Odette's Secrets

by Maryann Macdonald

  “We’re getting older now, Odette.

  It’s a good place for Henri and me.

  It’s not too far away,

  and you will always be welcome with us.”

  My godmother is so happy,

  she makes me want to feel happy too.

  But I can’t, not quite.

  I will miss her so much,

  even though I know things have changed between us.

  “You’re such a big girl now,” she always says,

  as if I grew up on purpose during my time away.

  We never talk in the same way, either.

  She always listens,

  and I can tell she’s impressed

  when I tell her about all I’ve learned.

  Did she know, I ask her one day,

  that humans are related to chimpanzees?

  But when I try to tell her other things,

  I’m a little shy.

  I don’t know what to say,

  how to begin to tell my godmother about my feelings now.

  I’d like her to know that I’m not so sure I like getting bigger,

  that I don’t feel ready for it.

  People are always talking about the Resistance.

  Many people gave their lives for France during the war.

  Some of them were only teenagers,

  a few years older than I am now.

  Would I have the courage to do that when I’m a teenager?

  I’d like to ask my godmother,

  but I can’t find the words.

  If only she would ask me what the heart is like again,

  so I can show her I remember.

  But she never asks.

  I give Madame Marie a hug,

  to show her I’m happy for her.

  I don’t trust my voice

  to tell her how much I’ll miss her.

  So I simply close the door on her little apartment,

  the place where I have always been so safe and so happy,

  the place where she saved my life.

  I look back through the sheer-curtained window.

  My godmother sews as always,

  and the clock ticks behind her.

  I peer back at her, take in every detail …

  her long gray hair coiled in a bun,

  the concentration on her face,

  her careful fingers poised at the machine.

  Even though she’s going away

  I’ll carry this image of her always.

  Lost and Found

  For Jews, all of France has become a gigantic Lost and Found.

  They look for their children in orphanages, and convents.

  They try to get their jobs, apartments, and businesses back.

  Decent people return everything.

  The greedy fight over what they want to keep.

  Lives come together slowly,

  like the pieces of a giant puzzle.

  Three pieces of that puzzle

  are Aunt Georgette, Uncle Hirsch, and my cousin Sophie.

  When all of them come back—

  Aunt Georgette and Sophie from their cousin’s farm,

  and Uncle Hirsch from the army—

  they find their apartment stripped bare.

  Still, they say they’re happy to be alive.

  My uncle sings as he makes suits at his sewing machine,

  and my aunt sings along with him.

  Steam from her ironing or from a stew she’s stirring

  clouds around her.

  She listens to the news my uncle brings home …

  a neighbor has found a good job,

  the butcher shop has fresh meat again,

  a friend’s daughter will marry the local shoemaker.

  Wonderful! Aunt Georgette says.

  My uncle whistles happily,

  as if he made these things happen all by himself.

  Sophie and I drink tea and nibble on paper-thin matzoh bread.

  Matzoh’s not allowed in my home.

  It’s connected somehow to religion …

  I have no idea how.

  I envy my cousin.

  Whatever she does seems to make her parents happy.

  They love to see her in the beautiful dresses

  they make for her.

  She can listen to Edith Piaf on the radio all day long

  if she wants to.

  Not me … I have to study.

  Sophie sleeps in the dining room alone at night too.

  I still sleep in the bedroom with my mother.

  I think about my other cousins—

  Sarah, Serge, Charles, Henriette, and Maurice—

  all the time.

  At last I ask Mama what happened to them,

  and to Aunt Miriam and Uncle Motl.

  Mama says she ran to their apartment on Black Thursday,

  the day that the police came to arrest us.

  The door was open.

  Mama froze in that spot, unable to move.

  On the table, a knife in the bread,

  halfway through the loaf.

  An untouched glass of milk.

  On one chair, Sarah’s wrinkled dress,

  waiting to be ironed.

  In a corner, Henriette’s shoes.

  Did Henriette leave barefoot?

  We’ll never know.

  She and everyone else are gone.

  Mama talked to the neighbors.

  Uncle Motl hid in a tool shed, they said.

  That’s what the Jewish leaders told men to do.

  They thought only men would be arrested.

  But when my uncle heard his wife scream and his children cry,

  he came out.

  The police took them all away.

  Mama takes a folded scrap of paper from the drawer.

  It is a letter from eleven-year-old Serge.

  Dear Auntie,

  Henriette and I are alone. Our parents are gone. Sarah went away to one camp with my mother, and Charles to another with my father. You are the only one who can help us. I don’t know what to do now for my little sister Henriette. She cries for Mama all the time, and doesn’t want to eat. The food is terrible, rotten cabbage soup. Please send us something to eat. Also, please send me a beret. They have shaved our heads because of the lice, and it makes me feel so strange, like a criminal. I would feel so much better with a beret.

  Your nephew,

  Serge

  Mama says she tried to send Serge and Henriette some food.

  But she never heard from anyone in the family again.

  “Your aunt and uncle and all your cousins are gone,” she says.

  “Gone?” I say.

  “But maybe they’ll come back.”

  Mama shakes her head.

  “They’re not coming back, Odette,” she says.

  “They’re gone forever.”

  Like my father? I wonder.

  But I don’t dare ask that question out loud.

  I see how eagerly Mama still checks the mail,

  how her shoulders slump sometimes,

  afterward.

  She’s still waiting.

  Waiting for a letter from Papa.

  We haven’t had one since we came back to Paris.

  I decide I must look for my cousins myself.

  I don’t tell Mama.

  I cross the big boulevard.

  I pass the bakery.

  I walk down their alley.

  The smell is the same: urine and cabbage.

  All the windows in the dreary courtyard stare at my back.

  The caretaker peers out at me from behind her lace curtains.

  A big man comes out of my aunt’s apartment.

  He knows nothing about my cousins, he says.

  He has lived in the apartment for two years.

  Did anyone come back, anyone at all? I ask.

  “Never!” he replies.

  He goes back into the apartment and slams the door.

  I stare at the door, hopin
g to hear Serge’s violin,

  Henriette’s giggle,

  Uncle Motl’s knitting machine.

  Silence.

  The caretaker opens her door.

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  “My cousin’s violin,” I say.

  She shuts the door.

  But I come back, again and again.

  Each time I ask her the same thing,

  “Where is Serge’s violin?”

  “How should I know?” she says.

  “That family’s long gone.

  Go away.

  You’re a pest.”

  Maybe I can find Serge’s violin in a pawnshop, I decide.

  I window-shop at all the pawnshops in the neighborhood.

  I never saw so many violins!

  I was sure I would know my cousin’s violin anywhere,

  but I was wrong.

  Can I ask my mother to describe it?

  No.

  Talk of my cousins brings her too much grief.

  Anyway, what would I do if I found Serge’s violin?

  I don’t have any money to buy it.

  Still, I choose three or four violins.

  I go back and visit them often,

  to make sure no one else has bought them.

  I’m not sure which is the magical one,

  the one that leaned on Serge’s shoulder.

  But at least I have some idea where it is.

  If Serge comes back, he won’t be disappointed.

  When he knocks on our door, I’ll take him to see the violins.

  I’m sure he’ll remember which one is his.

  Survivors

  Everywhere in Paris, I see people wearing black—

  women in black dresses, men with black armbands.

  Mama says they’re mourning people they loved,

  people who died in the war.

  “They survived, but they’re still suffering.

  If you speak to them, speak gently.”

  Mama has a surprise for me … our friend Bluma is back.

  The train taking her to a camp in Poland

  was bombed by the Resistance …

  she escaped.

  Now she’s home in Domont,

  her sleepy small town outside Paris.

  Mama and I go to visit her.

  Bluma’s home is like her, elegant, serene.

  Her husband, Edmond, asks us not to stay too long.

  Bluma’s still frail, he says.

  She had to stay in a camp near Paris, a place called Drancy.

  “It was a terrible camp,” Bluma tells us.

  “Dirty, overcrowded, nothing to eat.”

  She shakes her head.

  “I was so foolish.

  I should have stayed with you in the country.”

  Mama puts her arm around Bluma’s thin shoulders.

  I stroke her pale hand.

  No one says,

  It’s true, you should have stayed.

  But the words seem to be there,

  hanging in the air.

  On the train on the way home,

  Mama tells me that my cousins—

  Serge, Charles, Henriette, and Sarah—

  stayed in the camp at Drancy too.

  “That was before they were sent to Poland,”

  Mama says.

  She shakes her head.

  “For all we suffered, Odette,” she says,

  “you and I were lucky to be in the Vendée.”

  She’s right, I know.

  But I couldn’t be more surprised to hear Mama say it.

  Summer comes,

  and Mama signs me up for a Jewish youth group.

  One awful day, our leaders take us to see Drancy.

  We wander around the empty camp.

  Our footsteps echo off the concrete walls and floors.

  The guide tells us people had to sleep on those floors.

  How could they? I wonder.

  It must have been so cold, so hard.

  On an outside wall, I see letters scrawled by a child’s hand.

  One word: “Mama.”

  In the dirt, I spy a child’s toothbrush.

  I want to pick it up,

  but I don’t dare.

  Like Mama said,

  I’m one of the lucky ones,

  one of the survivors.

  I never had to suffer like the owner of that toothbrush did.

  Somehow I don’t have the right

  even to touch it.

  My friend Leon comes back to our neighborhood.

  He was the tall, strong boy

  who lifted me onto his shoulders to see the gypsy’s goat

  the day I got my orange from Marshal Pétain.

  He’s eighteen now but so weak he can’t even stand up.

  Mama says he was in a camp where people were starved.

  Leon, who always had a smile

  and friendly words to say to me,

  barely has the strength to speak.

  I visit Leon every day after school.

  Our visits are always the same.

  He lifts the corner of his pillow

  and offers me a piece of the American gum he keeps there.

  Then he asks me a question, the same one every day:

  “What did you learn in school today?”

  I always save up something special to tell him.

  He’s so interested in my answers.

  I can tell by the way his large, dark eyes follow mine.

  I collect information for him

  the way I once

  collected mushrooms and berries in the Vendée.

  Leon likes poetry, especially.

  I memorize poems for him.

  Though nobody says it,

  I know he’ll die soon.

  I want to bring him as much beauty as I can.

  On my way to see Leon, I walk past Saint Joseph’s Church.

  I want to go in, but I can’t.

  Now that I am back in Paris, I must be a Jew again.

  Being a Christian would make me a bad Jew.

  I want to talk to God about this problem.

  I want to ask him what I should do.

  But even though God lives with many Jews,

  he doesn’t live in my home.

  I can’t talk to my mother about God or prayer.

  Now that we don’t pretend to be Christians anymore,

  she doesn’t want to hear anything about it.

  When I arrive in Leon’s room one day,

  it’s even quieter than usual.

  My heart beats quicker

  as I walk toward his bed.

  Has death already come to take my friend?

  No, Leon is still with me.

  He doesn’t speak, but he looks at me.

  His eyes are larger than ever, a deeper and more urgent brown.

  They seem to want to say something terribly important.

  I want to ask them questions too,

  questions I never dared ask Leon out loud.

  How terrible was it in the camp?

  What’s it like to die?

  What does it mean to be a Jew?

  Should I be one?

  Leon’s eyes read mine and answer me.

  The camp was a nightmare.

  Dying here, at home, is a gift.

  To be a Jew is to know death and to love life.

  Be a Jew like me.

  What else can my eyes answer?

  Yes, I will.

  Of course I will.

  I promise.

  Before long, Leon’s stare softens and his eyelids slip shut.

  I close the door softly behind me.

  Shwush.

  Click.

  My People

  One spring day, Europe’s Lost and Found

  finds something to return to French Jews …

  a small box.

  The box contains the ashes of Jews who died in terrible places,

  places called concentration c
amps.

  No one really knows for sure,

  but they might be the ashes of our friends and relatives.

  We will bury the box at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

  Père Lachaise is near where my cousins used to live.

  But when I go there, I always think of Madame Marie.

  She spent her Sundays at the cemetery.

  She liked the tall trees, the fine statues,

  the prowling cats.

  She paid her respects to the famous at Père Lachaise,

  like the writers Balzac and Molière.

  Her favorites were the actress Sarah Bernhardt

  and the medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise.

  But she never limited herself to them … oh, no!

  She liked to see that all the tombs were in order.

  If she found one that wasn’t, she tidied it.

  Straightened an old photograph, lined it up on an altar,

  dusted cobwebs away with Monsieur Henri’s handkerchief.

  Cemeteries were my godmother’s hobby.

  But there are huge crowds of people at Père Lachaise today …

  Madame Marie will not be here.

  She stays away from crowds.

  I miss her so much I ache inside.

  Sometimes, in the middle of my days in Paris, I feel confused.

  I still wonder who I really am

  and where I really belong!

  In the city?

  In the country?

  At church?

  Or at my Jewish youth group?

  If only I could talk to my godmother about this.

  But since she moved away,

  I don’t see her as often as I would like.

  If I did see her and could tell her I’m not sure who I really am,

  I think I know what she would say.

  “The war is over now.

  You are the Jewish child of Jewish parents.

  You don’t have to be Christian anymore.

  In the eyes of God,

  it doesn’t matter where you live.

  It’s how you live that is important.

  Be a decent person who lives by her heart.”

  But how do I do this?

  How do I live by my heart?

  Mama and I come to Père Lachaise early.

  We’re there when the leaders of the march arrive,

  the skinniest men and women I’ve ever seen.

  These silent survivors gather in the thin rain.

  They are Jews who returned from the concentration camps.