The Postcard

In 1945, the French government begins to arrange for the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Signboards are put up with pictures of missing relatives in the Hotel Lutetia, where Jeanine is raising Patrick and Lélia. But the returnees are in far worse condition than anyone expected. Typhus has broken out in the hotel, people are dying, and Jeanine tries to spare Myriam this truth.

The Lutetia receives more concentration camp survivors, shocking the city. Trains bring more sickly former detainees every hour. Parisians are shocked, judgmental, and rude, blaming the detainees for their horrid appearances.

A man at the train station refuses to board the bus—it is the same bus that he boarded and took to the holding camp before being deported to Germany—and runs. He is surrounded by concerned Parisians. This man feels guilt for surviving when his wife, two-year-old son, and parents did not. Someone gives him yogurt, and when he eats it, he dies.

At the Lutetia Hotel, Myriam looks for her family. The horror the Jewish people endured is written on their bodies. The returnees, as they are called, are sprayed with DDT to kill the typhus lice. All over France, collaborators are being assassinated. Some former collaborators hide among the returnees. All returnees are questioned in an attempt to weed out collaborators, but this is miserable for the returnees, who were deported by the French government in the first place. The hotel is a mess, and the returnees are in agony, their minds destroyed by torture, death, and misery.

Myriam searches for her family in the hotel, but a man grabs her and asks for help waking his wife, who died in the waiting room. Myriam learns that some freed camp inmates were taken to Russia, and Myriam hopes her Russian-speaking parents are among them. The desperate family members searching for lost ones are heartbreaking to Myriam, as she hears words like, “There was no one left to repatriate” from some camps (439). She goes to the hotel daily until, one day, the hotel is closed. They are told there are no more returnees. Still, her family is not on the deceased list. By September, she is in Germany acting as a translator, searching for her family.

Anne returns to Lélia’s house, and Lélia says Myriam stayed in Germany on the Air Force base, acting as a translator. Vicente brings Lélia to visit her, but Myriam’s marriage is broken. She has an affair while in Germany. Anne asks about the trio, Yves, Vicente, and Myriam, and Lélia yells at her, claiming the postcard hunt is a waste of time, and none of it has anything to do with Anne anyway.

Anne gets a letter from Lélia apologizing for the fight; she does not forgive Myriam, her mother, for abandoning her through much of her childhood. Anne replies via email that she understands, but she hopes Lélia will speak with her. In response, Lélia agrees to talk.

Lélia discusses a photo of herself with her father, dated November 1947. He would die by suicide the following month.

Vicente overdoses on the sidewalk outside his mother’s apartment. Lélia is about to turn three. There is a police report that lists the cause of death as suicide.

Lélia asks Yves if he is her father, and Myriam and Yves fight. Later, Myriam writes a letter explaining that Vicente is her father.

Anne reads the letter Myriam sent Lélia about her father: Yves came to live with them and work for the resistance, and they decided not to end the pregnancy because of the Allied forces’ progress. When Lélia is born, her family uses their real names to register the birth, coming out of hiding, but Vicente is unwell and makes many mistakes on the paperwork. After Vicente dies, Lélia is sent to live with Yves in Cereste.

Myriam stays in Germany for two years while Lélia stays with Yves. When Myriam returns, Yves moves in, and they share a bed. Lélia is in the way, so she is sent to live with an old widow named Henriette Avon in Cereste. She attends school and builds a life there as a carefree child until someone throws a rock at her and yells a word she’s never heard—Jew.

Anne sees a parallel between the rock that was thrown at Lélia in 1950 and the rocks that were hurled at Myriam in Lodz in 1925, as well as the hurtful words hurled at Clara in 2019: “Something had to be learned from all these lives. But What?” (462). She addresses Deborah directly as she thinks about how she is not only Jewish when it suits her; it is a part of who she is, and the multigenerational trauma a part of her soul.

Anne opens the envelope from the mayor’s office in Les Forges. It contains two of Noémie’s journals. Anne reads several excerpts aloud that detail Noémie’s thoughts on the war in 1939. When Noémie talks about the loss of their relatives in Lodz, Lélia can bear it no more and stops Anne. The second notebook is a novel Noémie wrote; the main character is named Anne. This startles her and Lélia deeply.

Anne meets with Georges for her birthday weekend. They vacation near Cereste, which Anne has not visited since her childhood. Myriam and Yves settled there with Lélia after Vicente’s death, and Anne spent her childhood there with cousins.

Anne explains how she thought Yves was her grandfather, though he is not a blood relation. She knew so little of Myriam, her life, her first husband, and Anne’s actual grandfather. She didn’t even know Myriam was not born in France. Myriam, once settled in Cereste, would stay the rest of her life in that rural village. Myriam had two children with Yves—Jacques and Nicole. In her old age, Myriam developed Alzheimer’s disease and paranoia. She forgot how to speak French and spoke in Russian instead. As Anne and Georges tour the area, Anne stops and buys a pregnancy test, saying the child, if she is pregnant, will bear its own name.

Anne and Georges are still touring Cereste when Anne realizes Rene Char’s daughter is still alive and living nearby. They visit with Mireille, who recalls Myriam, Lélia, and Yves, and Anne asks who else she should talk with.

Anne Meets with Juliette, the woman who was Myriam’s nurse in her old age. It is Juliette who reveals that Myriam herself wrote the postcard, asking Juliette to mail it just before she died. Juliette forgot about the postcard for many years, but when she found it, she mailed it as promised, even though Myriam was long dead. Anne asks why Myriam wanted to mail the postcard, and Juliette says, “Because she knew her memory was failing and she said to me, ‘I can’t forget them. If I do, there will be no one left to remember that they ever existed’” (483).