Sarah's Key

by Tatiana de Rosnay

  At last, the house went silent. The dog barked once, then no more. The girl listened. Had the Germans taken Jules and Genevieve with them? Was she all alone in the house? Then she heard the stifled sound of sobs. The trapdoor opened with a groan and Jules's voice floated down to her.

  "Sirka! Sirka!"

  When she came up again, her legs aching, her eyes red with dust and her cheeks wet and grimy, she saw that Genevieve had broken down, her face in her hands. Jules was trying to comfort her. The girl looked on, helpless. The old woman glanced up. Her face had aged, had caved in. It frightened the girl.

  "That child," she whispered, "taken away to her death. I don't know where, or how, but I know she will die. They wouldn't listen. We tried to make them drink, but they kept their heads clear. They let us be, but they took Rachel."

  Genevieve's tears flowed down her wrinkled cheeks. She shook her head in despair, grasped Jules's hand, held it close.

  "My God, what is our country coming to?"

  Genevieve beckoned to the girl, clasped her small hand in her weathered old one. They saved me, the girl kept thinking. They saved me. They saved my life. Maybe somebody like them saved Michel, saved Papa and Maman. Maybe there is still hope.

  "Little Sirka!" sighed Genevieve, squeezing her fingers. "You were so brave down there."

  The girl smiled. A beautiful, courageous smile that touched the old couple right to their hearts.

  "Please," she said, "don't call me Sirka anymore. That's my baby name."

  "What should we call you then?" asked Jules.

  The girl squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.

  "My name is Sarah Starzynski."

  O

  N MY WAY FROM the apartment, where I had checked on the work in progress with Antoine, I stopped by the rue de Bretagne. The garage was still there. And a plaque, too, reminding the passerby that Jewish families of the third arrondissement had been gathered here, the morning of July 16, 1942, before being taken to the Vel' d'Hiv' and deported to the death camps. This is where Sarah's odyssey had started, I thought. Where had it ended?

  As I stood there, oblivious to the traffic, I felt I could almost see Sarah coming down the rue de Saintonge on that hot July morning, with her mother, and her father, and the policemen. Yes, I could see it all, I could see them being pushed into the garage, right here, where I now stood. I could see the sweet heart-shaped face, the incomprehension, the fear. The straight hair caught back in a bow, the slanted turquoise eyes. Sarah Starzynski. Was she still alive? She would be seventy today, I thought. No, she couldn't be alive. She had disappeared off the face of the earth, with the rest of the Vel' d'Hiv' children. She had never come back from Auschwitz. She was a handful of dust.

  I left the rue de Bretagne and went back to my car. In true American style, I had never been able to drive a stick shift. My car was a small automatic Japanese model that Bertrand scoffed at. I never used it to drive around Paris. The bus and metro system were excellent. I felt I didn't need a car to get around the city. Bertrand scoffed at that, too.

  Bamber and I were to visit Beaune-la-Rolande that afternoon. An hour's drive from Paris. I had been to Drancy this morning with Guillaume. It was very close to Paris, wedged in between the gray, shabby suburbs of Bobigny and Pantin. Over sixty trains had left from Drancy, situated smack in the heart of the French rail system, to Poland during the war. I had not realized, until we walked past a large, modern sculpture commemorating the place, that the camp was obviously lived in now. Women strolled by with baby carriages and dogs, children ran and shouted, curtains blew in the breeze, plants grew on windowsills. I was astounded. How could anyone live within these walls? I asked Guillaume if he knew of this. He nodded. I could tell by looking at his face that he was moved. His entire family had been deported from here. It was not easy for him to come to this place at all. But he had wanted to accompany me, he had insisted.

  The curator of the Drancy Memorial Museum was a middle-aged, tired-looking man called Menetzky. He was waiting for us outside the minute museum that was only opened if one telephoned and made an appointment. We wandered around the small, plain room, gazing at photographs, articles, maps. There were some yellow stars, placed behind a glass panel. It was the first time I saw a real one. I felt impressed and sickened.

  The camp had barely changed in the last sixty years. The huge U-shaped concrete construction, built in the late 1930s as an innovative residential project, and requisitioned in 1941 by the Vichy government for deporting Jews, now housed four hundred families in tiny apartments, and had been doing so since 1947. Drancy had the cheapest rents one could find in the vicinity.

  I asked the sad Monsieur Menetzky if the residents of the Cite de la Muette--the name of the place, which oddly enough meant "City of the Mute"--had any idea where they were living. He shook his head. Most of the people here were young. They didn't know, and they didn't care, according to him. I then asked if many visitors came to this memorial. Schools sent their classes, he replied, and sometimes tourists came. We leafed through the visitors book. "To Paulette, my mother. I love you and will never forget you. I will come here every year to think of you. This is where you left for Auschwitz in 1944 and never came back. Your daughter, Danielle." I felt tears prick the back of my eyes.

  We were then shown into the single cattle wagon that stood in the middle of the lawn, just outside the museum. It was locked, but the curator had the key. Guillaume helped me up, and we both stood in the small, bare space. I tried to imagine the wagon filled up with masses of people, squashed against each other, small children, grandparents, middle-aged parents, adolescents, on their way to death. Guillaume's face had gone white. He told me later he had never been into the wagon. He had never dared. I asked him if he felt all right. He nodded, but I could tell how disturbed he was.

  As we walked away from the building, a stack of leaflets and books under my arm given to me by the curator, I could not help thinking of what I knew about Drancy. Its inhumanity during those years of terror. Endless trains of Jews shipped straight to Poland.

  I could not help thinking of the heart-wrenching descriptions I had read about the four thousand Vel' d'Hiv' children arriving here at the end of summer of '42, parentless, stinking, sick, and ravenous. Had Sarah been with them after all? Had she left Drancy for Auschwitz, terrified and lonely in a cattle wagon full of strangers?

  Bamber was waiting for me in front of our office. He folded his lanky frame into the passenger seat after having put his photo gear in the back. Then he looked at me. I could tell he was worried. He put a gentle hand on my forearm.

  "Um, Julia, are you all right?"

  The dark glasses didn't help, I guessed. My wretched night was written all over my face. The talk with Bertrand until the wee hours. The more he had talked, the more adamant he had become. No, he did not want this baby. It wasn't even a baby, for him, at this point. It wasn't even a human being. It was a little seed. It was nothing. He did not want it. He could not deal with it. It was too much for him. His voice had broken, to my stupefaction. His face had seemed ravaged, older. Where was my happy-go-lucky, cocksure, irreverent husband? I had stared at him in utter surprise. And if I decided to have it against his will, he had said hoarsely, that would be the end. The end of what? I had gazed at him, appalled. The end of us, he had said, with the awful, broken voice I did not recognize. The end of our marriage. We had remained silent, facing each other over the kitchen table. I had asked him why the birth of the baby terrified him to such an extent. He had turned away, had sighed, rubbing his eyes. He was getting old, he had said. He was approaching fifty. That in itself was already hideous. Growing old. The pressure in his job to keep up with younger jackals. Competing with them day after day. And then watching his looks fade. The face in the mirror he had such a hard time coming to terms with. I had never had this kind of talk with Bertrand before. I could never have fathomed aging had ever been such a problem for him. "I don't want to be seventy when this child is twenty," he mu
ttered over and over again. "I can't. I won't. Julia, you have to get that into your head. If you have this child, it will kill me. Do you hear? It will kill me."

  I took a deep breath. What could I tell Bamber? How could I ever begin? What could he understand, he was so young, so different. Yet I appreciated his sympathy, his concern. I squared my shoulders.

  "Well, I'm not going to hide it from you, Bamber," I said, not looking at him and clenching the steering wheel with all my might. "I've had a hell of a night."

  "Your husband?" he asked tentatively.

  "My husband indeed," I quipped.

  He nodded. Then he turned to me.

  "If you want to talk about it, Julia, I am here," he said, with the same grave and forceful tone Churchill had used to utter, "We shall never surrender."

  I couldn't help smiling.

  "Thanks, Bamber. You rock."

  He grinned.

  "Um, how was Drancy?"

  I groaned.

  "Oh God, awful. The most depressing place you've ever seen. People are living in the building, can you believe it? I went there with a friend whose family was deported from there. You're not going to have fun taking those Drancy photos, believe me. It's ten times worse than the rue Nelaton."

  I headed out of Paris, took the A6. Not that many people on the highway at this time of the day, thankfully. We drove in silence. I realized that I had to talk to someone, soon, about what was happening. About the baby. I couldn't go on keeping it to myself. Charla. Too early to call her. It was barely 6 A.M. in New York City, although her work day as a tough, successful lawyer was about to start. She had two small children who were the spitting image of her ex-husband, Ben. And there now was a new husband, Barry, who was charming and into computers, but I did not know him well, yet.

  I yearned to hear Charla's voice, the soft, warm way she said "Hey!" on the phone when she knew it was me. Charla had never gotten along with Bertrand. They more or less put up with each other. It had been that way since the start. I knew what he thought of her: Beautiful, brilliant, arrogant, American feminist. And Charla, concerning him: Chauvinistic, gorgeous, vain Frog. I missed Charla. Her spirit, her laugh, her honesty. When I had left Boston for Paris, all those years ago, she was still in her teens. I had not missed her much, in the beginning. She was just my kid sister. It was now that I did. I missed her like hell.

  "Um," came Bamber's soft voice, "wasn't that our exit?"

  It was.

  "Shit!" I said.

  "Never mind," said Bamber, fumbling with the map. "The next one's OK too."

  "Sorry," I mumbled. "I'm a little tired."

  He smiled in sympathy. And kept his mouth shut. I liked that about Bamber.

  Beaune-la-Rolande drew near, a dreary little town lost in the middle of wheat fields. We parked in the center, by the church and the town hall. We walked around, Bamber taking an occasional photo. There were few people, I noticed. It was a sad, empty place.

  I had read that the camp was situated in the northeast section and that a technical school had been built over it in the sixties. The camp used to be a couple of miles away from the station, exactly on the opposite side, which meant that the deported families had to walk through the heart of the town. There must be people here who remembered, I said to Bamber. People who saw the endless groups trudge by from their windows, their doorsteps.

  The train station was no longer in use. It had been renovated and transformed into a day-care center. There was something ironic about that, I thought, peering through the windows at colorful drawings and stuffed animals. A group of small children were playing in a fenced-in area on the right of the building.

  A woman in her late twenties carrying a toddler in her arms came out to ask me if I needed anything. I replied that I was a journalist, researching information about the old internment camp that used to be here in the forties. She had never heard of a camp in the area. I pointed to the sign nailed up just over the day-care center door.

  In memory of the thousands of Jewish children, women, and men, who between May 1941 and August 1943 passed through this station and the internment camp at Beaune-la-Rolande, before being deported to Auschwitz, the extermination camp, where they were assassinated. Never forget.

  She shrugged, smiling at me apologetically. She didn't know. She was too young, anyway. This had happened long before her day. I asked her if people ever came to the station to look at the sign. She replied she had not noticed anyone since she started working there last year.

  Bamber clicked away as I walked around the squat white building. The name of the town was etched out in black letters on either side of the station. I peered over the fence.

  The old rails were grown over with weeds and grass, but still in place, with their ancient wooden planks and rusty steel. On those derelict rails, several trains had left directly for Auschwitz. I felt my heart tighten as I gazed at the planks. It was hard to breathe, all of a sudden.

  Convoy number 15 of August 5, 1942, had carried Sarah Starzynski's parents straight to their deaths.

  S

  ARAH SLEPT BADLY THAT night. She kept hearing Rachel scream, over and over again. Where was Rachel now? Was she all right? Was somebody looking after her, helping her get well again? Where had all those Jewish families been taken? And her mother, and her father? And the children back in the camp at Beaune-la-Rolande?

  Sarah lay on her back in the bed and listened to the silence of the old house. So many questions. And no answers. Her father used to answer all her queries. Why the sky was blue, and what were clouds made of, and how babies came into the world. Why the sea had tides, and how flowers grew, and why people fell in love. He had always taken time to answer her, patiently, calmly, with clear, easy words and gestures. He had never told her he was too busy. He loved her incessant questions. He used to say she was such a bright little girl.

  But recently, her father had not answered her questions the way he used to, she recalled. Her questions about the yellow star, about not being able to go the cinema, the public swimming pool. About the curfew. About that man, in Germany, who hated Jews, and whose very name made her shiver. No, he had not answered her questions properly. He had remained vague, silent. And when she had asked him, again, for the second or the third time, just before the men had come to get them on that black Thursday, what was it exactly about being a Jew that made others hate them-surely it couldn't be that they were afraid of Jews because Jews were "different"-he had looked away, as if he hadn't heard. But she knew that he had.

  She didn't want to think about her father. It hurt too much. She couldn't even remember the last time she saw him. At the camp . . . but when exactly? She didn't know. With her mother, there had been that last time she had seen her mother's face turn to her, as she had walked away with the other sobbing women, up that long dusty road to the station. She had a clear image pasted in her mind, like a photograph. Her mother's pale face, the startling blue of her eyes. The ghost of a smile.

  But there had been no last time with her father. No last image she could cling to, she could conjure. So she tried to remember him, to bring back his thin, dark face, his haunted eyes. The white teeth in the dark face. She had always heard she looked like her mother, and so did Michel. They had her fair, Slavic looks, the high, broad cheekbones, the slanted eyes. Her father used to complain that none of his children resembled him. She mentally pushed her father's smile away. It was too painful. Too deep.

  Tomorrow she had to get to Paris. She had to get home. She had to find out what had happened to Michel. Maybe he was safe, too, like she was now. Maybe some good, generous people had been able to open up the door of the hiding place and free him. But who? she wondered. Who could have helped him? She had never trusted Madame Royer, the concierge. Sly eyes, thin smile. No, not her. Maybe the nice violin teacher, the one who had yelled out on that black Thursday morning, "Where are you taking them? They're honest, good people! You can't do this!" Yes, maybe he had been able to save Michel, maybe Mich
el was safe in the man's home, and the man was playing Polish tunes to him on his violin. Michel's laugh, his pink cheeks, Michel clapping his hands and dancing round and round. Maybe Michel was waiting for her, maybe he said to the violin teacher every morning, "Is Sirka coming today, when is Sirka coming? She promised she would come back and get me, she promised!"

  When she was awoken at dawn by the call of a rooster, she realized her pillow was wet, sodden with her tears. She dressed quickly, slipping into the clothes that Genevieve had laid out for her. Clean, sturdy, old-fashioned boy clothes. She wondered who they belonged to. That Nicolas Dufaure who had painstakingly written his name out in all those books? She put the key and the money into her pocket.

  Downstairs, the large, cool kitchen was empty. It was early still. The cat slept on, curled up in a chair. The girl nibbled on a soft loaf of bread, drank some milk. She kept feeling in her pocket for the wad of money and the key, making sure they were safe.

  It was a hot, gray morning. There would be violent storms tonight, she knew. Those loud frightening storms that used to scare Michel so. She wondered how she was going to get to the station. Was Orleans far? She had no idea. How was she going to manage? How would she find her way? I got this far, she kept saying, I got this far, so I can't give up now, I'll find my way, I'll find a way. And she couldn't leave without saying good-bye to Jules and Genevieve. So she waited, throwing crumbs to the hens and chicks from the doorstep.

  Genevieve came down half an hour later. Her face still carried the traces of last night's crisis. A few minutes later, Jules appeared, planting an affectionate kiss on Sarah's crew cut. The girl watched them prepare breakfast, with slow careful gestures. She had grown fond of them, she thought. More than fond of them. How was she going to tell them she was leaving today? They would be heartbroken, she was sure of that. But she had no choice. She had to get back to Paris.