Denise Epstein

Irène Némirovsky had intended the work to be an epic five-part novel about a nation torn apart by war, to rival Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Written in the early years of the Nazi occupation of France, it was based on her own experiences; but she had finished only the first two parts when she was arrested on July 13 1942.

The first part in the planned sequence, Storm in June, is a clear-sighted depiction of mostly upper-class Parisians and the disintegration of civility and human kindness as they flee the city following the Nazi invasion. The second part, Dolce, drew on Irène Némirovsky’s experience of life in occupied Issy-l’Eveque (fictionalised as Bussy), a small village in Burgundy where she had fled with her family, and showed members of the self-righteous local social elite persuading themselves that they have more in common with the “cultured” German officers they are required to host than with their own socially inferior French neighbours.

With its bleakly comic and totally convincing depiction of the psychology of defeat and the processes of political, military and sexual collaboration, the book did not make easy reading for the French. Its stories of wartime compromise and capitulation fed a national mood of introspection, contributing to a debate on one of the darkest chapters of French history.

Awarded the prestigious Renaudot prize, Suite Française was sold, for record sums, to publishers around the world (it was published in English in 2006), and the interest it generated led to the reprinting and translation of other works by its author.

For Denise Epstein, however, the main rewards were personal: “It is an extraordinary feeling to have brought my mother back to life,” she told a BBC interviewer in 2006. “It shows that the Nazis did not truly succeed in killing her. It is not vengeance, but it is a victory.”

Denise France Catherine Epstein was born on November 9 1929 in Paris, where her parents, both descended from wealthy Russian-Jewish financiers, had fled after the 1917 Revolution. Her father, Michel Epstein, worked in a bank, and in the year Denise was born her mother made her name on the literary scene with her first novel, David Golder, about a dysfunctional, wealthy Jewish family, largely based on her own upbringing. She went on to publish nine more novels before war broke out.

Before then, when Denise was 10, during a period of rising anti-Semitism her parents made the strategic decision to convert to Roman Catholicism. This was not enough, of course, to prevent their being identified as Jewish after the German invasion (Denise would take her First Communion wearing the yellow star).

In 1940, as German tanks rolled into France, Irène sent her two daughters, Denise and her younger sister Elizabeth, to the Burgundy village of Issy-l’Eveque, the childhood home of Cécile Michaud, the nanny who had been with them since Denise’s birth. (Cécile’s family are immortalised — uniquely under their own surname — in Suite Française as the only truly good people in the whole book.)

The girls’ parents stayed in Paris, working, and visited when they could. By early 1942, with both of them registered Jewish, Michel had been banned from working and Irène told she could no longer publish her books. They, too, left for Issy-l’Eveque. Denise remembered the few short months that followed as the happiest of her life.

But on July 13 1942, betrayed by her French neighbours to the Nazi soldiers who were stationed in the village, Irène Némirovsky was arrested. “There was a knock on the door. She knew why the police had come, but there were no tears,” Denise recalled. “She just told me to look after my father. She said farewell to us, but I had no idea it was the final farewell, the last time I would see my mother.” Within 24 hours Irène Némirovsky was in a concentration camp north of Orléans. Within four days she was bound for Auschwitz. She died of typhus a month later, aged 39.

Knowing nothing of his wife’s fate, Denise’s father wrote to everybody he could think of, pleading for her life; but three months after her disappearance, he, too, was arrested and transported to Auschwitz, where he died in the gas chambers.

At first the girls were also detained, but a Gestapo officer took pity on them, saying they reminded him of his own daughters, and let Cécile Michaud take them away. Before they parted for the last time, Michel Epstein handed Denise a small leather suitcase and told her: “You must never part with this because there is a notebook of your mother’s inside.”

Cécile Michaud removed the Jewish stars from their clothes and fled the village with the girls and the suitcase. “I remember I was distraught because I had to abandon my doll Bleuette in order to carry the suitcase,” Denise recalled. But she kept it with her as they went into hiding for the next two years. Pursued by French police, they found refuge with nuns, then were passed around safe houses in Bordeaux, hiding in cellars and attics. Denise attended school under an assumed name.

Even when the war came to an end their troubles were not over. Not knowing that their parents were dead, the sisters would make daily visits to the Gare de l’Est in Paris to wait for trains carrying survivors from the concentration camps. They made their way to Nice, where their maternal grandmother, who had managed to convince the Gestapo that she was an Orthodox Russian, refused to open the door to them. “If you’re orphans, go to the orphanage!” she shouted.

Denise went on to work as an archivist, married, had two sons and a daughter, divorced, and eventually settled in Toulouse. Her sister became a writer and editor, publishing a novel, Le Mirador, based on their mother’s life, before dying of cancer in 1996.

Though Denise treasured the suitcase as the last relic of her mother, for years she could not bring herself to look at the dog-eared pages, covered in a tiny and almost illegible scrawl, that she had assumed was her mother’s personal diary of the war. “In 1975 I opened the manuscript,” she recalled, “but I found it too painful to read and closed it again.”

A flood in her apartment some years later prompted her to think about safeguarding the document and, using a magnifying glass, she began to transcribe it, only to discover that it was a novel.

For several more years she held back from approaching a publisher, fearing that she might be betraying her mother to publish a work which was clearly unfinished (in her notes Irène Némirovsky had named the unwritten parts of the book “captivity”, “battles” and, poignantly, “peace”). When she did, in 2002, the publisher, Denoël, immediately recognised its importance both as a historical document and a literary masterpiece.

After its publication Denise found herself invited to participate in the celebration of public events such as Bastille Day. But she never went: “How long will it take them to understand that I will never go to anything involving French flags flying and men in uniform?”

Denise Epstein is survived by her children, whom she raised as Catholics — just to be on the safe side.

Denise Epstein, born November 9 1929, died April 1 2013