The House of Izieu

by Jan Rehner

  We were always together. Two peas in a pod, Madame Sabine said. We always knew what the other was thinking and we dreamed each other’s dreams, and we smiled at each other every morning when we woke up because those dreams were always of home and that tiny village street we’d left so far behind.

  HANS (JEAN) AMENT, TEN YEARS OLD

  FRIDAY NIGHTS MY MOTHER would place a veil over her face and move her hands in graceful circles over the candles. We ate chicken flavoured with parsley and thyme, and broke open hot loaves of bread.

  When we were forced to flee to Belgium, we were hungry most of the time. But when my brother, Alfred, and I were granted visas for America, my parents insisted on celebrating with big bowls of coq au vin at the inn where we were staying. That was our last meal together.

  The very next day, the Nazis invaded Belgium. My father went into hiding and my mother became very ill. I never got to see America, though I sometimes still dream of it. The OSE took in my brother and me and after many months, we came to the House of Izieu.

  I remember breakfast on that first morning—porridge with honey and warm milk that tasted so sweet and familiar. It was like holding a piece of home in my mouth. I pretended to have something in my eye, because I didn’t want Alfred or anyone else to see that a bowl of porridge could make me cry.

  Our mother was suffering from tuberculosis and she was placed in a sanatorium called L’Espérance, not far from Izieu. We wrote to her almost every day.

  Some things Alfred explained to me because he made a big deal of being six years older than me. Some things were left unsaid. Sometimes we’d just sit under a tree together not talking at all, just breathing in the smell of fresh grass. Just the two of us, blowing dandelion puffs into the air, feeling the sun on our skin, remembering when there were four of us.

  LÉA FELDBLUM, TEACHER-COUNSELLOR

  FINALLY, THE CHILDREN were all asleep. I crept into the dormitory and watched them for a while. The room was crowded, all flung limbs and linens, a leg dangling off a bed here, an arm there. Sabine and I did our best to group them by age—the five five-year-olds in one corner, the seven eight-year-olds in another, and so on—but that plan soon broke down, as siblings gravitated to each other. I didn’t blame them for wanting to cling to what they knew. They’d been shunted around for months, some of them for years.

  My own bedroom, close by, was an oasis, but I never got used to Sabine and Miron sleeping in the barn. They sank everything they owned into this place, and what a place. I doubted her, but Sabine was right.

  When I first saw the House of Izieu, I had the sense that the boundary between dream and reality was becoming too subtle, almost invisible. Heaven had suddenly fallen to earth, though much of that earth was still dangerous and broken.

  I lay in bed and listened to the blissful silence of sanctuary. And when I heard footsteps, I just smiled and pulled back the covers so that little Émile Zuckerberg, in jumbled pyjamas and a bird’s nest of blond curls, could climb in beside me. He has been a part of me ever since I found him, alone and crying, in Rivesaltes. He is not my child, but I love him; I love all of them, as if they were. Children know love when they see it.

  With Émile’s head on my shoulder, I looked out through my window at the unencumbered sky: no uneven roof tiles, no spires, no telegraph poles strung together with sagging wires, no guards, and no barbed wire, only dense clusters of stars of every size.

  The river flowed underneath the moon, and the rivers of my heart flowed with it.

  IZIEU, SUMMER 1943

  THAT SUMMER THE MOON WAS GOLDEN.

  Sunlight was glorious. A bird was a wonder.

  The House of Izieu was bustling and alive, filled with the whoop and holler of children roaming free, the sounds of games and laughter, and beneath it all the liquid music of the river, swollen from mountain springs and rushing to find the sea.

  In the river meadows, alder, brambles, and wild roses formed a magical tangle for playing hide-and-seek. There were wild strawberries for picking, apple trees for climbing, marshy pools for wading, and river ponds for swimming. While the older boys pulled fish out of the river, grey herons and swifts circled overhead. This was la France profonde: ancient, luxuriant, generous, and remote.

  Every day had its routine and its surprises. Mornings began with trips to the fountain where the children washed their faces and then gathered around long tables next to the kitchen for bread and bowls of hot cocoa. There were lessons in the schoolroom, followed by chores: beds made, dishes washed, chickens fed, the cow milked, and the garden weeded. If the day was fine, lunch was often eaten on the terrace or simply on the grass beneath the nearest tree. There was a quiet hour, when the littlest ones might nap, except for four-year-old Coco who started every quiet hour with the chant “No nap. No nap.” The older children read to each other, or drew pictures, or wrote letters to parents, or cousins, or siblings, or aunts, or whomever was left of absent family.

  Then the children were set free to play and the surprises began. There might be swimming or hiking, tree-climbing or skipping. Some of the children collected all sorts of things: rocks from the river in the shape of bears or lions, every kind of feather, and pinecones of all sizes. By nightfall, their pockets were crammed with treasure. Others brought Léa and Sabine fistfuls of wilting wild flowers, or used the shells of acorns as miniature teacups, or fashioned dolls from sticks and the blossoms of hollyhocks.

  That summer was a good one for blackberries. Some of the bushes were taller than the children and covered in sweet, ripe fruit. The little ones filled their pails easily and came home with lips stained purple from blackberry juice.

  Surprises also came in the shape of people and animals. It seemed, at least in May, that someone or something new came every day. Léon Reifman arrived with eight more children dressed in layers of patched, cast-off clothes, like a row of tiny scarecrows. Léon took one look at the house and announced he would be delighted to stay on as a counsellor. Monsieur Perticoz rambled across the field leading a brown cow, followed by a bounding, long-eared cocker spaniel. Renée and Paulette Paillarès came all the way from Montpellier with a tent and a goat, prepared to stay for the whole summer. They also brought four-year-old Diane Popovski, long ago rescued from Agde by Sabine, and adopted by the Paillarès family.

  Perhaps best of all was the arrival of the cook and his mother. Philippe Dehan was dashing—tall and well proportioned with broad shoulders and thick black eyebrows that gave him a ferocious air. A lock of hair, black as coal, danced on his forehead. Most surprising of all, he wore an eye-patch, perhaps a souvenir from the war that was to end all wars but had failed to do so. Several boys nicknamed him the pirate at first sight. The cook’s mother, Marie, was stout and dignified, as dignified as a woman could be with a face that did, indeed, look like a raisin cookie. She wore a white kerchief over her hair and, unlike her son with the mysterious past, was as open and welcoming as her smile.

  Philippe immediately took command of the kitchen, slamming around pots and pans, and hollering for more wood to fire up the huge cooking stove. The bravest children hovered in the doorway to watch him, while the most timid peeked out at him from behind the nearest skirt. Marie acted as sous-chef, washing and chopping vegetables from the garden, and setting the table.

  When the moment came to taste the first dish, a thick fish stew, Philippe stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched with his arms crossed over his impressive chest. The children lifted their spoons with some trepidation, but the herb-scented smell of the stew was enough to make mouths water. Soon there was nothing to be heard but the clicking of spoons and the scraping of bowls. Philippe smiled, a huge grin that revealed a quick flash of gold.

  “Look! He has a gold tooth,” one boy whispered to another. “He really must’ve been a pirate.”

  Nodding and smiling, Marie gathered up the empty bowls, the older children quick to help her. T
hen everyone gasped as Philippe brought out a large, rectangular cake, placing it on the table with a flourish.

  “My specialty,” he announced. “Gingerbread. But don’t get used to such spoiling. It’s to celebrate my arrival.”

  As he carved up the cake, placing warm chunks of it on plates, Sabine sidled up to him. “You have a soft heart, Philippe,” she whispered. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep your secret.”

  After supper, if the night was fine, everyone gathered on the terrace for stories or songs. The cousins Fritz and Otto had once lived in Germany and knew the Der Struwwelpeter stories—a boy sucks his thumb and has it cut off by a tailor with a giant pair of scissors; another refuses to eat his supper and starves to death. These were quickly declared to be horrid little stories, banned from the terrace, but, happily, Alice knew all the stories from Charles Perrault, and she could recite her favourite, Puss in Boots, almost word for word.

  When Léa read aloud, her stories were soothing and gentle to match her voice, but if Marie-Antoinette were visiting, which could be anytime because she had no need of an invitation, the readings became theatrical performances and her stories resembled impromptu radio plays. Her voice could be low and raspy for talking bears, or high-pitched for the squeaks of field mice, or sugary for good fairies, or rough and hoarse for the cackles of witches. The small children, sitting on her lap or gathered at her feet, listening with rapt concentration, needed the wonder of Marie-Antoinette’s stories almost as much as they needed air to breathe.

  The songs were most often of the sort that everyone could join in on—Frère Jacques, Alouette, and Au claire de la lune. But if Barouk-Raoul Bentitou chose to sing, everyone else listened. He sang the street music from the old Casbah in Algiers, songs of love, joy, misery, and everything in between. His twelve-year-old voice was pure and clear. Sometimes it swelled and at other times softened, pulling at hearts. When he sang, Sabine thought of birds wheeling in the setting sun, of rolling waves, and of sparks dancing up into the air from a bonfire on the banks of a river on the edge of the world.

  During the long summer nights, the children’s feet, bare on boards, constant as rain, moved up and down the hallways and the stairs. Every bed and every room was full and no one wanted to be alone. The children’s voices echoed in slow, drowsy spirals through the house.

  Up in the attic, at the very top of the House of Izieu, Paul Niedermann and Théo Reiss lay down in their narrow beds. Théo was Paul’s best friend and confidante but he had never needed to make that explicit, because both of them took it for granted. “If we’re sharing a room,” Paul said, “I need to know: do you snore?”

  “No. Do you?”

  Paul shook his head. “Do you suffer from nightmares?”

  “Sometimes. Don’t you?” Without waiting for the obvious answer, Théo changed the subject, or rather returned to the subject that was never far from his mind. He was a lovely, dark-eyed teenager, and part of him was lonely all the time, a young, hungry part. “Tell me. Do you know anything about girls?”

  “Almost nothing.”

  “It’s Paulette, you see. When I’m around her, I feel like I’m all elbows and knees.”

  “Ah. Well, there’s one thing my mother told me once. She said men should treat women with tenderness.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  Since Paul didn’t really know, his answer was short. “Go to sleep, Théo.”

  There was always a time in the night when everything finally went silent—when the children were sleeping, or pretending to sleep, when the chickens stopped scratching, and the cow stopped lowing, when the wind stopped blowing, and the fir trees were flat against the dark sky.

  Alone in their separate space, their makeshift bedroom in the barn, Sabine and Miron often talked about how the children had altered their lives. To be in love with the children was to understand how alone they had been as a couple without them. It was to know that if they were ever to be without them again, the gap left by their absence would be unbridgeable, a yawning sorrow beyond fixing. Yet they were irresistible, these children, and they could no more stop loving them than they could stop loving each other.

  ARNOLD HIRSCH, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD

  I REMEMBER MY LAST IMAGE of my parents. My father was bearded, dressed entirely in black, in a heavy overcoat and hat. My mother stood next to him, leaning against his arm and sobbing. They were standing on the train platform, waving goodbye to me with white handkerchiefs.

  As the train carrying me to the South pulled away, they grew smaller and smaller, more and more indistinct, and their despair reinforced my premonition that I would never see them again.

  My father was never boastful or unkind. He sang at the piano, and gave ferocious hugs that lifted my mother and me right off our feet. As a little boy, I tried in vain to copy him in every way.

  My mother believed that laughter healed most wounds of the heart, and for anything else she recommended a remedy of chicken soup served with a spoonful of cod liver oil. She single-handedly drove away my fears and cares.

  At Izieu I learned to face my fears on my own and I cared for the little ones. I helped them organize their games and made sure no one was left on the sidelines. If they were tired, I carried them on my shoulders. If they were sad, I gave them hugs that lifted them off their feet.

  As the days came to an end, when the western horizon glowed a warm orange, I cuddled them on the terrace. We waited for the sky to darken and searched for shooting stars, and talked into the night.

  I missed my parents, but when I emulated their kindness, I felt the distance between us shrink, and the space I kept for them in my heart overflowed. This was the peace I found at Izieu.

  FRITZ LÖBMANN, FIFTEEN YEARS OLD

  THE COOK’S ARRIVAL was the trigger for endless speculation. Maybe he had to flee Paris because he had poisoned a Nazi in his bistro, or maybe he’d had his eye poked out by a jealous husband, or maybe he hadn’t lost an eye at all and the patch was a cunning disguise to hide a criminal past. Unlike the younger boys, I didn’t believe for a minute that he’d been a pirate, but he must have been hiding something or he wouldn’t have come here.

  We’re all hiding here.

  I read a book once about a wild boy who got lost in the Black Forest where the wolves found him and took care of him. They licked him clean, and brought him meat to cook on an open fire, and when the nights were cold, their fur kept him warm.

  I love that story. I remember wildness: running through the forest, my body buzzing with energy, leaping up for the joy of it with a mouthful of freedom to shout out. We’re all wolf cubs here, roaming the woods and the mountain trails like wild things.

  Of course, the real wolves are the Nazis. I never understood their hate, but I understand how it can leak out from a black heart into the light of day. It begins with muttered insults behind your back, with gravestones toppled over in Jewish cemeteries, with Dirty Jew scrawled on a shop window, and with synagogues on fire. When those eyes are on you, following you, watching you, tracking you, it feels as real as a fist punching you in the back.

  That’s why I love the House of Izieu, far from those tracking eyes. The forest is a thick curtain, and the rocky escarpments are like a fortress. It’s the best hiding place I ever found.

  BAROUK-RAOUL BENTITOU, TWELVE YEARS OLD

  EVENINGS ON TERRACE ARE BEST. On fine nights whole house is coming there to tell stories and sing. Music is in my blood, Paulette Paillarès says, and I guess she’s truth because at Izieu I am singing all the time. Humming when brushing my teeth, and whistling on hikes in woods. I am tapping my feet to tunes I hear while we are eating. In evenings I open my mouth and music of Algiers pours out.

  People are asking me about Algeria. I don’t have much to tell them. I am really little when we are leaving our town for Marseilles—most I remember hot skies going on forever, and sand in my food and
hair. And camels. They only look silly standing still. When camel in motion, moving on long legs over desert, in place where they are born and belong to, they as handsome as ancient kings.

  Never sure where I belong, so music my father and brothers taught me is home. They arrested in Marseilles when Nazis burst into café where we play for money for food—my father on mandole, Maurice on conga, and André on flute. I shake the Yoruba. I am being taken, too, only waiter grabs my shirt and stuffs me behind bar. Many months later the waiter, name also Maurice, writes letter to Madame Sabine and she is bringing me here.

  So yes, I am singing. Old folk tunes of Bedouin, songs of love from Casbah. I sing father’s hands on steel strings of mandole. I sing percussion of brother’s heart on conga, and I am singing André’s lips on flute. When I am hearing pure notes and feeling my body swaying in rhythms, I belong again. To them.

  JUNE 1943

  THE RIVER WAS NOT like the sea. It never threatened or boomed. Sabine grew to love the glass smooth calm of the evenings when the river reflected the silver and blue tones of twilight.

  From the terrace, she had an unobstructed view of the vista of mountains, river, and sky, cast by the evening light in a uniform blue. A thinly drawn line of darker blue, the horizon, appeared very near, as if she could reach out and touch it. She liked this delineating border and the feeling it gave her of being encircled, contained, even embraced. It was what she loved most about living here in this forgotten corner of France. She could live here in the moment, and immerse herself in the everyday. She could experience the world through the eyes of a child.

  Hours earlier, she had watched Léon take a group of children down to the river to feed the ducks that lived in the reed bed along the river’s edge. He was an excellent swimmer, sleek as an otter. Suddenly he dove into the water with a quick fluid grace that barely disturbed the surface.