And we planned to meet Suzanne’s daughters, Agnès and Nadine, for lunch at Agnès’s apartment. They had arranged for a neighbor to translate. Natacha would be there to translate, too.
“You’re going to their apartment?” Kathy’s eyebrows shot up.
I nodded hesitantly, sensing some bigger issue hiding inside Kathy’s question. She stared blankly for a moment. “Do you have any idea what that means?”
“No. Why?” I was horrified I had committed some grave faux pas.
“People in France never invite strangers into their home,” Kathy said as surprise curled into a giddy smile. I smiled, too. Fundamentally, we were strangers. But we were strangers already deeply, inextricably bound.
Henry emailed a draft of his article and requested I make any revisions immediately. Facts and details taken from the original article had been supplemented with quotes from me and Tiffanie.
“[Tiffanie], Heuzé’s great-granddaughter, said she first [thought] the letters were a hoax when she opened them at her grandmother Denise’s home. ‘Then when we realised it was true, it was like a magnificent film. It gave my grandmother so much joy but also sadness that her parents were not there to see them.’”
Henry’s article repeated the claim a German censor drew the swastika and Marcel’s speculation soldiers brought his father’s letters to the US. The inaccuracies made my stomach churn, but there was no way I was going to point out Marcel had drawn the swastika. What happened if someone shaved down my statement to include the fact Marcel drew it—but not also include the note it was backward? And I did not know how to tell Henry the soldier-took-them supposition was untrue without also telling him I knew Marcel’s letters had been at a flea market. I didn’t want that information to be public until I could talk with the family.
Henry’s article ran in the UK on Friday morning, accompanied by a photo of me. He had requested an image, so I took a photo with a self-timer after securing permission from Denise and Eliane to show an image of one letter. In the photo, I sat in our living room, smiling, holding the letter with the beautiful swash M.
By Friday afternoon, a sliced and diced variation of Henry’s story made it into the US. The article included one new embellishment: I was labeled a die-hard romantic.
I sent Aaron a text at work, and as soon as he could, he read the newest article. The inaccuracies remained a painful flaw, but he reminded me all core facts were correct. I informed Kathy, Tom, Dixie, Kim, and Louise about developments, but I did not promote the story or post anything on social media. Nevertheless, I knew the story was making the rounds when a friend from college made a three-word post on my Facebook page: “die-hard romantic.”
“I’ve been called worse,” I typed with a chuckle.
Little could I guess how true my statement would turn out to be.
That evening, I navigated to the comment section at the end of the article. I hoped to see that Marcel’s story touched readers, that the article provided a few moments of feel-good happiness. Instead, readers accused me of being a liar. They believed the entire story had to have been invented. They claimed prisoners could not mail letters from camps, that the letters had to be fake. They berated me for wasting years of time and speculated I was scheming to turn the story into a book or movie. They commented that it was unconscionable not to return the original letters, and that the photo of me smiling, holding one of Marcel’s letters, was wholly inappropriate. A few felt my blonde hair and blue eyes were damning. They described me wearing a Nazi uniform.
I knew I should snap my laptop shut and look away, but I could not. I read every single grisly comment, and there were hundreds. I wanted to hurl every insult back with the force and fury of a tornado, but I did not. Any response would have fueled their entertainment. Deep down, I knew it should not have mattered what people called me. I knew they had written the debasing comments for a laugh, yet I was blindsided by the vitriol. I did not understand how anyone would feel anything other than soaring joy to learn Marcel had made it home.
Other websites—history and lifestyle websites, blogs—reposted the article. Before long, I found my stupid smiling face staring back at me from a neo-Nazi website. I stood up, walked to the bathroom, stood over the toilet, and threw up as the reader comments swirled inside my head: Liar. Fake. Opportunist. Nazi.
Eventually, I shifted to my left and stared into the mirror above the sink. Mascara had relocated to my eyelids and cheeks. A black smudge streaked across my forehead. I wanted to crawl into bed and pretend I had not brought this on. But no matter how I dissected it, my actions caused this: I could not let go. I kept digging. I wrote Denise. I supplied the photo to Henry.
So I had to allow the comments, the accusations, the insults.
Sticks and fucking stones.
I wet a washcloth in the sink, then held the cool fabric over my face. A song began playing inside my head. First, I heard violins, then a trumpet’s blare, then a slow and steady drumming build. Then Edith Piaf began singing. Her raging, crumbling, defiant voice began belting the first words of “Non, je ne regrette rien.”
I imagined the moment Denise first opened my letter and saw her father’s writing. I envisioned the photo from the French newspaper of Marcel smiling and proudly holding his father’s letter. Call me whatever you want, I thought. I would do it again. I would do everything again. No, I regret nothing.
Sleep eluded me. All night, I sat on the couch. Hoover sat vigilant by my side, as if he were protecting me from some invisible assailant he did not quite understand. On our morning walk, a neighbor bolted out of her house, hands flapping in the air. She was bursting with excitement that someone from our sleepy street made the news. As she told me how much she loved the story, I nearly wept with gratitude. Each kind word seemed to chip away at the moat of hate that had surrounded me the night before.
“Finding those letters was no coincidence,” she said. “Those letters found you, you know.”
“Do you know the letters are in the news?” I had not talked with my brother and sister-in-law since the open house.
“Oh yeah, I know,” I replied.
Strangers had emailed me, asking if I would help with their genealogy research. A client had emailed a friendly accusation: “You’ve been leading a secret double life, I see.” Interview requests began coming in, so I reached out to a friend who had experience with media. After discussing the legal issues that prevented me from disclosing the letters’ contents, my hesitance to talk about the font, and the complicated relationships within the Heuzé family, he recommended I decline additional interview requests.
Despite my silence, new articles appeared. Some included surprising embellishments. One described how lines of writing had been covered with thick black censor marks. Another claimed I had returned the letters to France months earlier. Another described the meeting I had with Denise and Marcel, which had, according to the article, already taken place.
A second French television producer attempted to secure an on-camera interview and pressed for details on when I would arrive, where I planned to stay, when I planned to meet the family. I began swallowing Tums by the fistful.
Aaron had been on high alert since reading the online comments. His anger finally erupted. “If one reporter in France knocks on our door, if one producer touches you, if we sense someone is getting to the family, we’re leaving. We’re heading to the airport with the clothes we have on and we’re buying new tickets home.”
“That would be so expensive,” I mumbled.
“I don’t care,” he stated.
“What about the meetings with the family?”
“Right now,” he said, “I really don’t care about them.”
“Die-hard romantic” apparently translated into something slanderous in French. Natacha told me to “go to the police and make a handrail!” I should have laughed at the situation—and at whatever Natacha thought a handrail was—but I could not find humor in anything.
Agnès sent an emai
l wanting to be sure I understood her branch of the family was deeply upset the story had gone public. Angry phone calls had gone back and forth between various family members. Media coverage had turned into a “spectacle,” she explained, and Marcel and Renée would have been displeased with the circus it had become. I would later learn one family member had been the target of the same type of comments that had pained me.
The weight of everyone’s anger and disappointment made my knees buckle. Perhaps it had been a naïve belief, but I hoped these letters would stitch Marcel’s family back together. The opposite seemed to be happening, and I could not see how this enormous black cloud was not going to cast a dark shadow over our time in Paris.
For an hour, Agnès and I messaged back and forth; my emails were translated into crude French, hers into rough English. Three of her four children would join us for lunch, she wrote. She attached a photo. Arms draped over shoulders like teammates in a rugby scrum, and it looked as if they had forced themselves to stop laughing long enough to snap the photo. Their youngest, Eugénie, was fifteen; their oldest, Jean-Noël, was thirty-five.
“Because of you, we know a page of our history and can tell it to our children,” Agnès wrote. “That part of our grandfather’s life is, for me, very personal because Marcel barely talked about it. I think he kept his fears, his hunger, and the feeling of missing his family private because he wanted us to keep the memory of a happy man and not of a hard worker. I think he suffered and tried to protect us. Our grandfather was a man of peace.”
On Friday morning, Aaron left for one last, grueling shift. My day disappeared in a flurry of last-minute client requests.
Five complete sets of Marcel’s letters had been printed onto the highest-quality photographic paper, collated, and placed inside envelopes. The prints captured every tiny wrinkle, crease, fold, stain, and subtle change in color. Despite the quality, I knew copies could never compare to holding the paper Marcel had written on, paper he might have held to his heart or lips, paper that, at one time, held traces of his DNA.
By late afternoon, the guilt of not returning the originals smoldered like kindling about to erupt in fire. The bank would be open another hour, which left enough time to retrieve the originals from the safe-deposit box, which is where I had returned them after Kathy and Dixie’s private viewing.
“Don’t do it,” Aaron responded after I paged him at the hospital. He reminded me I could always send the original letters after the trip if I identified an ideal long-term caretaker. But if I had the originals with me, he feared I would hand the letters to the first person who asked for them.
Aaron then reminded me of a different scenario we had discussed. Since we did not know how the letters ended up at the flea market, we had to consider the possibility they had been stolen. If that was true, I would be entering France possessing stolen World War II memorabilia. The thought of the original letters being confiscated as I passed through customs, of being interrogated in French, or ending up in some legal quagmire made me feel like retching.
“Promise me you won’t get them,” Aaron said with an exasperated sigh.
“I promise.” My head knew not bringing the original letters was the right thing to do. But my heart still believed it was wrong.
By 9:30 Friday evening, my to-do list had been scratched clean. My suitcase and carry-on sat near the front door. Hoover seemed to understand I was leaving; he would not let me out of his sight.
I nestled into the couch with the translations of Marcel’s seventeen letters. I had glanced at them while preparing for the open house, but I had not taken the time to read the translations in weeks. As I read each letter, I tried to let Marcel’s words of love be a salve to the anger, to the misinformation, to the words of hate. Despite everything that happened during the previous twelve days, despite the unknowns that lay ahead of us, I tried to release everything except the one truth that had always made this project important.
The one truth that made everything important: love.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Paris, France
October 2012
Our little apartment was unavailable our first night in Paris. We knew about the scheduling limitation from the outset, so for one night, we reserved a bare-bones hotel room near the apartment. We arrived hours before we could check in, but the hotel’s front desk attendant said we were welcome to leave our luggage until our room was ready.
We stepped outside and strolled toward the Eiffel Tower. Aaron had never seen it before, and I enjoyed watching him smile as he gazed skyward, spellbound by its majesty. I had visited Paris briefly in 1992, eight months after I graduated from college. But I had forgotten how intricate the ironwork was, and that in bright sunlight the Tower glowed the color of milk chocolate.
We did not have anything on the afternoon’s agenda, so after wandering around the base of the Tower, we claimed a street-side table at a nearby café. Aaron had only studied French for two weeks compared to my three-month study, yet he had a gift for pronunciation that completely eluded me. “Deux sandwiches de poulet et de l’eau minérale gazeuse, s’il vous plaît” rolled off his tongue after our waitress asked for our order. I stared at him in astonishment.
After checking in to our room, washing up, and changing out of travel clothes, I turned my laptop on so I could send Agnès an email. She made me promise I would let her know we had arrived safe and sound. Her email had ended with “keesses.” The misspelling made her note even sweeter.
Eventually, Aaron and I went back outside and meandered through neighborhood streets. Paris’s charm seemed to infuse every cobble, every bentwood café chair, every perfectly twisted neck scarf. The intricate wrought iron adorning the city’s elegant white stone buildings reminded me of calligraphy; it was as if some master penman had dipped a steel-point pen into a jar of black ink and decorated every gate and window guard with swirling, scrolling ornamentation.
After watching the Eiffel Tower’s evening light show, Aaron and I wandered again until we came across a restaurant with an available outdoor table and a sidewalk menu board that caught both of our fancies. Aaron was drawn to the dishes advertised; I was charmed by the curlicue chalk script.
When our waiter came to take our order, I felt emboldened to put my yet-untested skills to work and order in French.
“Je voudrais que le—”
“No, no, Madame,” the waiter said as he threw a flat hand in the air. “Order in English. I will have some chance of understanding you that way.”
Aaron could barely contain his laughter; I wanted to crawl under the table. As the waiter walked away, I decided I would not let his boorishness ruin this moment. Accordion music wafted from the restaurant’s interior, the Eiffel Tower’s lights twinkled in the distance, and Aaron sat across from me. The evening was perfect.
Je voudrais graver ce moment dans ma mémoire pour toujours.
I would like to remember this moment forever.
For the first three hours I lay in bed, wide-eyed, marking time as the Eiffel Tower’s hourly light show reflected off a nearby building: 11:00 p.m. Midnight. 1:00 a.m. When Aaron’s snoring grew so loud it hurt my ears, I retrieved a spare blanket from the closet, propped my legs on the luggage rack, and tried to sleep in the desk chair. At 4:00 a.m., I abandoned the thought of sleep entirely, flipped on the desk light, and read the only English-language magazine in the room.
Aaron awoke sometime around 5:00 and mumbled, “Why are you awake?”
I told him his snoring made any attempt to sleep futile, but the truth was more complicated. A brew of excitement and anxiety had made it impossible to calm my mind. Every unknown about meeting Marcel’s family—every worry about what might go right or wrong—had caught up with me.
Aaron urged me to sleep, and promised not to make any more noise. He moved to the desk chair, and I slid into the warm bed. As I tumbled into a deep sleep, I calculated how the morning’s itinerary could be adjusted. We did not have to be anywhere until 11:30.
Fifteen minutes later, I woke to a crunch so loud it was as if someone had crumpled cellophane next my ear. “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I snapped.
“What?” Aaron asked through a mouthful of half-eaten peanuts.
I was wide awake again.
After showering and packing our bags, we checked out of our room and turned our suitcases over to a sleepy bellman.
We ambled past the darkened Tower, crossed over the Seine’s ink-black water, climbed the curved steps of the Trocadéro, and sat on the marble steps of the Esplanade. From our elevated vantage point, it appeared as though the enormous Tower stood guard over the city, sprawling and still asleep.
As the sky slowly lightened to baby blue, then as a strip of fiery orange erupted along the horizon, church spires were the first structures to appear from the shadow of night. The city reminded me of a vast classroom, and those spires seemed to be hands volunteering to greet the morning. And as light finally took hold, the frustrations of the sleepless night faded away.
Promptly at 8:30, a crew of rail-thin men hawking miniature Eiffel Towers appeared, followed by busloads of chattering, camera-wielding tourists. Though we knew it had not been true, for nearly two hours it felt as if Aaron and I had had the Eiffel Tower—the entire city of Paris—all to ourselves.
We stopped along the nearby Place du Trocadéro—a semi-circular road ringed with restaurants—for a warm breakfast before meandering to the Arc de Triomphe, then down the Champs-Élysées. All the while, we kept a close eye on the time.
“Where should we wait?” Aaron asked.
I shrugged. It was 11:30. We had returned to the Eiffel Tower and were standing underneath its soaring arches.
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