by Joanna Gruda
“Jules, don’t be a chicken! Come on in, the sea won’t eat you!”
“It’s just a bit cold, that’s all. I’m coming, I’m coming . . . ”
I sat down on the edge of a rock, and let my legs dangle in the water. Slowly I slid down, clinging to my rock, but eventually I had to let go and drop into the water. I was splashed by the waves, I could taste the salt. I copied the Binet brothers, splashing, jumping, shouting—shouting all my joy at being with my friends again, far away from Paris, far away from the war.
After our swim we lay on a big rock to dry out so our wet hair would not give away what we’d been up to.
It was only that evening in the refectory that I saw Rolande again. She gave me a funny look. I went over to her, trying to hide my embarrassment. I had gotten used to communicating with her in writing, and I realized that our letters had given rise to an intimacy between us that in her presence I did not know how to recreate.
“I’m happy to be here,” I said.
“Yes, you seem happy.”
“Well, yeah, everyone seems nice, I think. You must have a good time, it seems more fun than at the orphanage, with all the grapes, and the sea . . . ”
“You know, I wanted to tell you that I’ve made new friends. I’m glad to see you, but there is Clément, who is my best friend.”
“Oh, I see . . . well, that’s no big deal.”
She didn’t say anything.
“We’re still friends, aren’t we?”
“Well, yes.”
And she walked away.
I felt there was something wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Later on I would realize that I hadn’t reacted the way I should have, that Rolande wanted me to insist, to make her choose me as her “best friend”; basically, she didn’t really care about Clément. I’d made a mess of my first little love affair, but it didn’t bother me too much, because there was so much to do at the holiday camp.
It didn’t take me long to learn the customs of the place. The camp was surrounded by vineyards, but we weren’t allowed to pick the grapes, which made it one of our favorite activities. The boys quickly taught me the basics of the art: never pick all your grapes in one place, never leave an entire stock with nothing. And never go to the same place two days in a row. Of course we ate a lot of grapes, but in the long run, you got tired of them. So, we decided we’d try being winemakers. We plucked the grapes from their stems, filled up some buckets, then stood barefoot in the buckets and crushed the grapes. Then we had to strain the mixture through a sieve and bottle it. We lay the bottles down flat underneath our cabin, and every week we would uncork one to taste it. I don’t think our method really worked . . . The concoction didn’t taste very good, so I didn’t manage to make myself drunk. But there were others who did.
Another activity that I enjoyed a lot, and which was perfectly legal, was going to the beach. It reminded me of our expeditions to the canal with the orphanage. We would stand in a line and walk roughly two kilometers, all the way to the sea. We found plenty of things there to keep busy: we smashed oysters against the rocks, observed the seahorses, or caught eels (which we then took back to the chef at the holiday camp). The nice thing about eels was that you could hide one behind your back and then suddenly dangle it in front of one of the girls. Shouts and screams guaranteed!
CHAPTER 21
The Germans Come to the Summer Camp
One day, the war, which had seemed very far away, came to Royan. The Germans were all over the town, and one morning, their trucks, trailers, and wagons showed up in the garden at the holiday camp, and they set up their own encampment. We were terrified. Especially the boys. We had our informers, and we knew that the Germans, who didn’t want a third war with France, had decided to resort to extreme measures and cut off the right hand of every French man (and boy). As soon as we heard the sound of the German soldiers’ boots on the ground in the summer camp, we ran to hide in the cellar of an outlying building, where we stayed for several hours, determined not to budge from there until the end of the war. Eventually the director of the camp came and found us there. She told us, finding it difficult to hide a little smile, that this story about cutting our hands off was a rumor that came from God knows where, and that we could come out and needn’t be afraid, we could join the girls for dinner.
Once we were convinced the Germans weren’t going to cut anything off, fear gave way to curiosity. We ate very quickly and as soon as the bell rang for the end of the meal we left the refectory in a great hubbub.
Outdoors, everything had changed. Every bit of lawn in the garden was occupied, there were Germans everywhere, German wagons, German cars . . . I walked around in the middle of it all feeling a little nervous, but above all fascinated. The soldiers were too busy setting up camp to show any interest in us. So we were able to observe them quite openly. Georges came and joined me.
“You know what? I saw a German go into a wagon and I got a look inside. Guess what there was.”
“Prisoners of war?”
“Well, no, not exactly. Rifles and machine guns.”
“And Madame Bouillon is allowing them to leave that stuff in the midst of the kids?”
“Uh . . . I don’t think they asked her for permission.”
And before he’d even finished his sentence I realized how stupid my question had been. The Germans were invaders—they didn’t give a damn about the safety of French children. Or about Madame Bouillon for that matter.
Contrary to all our expectations, the Germans behaved very nicely with us. Thanks to one of them I even got my first paid job. I was walking around among the German wagons, very slowly, both because it was incredibly hot and because I couldn’t get enough of watching the soldiers. One of them waved at me to come over. My heart began pounding very fast. I hesitated for a moment, but then I realized that to run away would be as ridiculous as it would be pointless. So I went up to him, acting casual.
“What your name?”
“Jules.”
“Me, Hans. You, how old?”
“I’m ten. And you?”
He laughed and ruffled my hair.
“Me, twenty-three years old. My French is not very good, very difficult. I want to read and write. You know?”
“Do I know how to read and write French?”
“No. You know . . . teach me?”
“Uh . . . Yes, I suppose so . . . I’ve never done it, but I could try, we can see what happens, I’m not sure I know how to go about it, but like I said, I’m willing to try.”
“Slow, slow, please. If you slow, I understand a little.”
“Yes, sorry. I’ve never done it, but I can try. After, you tell me, it’s okay, or it’s not okay.”
“Super! I have newspaper, we start?”
Hans asked me to read a newspaper article. I read the first paragraph. He looked over my shoulder while I read, then he tried, laboriously, to read in turn. Every time he mispronounced a word, I corrected him, he said the word again, and I corrected him again if I had to. And that way, we got through half the article. He seemed delighted.
“Is good, very good. Tomorrow, again?”
“Okay, I’ll come back at the same time.”
“Here is for you,” said Hans, handing me a bar of chocolate.
Chocolate had been very rare since the beginning of the war. And I loved it. Hans couldn’t have chosen a better form of remuneration. I hid this first bar of chocolate carefully under my shirt and only ate it late at night, alone in my bed. It was all soft and warm, but what a treat!
And he went on giving me bars of chocolate for each lesson. After a while, it wasn’t such a novelty and I began sharing it with my friends.
It was thanks to a square of chocolate I gave to Jacques that I earned the right to some special information: at certain times of day it was fairly easy to climb into the trucks whe
re the Germans kept their supplies. Jacques had already done it twice and brought back cookies and cans of Spam.
“You want to join us on the next expedition?”
“Is there a risk we’ll get caught?”
“No, there are times when it’s really easy, when they’re at meals, for example.”
“Okay. Shall we go together this afternoon?”
“Okay. Normally, when they ring the bell for our meal it’s about when they are finishing theirs. So it’s easy to get out of the truck in time.”
All morning I waited impatiently. When I saw the German soldiers head off to their canteen, I felt a twinge in my heart. Jacques came over to me, very cool and calm. I tried to absorb some of his calm. He explained his strategy.
“In order not to look suspicious, you mustn’t watch them out of the corner of your eye or seem to be wandering around aimlessly. The best thing is to run, as if we were chasing each other, or to pretend we’re playing hide and seek.”
“Okay, go and hide, I’ll look for you.”
Not hesitating for a moment, Jacques ran off. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him dart into a German truck. All I had to do was go and join him . . . but I could sense that my behavior wasn’t natural. I tried to give an impression of composure by shouting, “Here I come, ready or not!” but there was no audience to applaud my performance, because now there were no Germans to be seen. I joined my friend inside the truck.
Jacques had already filled his pockets. He was comfortably installed at the back of the truck eating cookies and inspecting the cans of food in search of something that might interest him.
“Go on, help yourself. You mustn’t take too much. Besides, we can come back and get more any day. Look, I just found a whole pile of cans of sauerkraut. I don’t like it too much, but if you want some, go ahead.”
I really liked sauerkraut. It must have been my Polish roots. When I was little, to make the sauerkraut Fruzia used to make me walk on the cabbage leaves covered in salt, a little bit like what we did here to make the wine. That evening, I devoured it behind my cabin, and invited Roger and Pierre to share the feast.
CHAPTER 22
Fireworks
I was in the middle of trying to get my German student to pronounce the sound “un” more or less correctly when Jacques walked by and signaled to me that I had to go with him right away. Hans noticed his little charade, and because he was getting discouraged that he couldn’t figure out the difference between the pronunciation of “un,” “in” and “an,” he gave me a bar of chocolate and said, “It’s okay, we finish. Tomorrow is better.”
“What’s going on?” I asked Jacques.
“You’ll never guess what I found this morning when I was in one of the German wagons?”
“You were in the wagons this morning, before they went to eat?”
“Well, yeah, you see the one that is all the way at the end, behind the three trees? The entrance is on the other side, so you can climb in without being seen. I already noticed it a few days ago, and since then, every time I have been by, there’s been no one there keeping watch. So guess what’s inside.”
“Machine guns? Georges saw some.”
“No. The wagons with machine guns are very well protected. But I found ammunition! Loads of it! There are bullets, and some sort of fuses, and loads of other things that explode. You want to come and see?”
What could I say? Obviously I was terrified at the thought of going without permission into a German wagon full of ammunition. And it was just as obvious that I could not possibly miss such an opportunity. But I persuaded Jacques to wait until the Germans had gone to eat, which would increase the safety of our operation to infiltrate enemy lines.
Once we were in the wagon I froze. There really was a ton of ammunition. I didn’t dare touch a thing, I just stared beatifically. Jacques had a plan.
“We’d better not hang around here. I suggest we take a few bullets and one or two fuses with us, that way we can hide in the woods and take a closer look.”
“Are you crazy or what?”
“Look how much there is, they’ll never notice anything, for sure.”
“Yes, but what if they catch us with it?”
“I’ve thought of a hiding place. And we’ll go and examine our booty during the next meal.”
I had already understood, long before, that when Jacques got an idea in his head it was pointless to try and convince him to drop it. So either I refused to take part in his operation, which would show I was a coward—moreover, I might regret it—or else I stopped asking questions and set to work to get it over with as quickly as possible.
When our dinner bell rang, our ammunition was already hidden in the woods. We went back to our cabin and our breathing returned more or less to normal.
That evening, we rushed over to our hiding place. Jacques had had time to come up with a plan for the ammunition.
“I had a good look at the bullets the first time I found them, since you weren’t there breathing down my neck. We should be able to take them apart and take out the gunpowder. If we set it on fire, it will burn.”
It was incredible, all the things we could do with bullets . . . To start with, we laid down paths of fire with the powder from inside the bullets. We created all sorts of shapes, and watched as the fire wove through the forest, circling, zigzagging . . . after that, we made a hole in a tree, put a bullet in the hole, and then placed a nail directly opposite the primer and hit it with a stone. It made a huge BOOM and the bullet went straight into the heart of the tree.
Then there were the fuses. In the beginning we tried to light them with our matches, but nothing happened. Jacques was trying to find a solution.
“We need really big matches, so they’ll stay hot longer.”
“Or we can light a few at the same time, but we’d need more accomplices. I wonder how the soldiers do it.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to ask. I have an idea! We’ll light a fire, and throw the fuses into it!”
“Oh, yeah!”
The next day, I appointed myself head of safety and went looking for a clearing, because I didn’t want to risk setting the forest on fire. We hesitated between several places. In the end it was Georges, whom we’d let in on the plot along with Roger and Pierre, who came up with the perfect place: a huge clearing a fifteen minute walk from the camp, which could be reached by way of some very dense undergrowth.
Our first experiment went as planned. We lit a fire. We waited until it was burning nicely, then Jacques had the honor of tossing a first fuse into the flames. After twenty seconds or so, we could hear a whistling sound, and a bright white light soared in a straight line toward the sky, then a huge BOOM made us jump. We screamed for joy. Then I asked everyone to calm down and wait in silence. I made sure nothing had caught fire in the woods, and we listened out for the sound of footsteps. Everything was fine, the operation was declared a success. We decided to keep the rest of the fuses to explode them at night.
That evening, roughly two hours after bedtime, we gathered at the edge of the woods. It was harder to walk through the forest when it was dark, but we were very excited, and even when we tripped and fell we didn’t get discouraged. We managed to reach the clearing. Stage one: make the fire. Stage two: wait until it is burning nicely.
“I suggest each of us prepare a little pile of fuses and when I give the signal we throw them all in at the same time.”
“No,” said Jacques. “It has to last longer. Let’s throw one fuse at a time.”
“Good idea. So, has everyone got his little pile?”
I saw four heads nodding and eight eyes looking at me intensely. I savored these few seconds where time stood still, then I gave Georges the signal . . . and off we went! He threw his first fuse. We waited for a second . . . A whistling sound, a lovely green line soaring into the sky, then it
fell again to the ground. Then it was Pierre’s turn, and his was a lovely orange, then Roger, for a white one, Jacques, a blue one, and finally my turn, with another blue one. Then we started all over again: Georges, Pierre, Roger and . . . this time, the fuse flew horizontally . . . and it fell thirty meters from there, in the forest. We looked over to where it had fallen, and as nothing was happening, Jacques prepared to throw the next fuse.
Suddenly Georges cried out, “Shit, lads!” and pointed to the place where Roger’s fuse had landed. There was thick brown smoke rising from the bushes. Then flames. We all froze, speechless. As head of safety, I forced myself to react: “We have to throw earth onto the fire!” When we approached the bushes, we heard voices. A German officer came out from behind a bush, looking very annoyed. He was buckling his belt. A few seconds later, a young woman came out in turn, looking frightened, her hair disheveled. The officer was shouting in German, pushing the woman to get her away from the fire, and he began stamping furiously on the bush. He was shouting in our direction. We had no choice but to come forward. I tried to dig up some earth, which I tossed onto the fire. It didn’t seem to do much good. Pierre and Roger stood next to the fire and pissed on it. Jacques and Georges jumped on the bush, like the German had done. In the end, the German officer took his coat and tossed it onto the flames, and finally managed to smother them.
