The House of Izieu

by Jan Rehner

  “Fine. You can stay here. You just have to be careful not to move around during the day when the shop downstairs is open. You might find it a bit crowded, but it won’t be for long. Paris has been liberated and the Germans are getting ready to run. They won’t try to defend a backwater like Belley. Philippe says the Resistance is ready to fight.”

  “Philippe is here?”

  “Nearby. He and Marie weren’t taken in the raid. They’d gone on holiday. Like all of us, they were devastated.”

  “But you said it might be crowded. I thought that meant someone was already here.”

  For the first time, Marie-Antoinette smiled. “Someone is. Gérard Bendrihem, the doctor’s son. Lucie had always intended to hide him with me. He’s sound asleep right now. You’ll have to share the bed or sleep on the floor.”

  “Tell me, how do you know the order for the raid came from Lyon? Perhaps it came locally, from someone in Belley.”

  “I made it my business to find out. I still work in the subpréfecture, for the Germans now. They’re careless around me. Reassuringly unimaginative. How threatening could a dim little secretary be? I only wish I could speak German because then I would know even more. Whatever information I can get I pass on to Philippe.”

  It was a glimpse of the old Marie-Antoinette. Still irreverent. Still smart. He watched her cross the room and rummage in a drawer. When she came back she held out a gun.

  “Here. Take this, in case you need to protect the boy.”

  The gun looked German, but he couldn’t be sure. He didn’t know much about guns. He took it from her and hefted its weight. “I used to not believe in these,” he said wearily.

  “I’m told they still work, whether you believe in them or not.”

  “But what about you? Are you safe working in the same office?”

  Marie-Antoinette shrugged. “I treat them with the same hypocritical politeness as they treat me. I’m fine,” she lied.

  She decided not to tell him she woke up every morning disbelieving and found it impossible to reconcile the happiness of her time spent at the House of Izieu with her despair at its fate. He didn’t need to know that nothing was clear to her any longer, that everything was cloudy now like the water in a vase of dying flowers, that the only time she smiled was when she was with little Gérard. Instead, she coaxed him into eating some bread and the last of her cheese. She gave him a blanket and urged him to sleep.

  “Goodnight, Léon,” she whispered, being careful not to wake the child, his limbs sprawled, his face relaxed, his breathing sweet and deep and strong.

  Unbelievably, miraculously, agonizingly, the war finally ended.

  Paris saw its share of revelry and revenge. Some collaborators met the rough justice of the street—a short noose and a long struggle on a lamppost. Others slithered away, and still others faced formal charges in the courts.

  Denise and Sabine sat in the kitchen, reading about the plans for the Nuremberg trials. Klaus Barbie had been charged, but not arrested. He seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. The prospect of his being found guilty in absentia left a sour taste in Sabine’s mouth.

  “The war is over, but nothing seems to have changed. Even justice is hit or miss,” she sighed, pushing the newspaper away.

  “Oh, just watch,” Denise insisted. “One thing will change for sure. There’ll be a national amnesia. Everyone will have been in the Resistance and no one will admit they collaborated. Vichy itself will be buried. And as for women? We’ll be expected to return to our household duties and not make a fuss.”

  “Well at least the government is talking about giving women the vote for the contributions thousands of women made to the Resistance.”

  “Maybe, or maybe just because our story fits so neatly with the De Gaulle myth of a unified and reborn France. I doubt we’ll see many women, even the heroines of the Resistance, given positions of power.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “My husband is dead. That’s been confirmed. So I’ll marry again. But I won’t give up what I’ve learned about my abilities and myself. Maybe I’ll start a business or go back to school. What will you do?”

  “I still don’t know where my husband is, or what happened to him. I don’t know what happened to any of the people I loved.”

  “Well, I have an idea. Until Jake comes back from England, I’m going to work with Henri Frenay in the Ministry set up to help returning prisoners of war and deportees. You might be able to find out what happened if you come and work with me. That is, if you think you can bear it.”

  “I can bear anything to find out. I’m just not sure what I’ll do when I know.”

  Frenay, who had helped found Combat, negotiated with De Gaulle to procure a building large enough to provide medical assistance and temporary shelter to the thousands of prisoners of war and concentration camp survivors making their way back to Paris. The Hotel Lutétia, a beautiful Art Nouveau building in the Saint-German-des-Prés area of the sixth arrondissement, became Sabine’s second home. She and Denise were quick to appreciate the irony of the site, for the Lutétia had once been the centre of German counter-espionage, its gracious ballroom the venue for glittering parties to entertain the commanders of the occupation. In their haste to flee Paris, the Germans left behind a dozen refrigerators filled with meat, cheese and butter, and a cellar full of the finest wines.

  Sabine soon discovered that her secretarial skills were negligible. She couldn’t type a word, but her organizational skills were brilliant. Within a few weeks, she was able to procure vital medical supplies and piles of clean clothing and linens. With her Red Cross connections, she set up a radiology centre and a staff of workers to help deportees find their families. Denise was thrilled when Sabine was asked to become the director of the repatriation centre. “After all you’ve been through, and all you’ve done, you’re the perfect choice, Sabine.”

  But though she was happy to serve, Sabine found the work emotionally gruelling. Pictures of the still missing lined every wall of the Lutétia’s huge lobby, and every day letters arrived from every corner of Europe from people still searching. If every name weighed an ounce, and all the names were piled on top of each other, the desk where she was sitting would buckle and the floor underneath her would crack open. The building itself would shudder and sink into the ground. Sabine felt the crush of those names like an iron bar pressing down on her shoulders.

  Many of the people pouring into the hotel every day had touched the very border of death. They were fragile and exhausted. Some of them had lost their limbs, and some had lost their minds. These poor senseless wretches would wander this way and that, with only the air to talk to because people avoided them and averted their eyes. Sabine thought of them as holy fools for they lived in the purity of the moment. They had lost their reason and thus, also, their grief, their fears, and their memory. She treated them with special gentleness, helping them remove their rags and put on clean clothes, and feeding them tiny bits of food so that their shrunken intestines would not burst.

  Most of the time, the repatriation centre was surprisingly quiet. There was the low humming of voices and the occasional ringing of a telephone, but the deportees were unsettled. They looked down at the shining floor and up at the chandeliers as if they couldn’t quite believe in them. They seemed eager to ask questions, but feared to disturb anyone and so held their tongues until spoken to by one of the workers. They were grateful for the slightest touch or acknowledgement.

  But every few days, a shouted name or a cry of joy, a miracle of recognition or reunion, would shatter the quiet. Heads would be buried in embraces and tears would flow and a life would be reclaimed.

  Sabine longed for the day when this might happen to her. She studied every face. Her heart jumped each time she saw a child. She pasted photos of Miron and Théo and Arnold on the lobby walls. And then one day, her eyes met those o
f another woman. A tremor of recognition. Léa?

  Sabine stood up, but her legs were shaking so badly, she sat down again. She tried to follow the woman with her eyes but she was quickly gone. There was an ache so hollow and lonely in her stomach that she felt faint. Perhaps she was only seeing another memory or an apparition.

  “Sabine.” The voice floated around her, light as a feather, brushing her skin as if it were a caress.

  “Is it really you, Léa?”

  “It is. I’m here.”

  Slowly, Sabine rose to her feet. The two women stood face-to-face, their hands tracing each other’s bodies as if they were blind. Sabine could feel the bones under Léa’s skin. Her fingers brushed the numbers tattooed on her arm. But Léa’s gaze was steady, her eyes bright, her soul untouched and unsullied. She smiled and suddenly Sabine’s grey world was shot through with colour again, like fireworks bursting across a night sky.

  “The children?” Sabine whispered.

  “It is thanks to the children that I’m here to tell what happened that day. My love for the children saved me, but I was unable to do the same for them.”

  “All of them?”

  “Remember them the way you loved them.”

  Sabine pressed one hand over her mouth and the other one over her stomach, as if to keep her screams locked inside and her body in one piece. The anguish she felt could rock the room, but nobody except Léa seemed to notice the trees crashing to the earth and the sun exploding. They thought the world was just as it had been a moment ago.

  Léa stayed for four months with Sabine and Denise, growing physically stronger every day. The House of Izieu was like a bruise, painful to touch, but with gentle coaxing from Denise the other two women began to set free the splendid lightness of those days: Coco dressed as a tomato, Barouk’s glorious voice, Suzanne’s magical dance.

  Sometimes they talked all night and sometimes they laughed.

  Léa did not speak of Auschwitz. Whenever Sabine had the courage to ask, which wasn’t often, she would tell Sabine not to think about the children’s last week, but to hold dear instead the year of joy she had given them. She would not say little Émile was torn from her arms by a guard, the same guard who had kicked her aside with a boot to her abdomen when she tried to follow. She would not describe the column of children marching hand-in-hand to the gas chambers. Instead she swore she felt the children’s presence in the world, in the beauty of twilight and the smell of lavender, in roses that bloomed despite the wreckage of war, and in the innocence of birds. As she always had, she taught Sabine how to bear the unbearable.

  When she felt they were strong enough to part, Léa told Sabine of her plan. “I’m leaving at the end of the week. I’m going to Palestine. Will you come with me?” Léa already knew the answer to her question, but she asked it anyway, for friendship’s sake.

  Sabine shook her head. “There’s still Miron, and the two older boys. It’s probably pointless to hope, but I need to stay where he might find me.”

  When the day came, Denise and Sabine accompanied Léa to the ship, Exodus. Her whole life was in one suitcase. They embraced and Léa placed her hands on either side of Sabine’s face. “My dear friend,” she whispered, as tenderly as she could. “Don’t wear your pain like a medal. Please do something with it.”

  Sabine heard those words for days afterwards. She pondered what she might do. She had no desire to parade her sorrow, but neither could she allow the crimes of the past to slip unnoticed into the darkness of the occupation. Denise had been right. Already, France spoke of les noir ans, the black years. People were eager to forget, to blot out bad memories like a spill of ink on a pristine page.

  Her decision to travel to a conference in Geneva was a declaration of her devotion to the children of Izieu. She would tell their story, no matter how much it hurt to revisit those days, as testimony to crimes against humanity.

  But even as she set out on her journey—her suitcase was under her desk and she had a ticket for an afternoon train—her past lashed out at her again.

  She happened to glance down the hallway where pictures of the missing still hung, waiting for someone to claim them. She saw a small man with red hair studying the photos. Something about him called to her and she went to stand beside him.

  “I’m Madame Zlatin, the director here. Do you recognize someone?”

  They shook hands and the red-haired man pointed to the photos of Miron, Théo, and Arnold. “These three men, I know them. We were in the same prison.”

  Sabine reached up and took down the picture of Miron. Though her hands were shaking, her body was rigid, as if a steel bar were running down her spine. “This is my husband. And these boys are my children.”

  The man stared at her. She saw his face was pale and as wrinkled as a winter apple, his eyes cloudy. Perhaps he was mistaken.

  “Are you sure?” she moaned.

  “We worked in the mines. But one day, when the Russians were approaching, the Germans told us to chop wood in the forest. As soon as we were hidden in the trees, the Germans opened fire. These men and a dozen others were killed. This was July 31, 1944, in Tallinn in Estonia. I am sorry, Madame.”

  He reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder. She could not bear even an ounce more of weight. The steel bar in her spine snapped and she collapsed to the floor.

  To assuage Sabine’s suffering, Denise postponed her wedding and hid her one photo of Jake in a drawer in her room. It seemed almost grotesque to her that she could be happy about her future when Sabine was facing a void. She marvelled that her friend could still walk and talk, that she hadn’t been driven witless by the enormity of her losses.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Sabine insisted. “I’ve been mourning my husband since the day I last saw him. And now, kindness itself to the end, he’s taken my nightmares away with him. It’s the two boys, those brave, handsome teenagers that my heart aches for, the last of the children.”

  “Surely not the last.”

  Sabine raised her head.

  “You’re not discounting those who are living, I hope,” Denise continued. “The babies you rescued, Dianne and Yvette, will be toddlers by now. What about Paul Niedermann and Henri Alexander, safe in Switzerland, or the children who stayed at Izieu for only a few months before being reunited with their families or smuggled across the border? It might do you some good to see them, or see your friend with the name that always reminds me of a queen.”

  “You mean go back to Izieu?”

  “I don’t know, Sabine. I can’t pretend to advise you. But listening to you and Léa, I could see it was a place of great love. Perhaps it still is.”

  Sabine didn’t respond, but several days later, she smiled at Denise. “Her name is Marie-Antoinette, and she is rather like a queen. I’m going to visit her. What do you think?”

  “Well, your suitcase is still packed.”

  Sabine had forgotten how rejuvenating the countryside could be. A scattering of tiny villages huddled around church spires. Through the window of the train, she gazed out at long stretches of green and golden fields. When she left the train, she saw the leaves of a thousand trees resplendent in the sun, and heard the birdsong and bees and the rustling of tall grasses like faint music from a thousand violins.

  Marie-Antoinette was waiting for her just outside the offices of the subpréfecture.

  Everything that could or should be said happened in the moment their eyes met and each saw the subtle changes pain had wrought in the other. A stranger might have seen no visible alteration at all. A clairvoyant might have seen a deep purple aura, the colour of a thundercloud. But these two women read the silent etchings of bereavement as clearly as if they were branded on their foreheads.

  Between them muteness was eloquence. Words were superfluous because what use would a sentence be when any sentence uttered about Izieu would be filled with stu
tters, pauses, and gasps for breath? Once that moment of meeting each other again was over, they felt freed of a burden and were pleased to be with each other.

  “Tell me,” Sabine pressed, as they walked the streets of Belley on their way to Marie-Antoinette’s apartment. “Have you heard from Pierre-Marcel?”

  “Oh, yes. He was sent to Chantellerault near Poitiers for the remainder of the war. He’s something of a local hero now. When the Germans were leaving, he negotiated their safe retreat in exchange for their not destroying the Henry IV Bridge. Noelle and the children are with him, and they’re happy to stay there. Belley has too many ghosts.”

  “Was he sent away by the Germans because of the House of Izieu?”

  “I think so, but I can’t be sure. It might have been because they suspected he was supplying identity papers to the Free French.”

  “He was?”

  Marie-Antoinette grinned. “My own father recruited him.”

  “But he wasn’t arrested?”

  “Pierre was too clever for that. I think the Germans actually admired him for never bending his head to Vichy, and he was so loved here, arresting him would have stirred the people against them.”

  “And you still miss him?”

  “Sometimes. He sends me postcards signed, with affection, Pierre.” Marie-Antoinette rolled her eyes and laughed. “Come on. I have a surprise for you.”

  She unlocked her apartment door and led Sabine into a pretty room, flooded with light. A boy of about twelve looked up from the book he was reading and smiled. He had a delicate nose, large brown eyes under straight brown hair, and a shy glance. He was a beautiful boy. When he stood to greet her, she could see he was tall for his age.

  “Gérard?” Sabine cried. “Is it you?”

  Woman and child embraced as Marie-Antoinette looked on proudly. “Gérard is going to be a doctor like his father.”