentiethCentury Jewish Family
WHEN Hadley Freeman was a child, she was always wary of her glamorous grandmother Sala. Although she lived in America, she was the epitome of French chic, but beneath her immaculate facade lay a deep, unbearable sadness, a sadness that Hadley was reluctant to delve into.
As an adult, Hadley was haunted by this melancholy woman and decided to write about her relationship with fashion, an approach that felt comfortably unobtrusive. Searching through her grandmother’s wardrobe, she found an old shoe box at the back of a shelf, dust covered and burnished with age. Expecting another pair of kitten-heel shoes, she instead discovered a treasure trove.
The shoe box was filled with an extraordinary collection of photographs of Sala and her three brothers but there was also a signed Pablo Picasso sketch, a metal plate engraved with the words “GLASS, Prisonnier Cambrai, 1940” and a telegram from the International Committee of the Red Cross apologising for the “distressing news contained within”.
These were all clues to a past Sala never spoke of.
Hadley spent the next 13 years travelling from Paris to Long Island to Auschwitz, piecing together the stories behind the memorabilia; stories that are horrifying, moving and astonishing in equal measure.
The Glahs siblings, Jehuda, Jakob, Sender and Sala, were born in Poland, part of the large Jewish community that made up the population of Chrzanow, a town surrounded by a dense forest of silver birches.They were poor, constantly hungry, but mostly content.All that was to change with the outbreak of the First World War and, as the Polish authorities became increasingly anti-Jewish, the Glahs’ home no longer felt safe and there were frightening rumours of a pogrom.
On November 5 1918, Chrzanow was attacked by “a savage, screaming crowd... wild beasts from the guts of hell”. Polish men and women rampaged through the town, ransacking synagogues, smashing the windows of Jewish shops, and the Glahs family were horrified to see friends and teachers in the baying crowd.
Their childhood died that night. Fleeing to their cousins in France seemed the only sensible course of action.
In their newly adopted country, the boys changed their names to Henri, Jacques and Alex, Sala became Sara, and all four siblings, now with the surname Glass, leaped headlong into enticing, exciting lives.
Sara fell in love and began designing fabric for clothes, “toughas-a-bullet” Alex became a couturier and counted among his friends Christian Dior and Picasso, affable Jacques ran an a furrier business, and Henri invented a machine that reproduced documents and blueprints in miniature, and made his fortune. But their happiness was
fragile. Hitler gained power, the Nazis took France and the Glass’ world was smashed to smithereens; they “had outrun the demons in their own country, but those demons had caught up with them”.
It was a time of desperation and fear, subterfuge and betrayal, as the Glass’ neighbours were all too willing to inform on the whereabouts of Jewish families.
Alex joined the Foreign Legion and had many an adventure, Henri worked for the Resistance, copying important documents and maps, and Sara, whose heart belonged in Paris, was encouraged by Alex to marry an American businessman.
Her life was saved but she was exiled from the place and the people she loved best, a source of lifelong sorrow.And easy-going Jacques? He was murdered in Auschwitz.
House Of Glass is remarkable; a tenaciously researched, heartfelt memorial to a family mercilessly pulled asunder by a regime that deemed their lives worthless.