In September 1944, Chaskiel Perelman returned to the apartment he had been renting at 67 rue Rochechouart in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. He and his wife and youngest daughter Rachel had fled that home address soon after the Vel d'Hiv police raids of July 16–17, 1942. As part of the operation Möbel Aktion, the apartment had been stripped of all its furniture and effects, even mantelpieces and electrical sockets were torn out. There was nothing left of their former life. Rachel alone accompanied him on that visit. That same autumn 1944, Basia Elka, called Berthe, the eldest daughter, and her husband Srulka Berneman, called Raoul, whom she married in Paris on May 20, 1941, moved to their former family home at 7 rue Taylor with their infant daughter Evelyne, born in Grenoble on July 27, 1943. This apartment had also been completely gutted. The prior occupants—the parents and sister of Srulka—had been deported, and never returned.

At that point, no one knew what had become of the son, Rachmil Boruch, called Roger, who had been deported. He would return to 67 rue Rochechouart in August 1945.

The Berneman and Perelman families are typical of Jewish immigrant families from Poland, victims of antisemitic persecution from both the Nazis and the French state, known as the Vichy Government. Some members of the family were murdered, others survived. The ratio for the two families resembles that of Jews in France overall: out of some 330,000 Jews living in France in 1939, 80,000, or 25%, were to perish, mostly at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of those, 69% were foreigners, like the Berneman and Perelman families.

What is the purpose of writing the history of a family—in this case, my family on my mother's side? How should this history be written? What has made such writing now possible?

To write a story of one's family is to be contemporary. ‘All history is contemporary history,’ as the Italian historian Croce famously put it. Marc Bloch formulated it differently. Recalling an old Arab proverb, he noted that ‘Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.’