The House of Izieu

by Jan Rehner

“When can I start?” Sabine answered.

  “Tomorrow. As you know, time is of the essence.”

  Agde. Sabine would never forget her first sight of it. Bumping along in a truck that had long lost its shock absorbers, with her driver, Marius, she saw pastel stucco houses with red-tiled roofs, agave cactus, and a curving, hilly shoreline. Flocks of seagulls were a shock of white against a deep blue sky and the gentle waves of the azure Mediterranean.

  But there was nothing gentle about the camp itself and Sabine found it difficult to stomach either the contrast or the smell. The barracks, each about one hundred feet long, were made of heavy cardboard, coated with a layer of tar and separated from the outside world by a fifteen-foot fence topped with barbed wire. The floors were slabs of concrete, the beds were straw mattresses resting upon hard wooden benches, and the windows were square holes covered in plastic.

  Men and boys fourteen years of age and older were separated from the women and children, thus tearing families apart. Privacy was a series of thin blankets hung from low ceilings. Inside, the heat was stifling.

  Outside the barracks, a few taps provided water for drinking and washing, but there were no containers for transporting water inside. The latrines, almost hidden amid clouds of flies and crawling with vermin, were concrete structures with spaces for standing or squatting over large petrol drums sunk into the ground. Sabine saw more than one rat in the camp kitchen that served two meals a day, usually a thin potato soup and a small slice of brown bread.

  The medical tent was predictably overcrowded and disease was rife. As in the hospitals, medicine was scarce and despair abundant.

  The guards of Camp Agde were all French. There were no beatings, no overt incidents of violence. No prisoners were shot. They simply grew hungrier and thirstier, weaker and more vulnerable, and finally more susceptible to tuberculosis or pneumonia.

  Sabine was rooted to the ground, unable to move, as still as she’d ever been. In the pocket of her Red Cross cape was a list with five names. Five. From where she stood, she could see dozens of children, more than she could count, maybe hundreds. Some of them played soccer, kicking at an old lop-sided ball. Some of them drew pictures in the dirt with sticks. Some of them clung to their mothers’ skirts and looked at her through eyes older than their years. All of them were too thin, too ragged, and too young to be prisoners.

  Sabine trembled with fury and indignation and marched up to the nearest guard.

  “How can you be a party to this?” she demanded. “Look at these children!”

  The guard, grimly silent, looked right through her as though she did not exist.

  Sabine wanted to scream. She wanted to shake him until his brains rattled and arouse whatever scrap of conscience he might once have had.

  She opened her mouth to speak and felt a hand on her back. Whirling around, she found herself face to face with a young woman with curly black hair and a look of pure compassion in her eyes. Her features had an indefinable quality of grace. “It does no good to be fierce with the guards,” she said softly. “Try another way.”

  “But how?” Sabine wailed. She clutched the official papers in her fist and waved them at the woman. “Look at this list. Five names and there are so many children.”

  “One day at a time, Madame. Five today, and in a few days, five more, and a few days after that another five.”

  Sabine took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. It’s just—”

  “Yes. The first visit is a shock. I’m Léa, by the way. Léa Feldblum. I work as a teacher and counsellor at the children’s home in Palavas-les-Flots.”

  Sabine introduced herself and then asked again: “How do you deal with the guards?”

  Léa smiled. “Learn from the children. The guards they speak to have a heart. The guards they ignore pretend to be blind and so are susceptible to distractions and bribes. The children have been known to come up with some ingenious distractions—everything from fist fights, to hysterical fits of crying and even, just once, racing from the kitchen screaming Fire! I see by your ring that you’re married?”

  “Yes. Miron and I live on a farm on the edge of Montpellier.”

  “Does he smoke?”

  “No.”

  “Use his ration cards for cigarettes. That’s a good place to start.”

  And so the journeys back and forth between Montpellier and Agde began and continued two or three times a week for several months. Sabine grew braver and smarter and learned when to bring out the cigarettes, when to bargain with a chicken or two donated by Miron, and when to use her tall stature and her voluminous Red Cross cape. More than once, she strapped an infant to her chest, covered the baby with her cape and strode past the guards.

  Marius and Léa had many contacts in OSE who helped her find placements or homes, and she grew especially fond of the Paillarès family whose two teenaged daughters, Renée and Paulette, volunteered at the camp and at Palavas-les-Flots. She also found a well of kindness in the person of Berthe Mering, who lived frugally in order to give generously to the OSE.

  But Sabine never got used to the mothers crying out take my children. She wanted desperately to guarantee these mothers that their children would be safe, but as the women looked into each other’s eyes, they knew no spell, or promise, or prayer could make it so.

  PAULA MERMELSTEIN, TEN YEARS OLD

  I WAS SENT TO THE DUMAIS FAMILY in the south of France. That was after the German soldiers marched into Paris. My parents paid money to Monsieur Dumais to hide me.

  “You’ll be safe here,” my father said.

  But I didn’t like Monsieur Dumais. He was fat and sweated a lot in the heat, and he laughed at me.

  There was a girl my age, Jeanne. I don’t think she liked Dumais either, even though he was her father. When he lit up a smelly cigar, she said I should watch and he would blow smoke through his nostrils like a dragon. But that wasn’t why I didn’t like him.

  He watched me. I could feel his eyes on my back.

  Sometimes he would imitate my voice. We’d be at the table and I’d ask Jeanne to pass the salt, please, and he’d say, Pass the salt, please, in a high squeaky voice. He thought that was funny and I should learn to take a joke, but it made me feel small and itchy.

  Madame Dumais noticed, but she didn’t like to cross him. Sometimes I’d glimpse bruises on her arm and she’d pull down her sweater to hide them. Jeanne said Dumais hit her when he was drunk.

  I wanted desperately to go home. I wanted to sit at my own kitchen table and swing my legs and eat Challah with strawberry jam. I even missed my little brother, Marcel. I didn’t think that would ever happen.

  One night, after about two weeks, Madame Dumais came down to my room in the basement. “Tomorrow,” she said, “when my husband’s at work, you have to leave. He’s threatening to turn you in. I’m sorry.”

  I just sat on the bed, scared to death. So, my father didn’t know everything, after all. I wasn’t safe.

  “Jeanne will take you to a good family.”

  She pushed some money into my hands, a fraction of what my father had paid Dumais.

  “But how will my parents find me?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “They’ll never find you if you stay.”

  So Jeanne and I set out the next morning. I wanted to know where she was taking me and I pestered her with questions but she wouldn’t answer. I could tell she was angry.

  “You’re nothing but trouble,” she finally said. “Maman will get a good beating for this.”

  I started to cry because I didn’t want to be trouble. My parents always told me I was a good girl. All I could see with my head down were my shoes on the pavement and the bruises on Madame Dumais’s arms.

  Finally we stopped walking in front of a blue house with red tiles on the roof. Jeanne gave me a little shove. “Go on. Go in.”

  She ran off without anot
her word.

  I opened the gate of the little fence, but I couldn’t go any further. I didn’t know where I was or who the people in the house might be. I just sat down on a corner of the lawn.

  It seemed a long time before the door opened. A girl came out and crouched down in front of me. She handed me a handkerchief because my face was all snotty from crying so much.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “P-Pa-Paula. Mermelstein.”

  “I’m Paulette Paillarès. I don’t blame you for being scared, but it’s very nice inside. Would you like to come in?”

  I nodded and she took my hand. I noticed how pretty she was. She had clear smooth skin and long black eyelashes. “I don’t want to be trouble,” I said.

  “You? You’re no trouble at all.”

  That’s when I fell in love with Paulette and I love her still.

  MAX TETELBAUM, TWELVE YEARS OLD

  I REMEMBER WHEN I HEARD the word “refugees” for the first time. It was spoken harshly by a man in the doorway of a hotel who took one look at us and shut the door in my mother’s face. “What does it mean, refugees?” I asked.

  “It means us,” my mother explained with a sigh. “People who have lost their homes and are in search of shelter.”

  We didn’t seem to be searching in any of the right places. All the hotels and restaurants were full. People sat down right on the sidewalk or even right on the road. One night, a bar maid on her way home caught sight of my little brother, Herman, asleep on the ground with his head on my mother’s lap. “Come with me,” she said. “I haven’t much, but it’s more than this.”

  She fed us a thick vegetable stew and hunks of bread and she slept on the floor of her living room with Herman and me so that my mother could have a proper bed for once. The bar maid’s name was Francine and she was kind, but there were other nights when I saw money change hands and all we got were straw mattresses with fleas on the floor of an outhouse.

  When we weren’t searching for shelter, we were waiting. Waiting in long lines for transport, waiting for stamps on visas, for the next train, the next meal, the next chance.

  Only the present counted. That, and where you stood in line, or how much money you could raise for papers.

  I looked around and saw that refugees were sad people caught between a past that was ruined and a future that lay just over the border, or in the next town, or on the other side of the ocean, which might just as well be the other side of the moon.

  Father said we should meet him in Montpellier, but when we finally got there in mid-summer, the sky was hot and the earth was dry. Dust swirled in the air and the fronds of the palm trees rattled in the wind.

  We were able to rent a room in a small pension, and every day mother would leave us for a few hours while she searched for my father in the appointed meeting-place, the market in the Place Jean Jaurès.

  On the fifth day, she didn’t come back.

  We still had some food, a bit of sausage and bread, and I tried to persuade Herman to eat a little, though I could see by the way he bit his lower lip that he was trying not to cry.

  Suddenly there was a knock on the door and I told Herman to hide under the bed. When I opened the door, there was a lady in a nurse’s uniform. That was the first time I saw Madame Zlatin. She was very calm and respectful and asked if she might come in.

  “Your parents have been taken to an internment camp in Agde, not far from here,” she said. “I’ve spoken to them and their only thought is for you.”

  My heart sank, but I was grateful that she didn’t pretend that this was anything other than bad news. It made it easier to accept my responsibility to look after Herman. He was sitting on top of the bed now and I went to his side and put my arm around him. I looked Madame Zlatin in the eye. “We won’t be separated,” I said.

  “I promise,” she replied.

  And I could tell by the kindness in her face that she would keep her word.

  MAJER (MARCEL) BULKA, THIRTEEN YEARS OLD

  I WAS SCOLDED BY MY MOTHER a lot. She said I was a naughty kid, without manners or common sense. “Majer,” she would say, wagging her finger. “Wild boys come to wild ends.”

  It’s true I was bad. There was something in my legs that made them want to kick out at rules. I figured that just because something was a rule didn’t necessarily mean it was fair. And I sure didn’t trust people that made up the rules, seeming to spin them out of thin air. These were the same people who spat on the sidewalk after a Jew passed by.

  So I broke the rules. I pinched apples from the fruit seller around the corner. Once I stole a bottle of Shabat wine and drank until I fell on my face. I teased girls and chased dogs and threw stones at squirrels. I took every kind of dare. I climbed unto rooftops, crossed streets in traffic, broke into any empty house that might be haunted. I threw a few punches, too.

  But in the end, my rule breaking was nothing compared to the way Vichy twisted the law. My whole family was rounded up and sent to a wretched camp. “You see,” I told my mother. “The bad boys are penned up now with the good boys, so what’s the point of being good? What good did it do you to follow the rules?”

  In the camp, I learned that my bad behaviour gave me certain skills. The guards would sometimes give me a bit of sausage or cheese if I could recite every French swear word I knew, and I knew lots. On nights so black that even the trees and shrubs were black, too, I’d sneak into the guardhouse and raid their supplies, never enough to raise the alarm, but enough to ease the hunger of my younger brother, Albert. His pet name was Coco, and he was only three.

  My mother smiled at me then. “If you get the chance, my son, run away and don’t look back.”

  But now that I had her permission, I wanted to stay.

  She begged me to go.

  Several weeks later a nurse came with a list of children to be released from the camp. Our names were not on the list. My mother approached the nurse and held up Coco.

  “Please,” she said quietly. “He’s such a good boy. He never complains when he’s sick, just puts his head on my shoulder and waits to get better. My eldest son, Majer, will look after him.”

  I watched as the nurse held my mother’s gaze for what seemed a long time, but was surely only seconds. I thought she was going to say no, but instead she told me she was going to smuggle Coco out under her Red Cross cape and I should try to follow and slip by the guards.

  “Carry one of the younger children to the truck and, while I distract the guards with paperwork, jump into the back.”

  “He can do it,” my mother said. “He’s clever.”

  So I did what the nurse said and when the truck started to move, I looked back, even though my mother had told me not to. I could see her waving behind the fence, and I can see her there still, a tall woman growing smaller as the distance between us grew.

  I never got to say how much I loved her.

  EGON-HEINRICH GAMIEL, NINE YEARS OLD

  I WAS AT PALAVAS-LES-FLOTS with my cousin, Arnold Hirsch. I remember the sea best of all. The fishing boats and even the fish were bright red, green, blue, and yellow. We made a game of learning those crazy fish names, shouting them out loud as we ran along the shoreline.

  “Gulper shark!” Arnold shouted

  “Lizardfish!” I shouted back.

  “Starry sturgeon!”

  “Butterfly blenny!”

  “Velvet belly!”

  “Tonguesole!”

  Every day, there were sardine barbeques on the beach. We took off our shoes and went barefoot in the sand dunes. We waded into the sea where the water was pale green. We wandered along the alleys beside the wharves. They stank of drying fish. Some days, the sea was smooth and glassy. Arnold said it almost seemed we could walk across it, hopping onto the backs of turtles and fish, all the way to neutral Spain. I loved the way the tide le
ft the beach washed and clean. Every morning seemed like a new beginning.

  The end of days on the beach was the only part of being at Palavas that made me sad. That was when the town’s mothers and grandmothers would stroll along the sand, as predictably as the incoming tide, and gather in all the other children. Arnold and I would just sit and watch. Both of our mothers had been arrested and deported. We never talked about where they might be, or how much we missed them. If Arnold ever hoped, as I did, that we would see our mothers again, he never spoke of it. I understood. It was a hope too huge to risk speaking aloud.

  We walked along the edge of the water toward the sanatorium that housed the Children’s Shelter. When I looked back, I saw that the wet sand had already swallowed our footprints, leaving no trace of us.

  MONTPELLIER, 1941-1942

  SABINE AND MIRON WERE ARGUING. Notice had been given that all Jews, under the authority of René Bousquet, the despised Vichy official in charge of French police, must register at the local gendarmerie. Miron thought they should obey the order. Sabine did not.

  “How can you even think that this is a good idea? I see the results of this tactic over and over again at the camp,” Sabine argued.

  “If we don’t register, we’ll be fugitives. Nothing will protect us.”

  “And you believe that if we do register, we won’t still be fugitives?”

  Sabine stood up from the kitchen table and retreated into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. She just didn’t want to fight anymore. They’d been going back and forth for hours and she was beginning to see that no words would change Miron’s mind.

  Hunger drove her back to the kitchen several hours later. Miron was standing by the window, hands clasped behind his back and his head bent. The sunlight caught his profile and for one moment, gone so quickly she might have imagined it, she saw something different in him: not his usual certainty, not defiance, but something pale and unvoiced. It was vulnerability and fear. She knew because she felt it too, as though a car on a slippery road was skidding straight towards them. Who should they trust—the law, their French neighbours, themselves? She didn’t know, and neither did her husband. She walked toward him and held him in her arms.