Their worn striped uniforms
look like pajamas that are too big for them.
Their eyes are much too large.
They walk as if they only half remember how to do it, or why.
They seem sacred … set apart from ordinary people.
Only one outsider, God Himself,
could ever understand their thoughts and feelings.
Finally the leaders disappear into the cemetery,
carrying the small wooden box.
It’s the size of a baby’s coffin.
Mama and I, with groups of people our own ages, follow them.
We walk in silence under the weeping sky,
past sorrowful stone angels.
Some of us weep too.
Around us are grand tombs
carved with the last names of single families.
First names, dates, and places have been carefully recorded.
But all we have left of our loved ones is this small box of ashes.
It may be these ashes are not even theirs.
Suddenly, out of the crowd, a woman rushes up.
She reaches for me,
draws me to her, and hugs me until it hurts.
I don’t know her.
I’ve never even seen her before.
I’m sure she doesn’t know me.
But here she is, holding me as if she’d lost me,
missed me terribly,
and then found me again.
Should I push her away?
Should I call Mama?
In pain and joy the woman cries, “I had a daughter like you!”
Was her daughter my age?
Did she look like me?
The mother repeats again and again,
“I had a daughter like you!”
She strokes my hair, presses my face into her chest.
My heart tells me what to do …
it’s so simple.
Let this woman be your mother.
Be her daughter.
So I hug her.
I stroke her back as a lost-and-found daughter would.
I am every Jewish daughter who has died.
She is every Jewish mother who has lost a child.
Slowly, she begins to run out of tears.
Her friend takes her by one hand.
Covering her eyes with the other,
the woman staggers away.
I lie awake that night in my bed,
the bed that’s grown too small for me.
I finger my yellow blanket, thinking.
I belong to my family.
To Mama, of course.
To Papa too, if he ever returns.
To my godmother, Madame Marie, and to Monsieur Henri.
But the tears of the woman I met today
have washed away every speck of dust in my heart,
every trace of fear.
I’m a child of my family,
a child of France.
But, more than these,
my heart tells me now
I’m a child of my people.
The dead we buried today in the small wooden box,
the living brothers and sisters who have survived.
I don’t need to hide anymore,
and I don’t want to keep any more secrets.
Secrets stand in my way.
They stop me from knowing who I am.
I am a Jew.
I’m sure of it.
And I will always be one.
The Present
It’s a hot, dull day in July,
just before school lets out for the summer.
Our class is copying a map
when a knock sounds at the schoolroom door.
It’s the skinny new caretaker,
the one who’s taken Madame Marie’s place.
She speaks to my teacher.
My teacher smiles
and calls me forward.
“Your father has returned,” she tells me.
“You may go home to see him.”
I take my time walking there.
I should feel happy, I know.
The trouble is,
I don’t really know who my father is anymore.
I was only a little girl
when he went away.
Except for that one visit in the hotel room,
I haven’t seen him in five years.
We haven’t had a letter from him
in more than a year.
What will we have to say to each other?
He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him.
What if he doesn’t like me?
What if I don’t like him?
Will we have to live together anyway?
Many of my friends,
including Esther,
have lost mothers or fathers,
brothers or sisters.
Now our family will be whole again.
I’ll be different from my friends.
Slowly, I open the door to our apartment.
The electricity is turned off in the daytime.
A man sits in the shadows at our table,
wearing a soldier’s uniform and cap.
I stand near the table with my back to the wall.
The man tries to talk to me.
I try to answer.
Out of the man’s pocket comes a chocolate bar.
But even the enemy soldiers
tried to make friends with children, didn’t they?
They offered us candy too.
The man acts just like every other soldier.
How can I be sure he’s my father?
The man begins to tell me stories.
He tells me the Red Army liberated his prison camp.
What is the Red Army?
Did the soldiers wear red uniforms?
The man ran away through vast forests
with other Jewish prisoners.
The war was over, but they were far from France.
They had to walk most of the way back,
through empty bombed-out villages and farms.
All along the way,
they heard gunshots
and the sound of unmilked cows, mooing in pain.
His journey home took eight months.
As the man speaks,
I begin to remember my father,
the man who read stories to me so long ago.
I’m hungry for more details,
for richer stories.
“How did you survive?” I ask.
“We’d find food,” he said,
“chickens and vegetables on abandoned farms.
We’d make ourselves a feast and rest …
then move on.”
I nod, asking for more.
“And I had poetry,”
he says,
“reading poems helped me survive.”
Poetry?
So the beauty of words kept him alive,
just as it comforted Leon,
and just as it gave me my voice back!
“I have a present for you,” the man says,
opening his knapsack.
“In one empty house,
I found a jewelry box.
In it was a necklace,
a single strand of small pearls,
just right for a young girl.
I hadn’t seen anything so beautiful for so long
that I decided to put it in my knapsack for you.”
For me?
So this man brought home
a pearl necklace for me?
He must be my real father
or why would he do that?
No one else I know has a real pearl necklace.
How will I feel when I wear it?
Proud?
Embarrassed?
“But the next morning I changed my mind,”
the man says.
“I thought about the girl who owned it.
What if she came back?”
My heart sinks.
<
br /> My fingers have already touched the smooth pearls.
I’ve already seen them shining around my neck.
And now they’re gone.
The man reads my face.
“Never mind,” he says.
“Later on, I found something even better.”
Even better?
What could that be? I wonder.
My eyes travel to the man’s brown knapsack.
Is it the one Madame Marie made for my papa?
I just can’t remember.
The man begins to take things out.
Clothing, food … a worn-out dictionary!
The dictionary has lost its cover,
so I can’t tell if it’s the blue one.
But maybe this really is my papa after all!
Who else would carry a dictionary for five long years?
At last the man finds the package he’s looking for.
He hands it to me.
The package is small,
but too big for jewelry, I think.
I can barely breathe.
Slowly, I unwrap it.
Inside is a fine leather notebook.
It looks like a diary
but with no lock or key,
so it’s not a place for keeping secrets.
I run my fingers across the paper,
smooth as the skin of a newborn baby.
I smell the leather,
rich and spicy.
“What’s this for?” I ask.
“For you to write in,”
the man replies.
For me to write in?
I lean over and kiss him on the cheek.
“Thank you, Papa,” I say.
Yes, telling my story is what I must do.
I’ll write it down here
in the most beautiful words I can find.
The story of bombs and broom closets,
of stars and soldiers,
of cats and cousins,
of family and friends,
of heaven and hell.
The story of all the secrets I kept …
and the story of my lost-and-found heart.
Timeline
January 1933
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party come to power in Germany. Jews in that country begin to be excluded from public life.
November 1934
Odette Melspajz (later, Meyers) is born in Paris to Jewish parents of Polish origin, Berthe and George Melspajz.
September 1939
Hitler invades Poland as a first step toward conquering all of Europe. France and England declare war on Germany.
November 1939
George Melspajz joins the French army.
June/July 1940
France is defeated, and the German occupation begins. Marshal Phillippe Pétain is named head of the Vichy government in France, which collaborates with the Nazis.
May, August, December 1941
The first large-scale roundups of Jews take place. Only men are arrested. They are kept in camps in France.
March 1942
The first foreign-born Jews in France are deported to death camps in Poland.
May/June 1942
French Jews over the age of six are required to wear yellow stars on their clothing. They are forbidden to go to parks, restaurants, libraries, and other public places.
July 1942
Nearly thirteen thousand foreign-born Jews are arrested in Paris and deported to death camps. Odette escapes to the Vendée.
January 1943
The first roundups of French-born Jews begin.
March 1943
Berthe Melspajz joins Odette in hiding in the Vendée.
June 1944
After many sea and air battles, Allied forces invade France in a final, successful effort to defeat the Nazis.
August 1944
Paris is liberated.
October 1944
Berthe Melspajz and Odette return to Paris.
April 1945
Hitler commits suicide.
May 1945
Germany surrenders. The war in Europe is over. The death camps in Poland are liberated, and surviving Jews begin to try to return to their homes.
July 1945
George Melspajz returns home.
Author’s Note
Odette’s Secrets is classed as a work of fiction, but it is based very closely on a true story. Here is how it came to be. One late August afternoon a few years ago, I was walking through the Marais, an old Jewish neighborhood in Paris, with my husband. We passed an elementary school with a bronze plaque. The plaque honored the memory of the Jewish children, students at the school, who had been deported from France during World War II. I put my hand on the warm stone of the school, thinking of those children. Who were they? What were their lives like in France during the war?
I began to read about life in Paris during World War II, especially about the life of French Jews. I learned that 11,400 children were deported. Most died in concentration camps in Eastern Europe. But more children survived in France than in any other European country, 84 percent. How did this happen?
Most were hidden in homes, convents, monasteries, farms, and schools all over the country. To stay successfully hidden, children had to reinvent themselves, to deny their families and their identity and “become” French Christian children. How in the world were children able to do this? I wondered. And what was it like for them to readjust to reality after the war?
In October I was still thinking over these questions when I was invited to the American Library in Paris to read my book The Costume Copycat at the library’s annual Halloween party. After all the pirates and princesses went home, I went upstairs to browse in the stacks. And there, by chance, I found Doors to Madame Marie, the autobiography of Odette Meyers, a woman who had been one of those hidden French children during the war.
I became fascinated by Odette’s story. I pored over the photographs of her and her family and friends, read and reread her adventures, especially the passages where she described what it was like to switch selves, not once but twice, both in the remote countryside of the Vendée where she hid and then back in Paris again after the war. I visited the street where Odette’s family lived, and sat in the square opposite their building, studying the door and the window of their apartment above. I walked up the street, as Odette did, imagining her holding the hand of her beloved Monsieur Henri as he led her past the French policemen sent to arrest her and her mother on Black Thursday, July 16, 1942. Did the café and the convent she mentioned in her book look the same then? Where was her school? I explored the alleyway where her dear cousins lived, the cousins who were deported from France weeks after their arrest and never returned. I strolled in the park where Odette played, and in the cemetery where she came face-to-face with who she was after the war.
One night, I told my husband Odette’s story. Together, we took the Métro to the 11th arrondissement and stood outside Odette’s apartment building. “I so wish I could go inside!” I said, looking at the heavy oak door at the front of the building, a solid street door of the type that is always locked.
“Let’s see if we can,” my husband said, and pressed his fingertips against the door. It swung open! In moments we were standing in the tiled hallway where Odette played with her red rubber ball. At the end was the tiny apartment of her godmother, Madame Marie, the place where Odette and her mother hid in her broom closet when the police came at dawn to arrest them. I couldn’t believe my luck … the opening of that door seemed like a sign. I just had to write for children the story of Odette’s remarkable life.
I had grown up in a neighborhood with many immigrants near Detroit just after World War II. War stories, including some involving the Holocaust, were part of the fabric of our lives. But I had never before heard the story of how children saved themselves from death through their own courage and ingenuity. This was the story I wanted to tell.
But how? Odette had lived and prospered as a m
other, a teacher, and a writer, but she had died in 2002. Still, I knew she had a son, Daniel, and he lived in Paris.
I found her son’s number in the Paris telephone directory. With my heart in my mouth, I dialed the number. I left a message, explaining who I was and what I hoped to do. Then I waited. A few days later, Daniel called me back and invited me to lunch in his sunny apartment on the rue Rambuteau. He listened to my request and made his decision almost immediately. His mother, he said, had often talked in schools and libraries to children about her wartime experience. He was sure she would want her story to live on. As her literary executor, he gave me permission to use the facts of her life as the basis of a book for children.
I was thrilled but wanted to learn as much as I could about Odette and her family and experiences first. Daniel gave me his grandmother’s autobiography and some of his mother’s poems. He showed me film clips and more family photographs. He also told me that although Odette and her three friends thought they were the only Jewish children in the small village where they lived in the remote country area of the Vendée, in fact, more than forty children were hidden there by local families.
I decided I needed to visit the Vendée. I took the train to Nantes, as Odette did at the time of her escape from Paris. All the way I studied the farmhouses, the villages, and the train stations passing by. What was there in 1942? Did Odette see it as I did? Then I drove to Chavagnesen-Paillers, the first village where Odette was hidden in plain sight during the war. My husband and I were standing outside the house where she lived when a kindly old man appeared at the upstairs window and invited us in. He was Jacques Raffin, who had been one of the children of the family that had sheltered Odette. He showed me the garden where they had played together on the swing and fed the pigeons. Afterward, we visited the school Odette attended with her friends Cécile and Paulette, and the church where she went to Mass every Sunday. Finally, we went to the hamlet where Odette and her mother lived together under assumed names. We saw the forest and the square where she played hide-and-seek and hopscotch, the pathway she took walking to school in the town of Saint-Fulgent. The fields, the cows, and the cottages were all still there. Now that I had seen as much of Odette’s wartime world as I could, I was ready to write.
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