by Mary Finn
“The worst is that everybody’s gone, run away from their own lives, nobody knows where,” she said. That was frightening but she didn’t mean me to hear her. She was talking to Papa in the kitchen.
Nadia and I couldn’t go out to play for whole weeks. It was very hot and there were no lemons to make lemonade, like Mama always did in summer. All over town the shops were closed up. The Germans hung up their swastika flags everywhere you looked. They were HUGE and they made a nasty flapping sound when you had to walk under them. I said they were like pterodactyl wings but Nadia said they were like a giant’s dirty washing hanging out.
“Your sister has that one right,” Papa said to me.
When the Germans really got stuck in here, they put up new signposts on the main streets, all done in big black German letters. Nadia called them the witchy signposts. We had to put our clocks forward so they told the same time as Hitler’s watch back in Germany. Papa set the shop wall-clock that way, but all the others he kept on French time.
Most people came back to Paris again after a while and then school started up again. They had all been somewhere in France but it didn’t sound as if it had been much fun. Jean-Paul said there were planes shooting at people on the roads. He showed me how they did it.
“Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz – it’s like a huge mosquito, first.” He buzzed around and then he banked with his arms like a plane does and made a shrieking noise in my ear. “Then the Stuka comes at you straight, like a bat out of hell. And the pilot is so close you can see his face full of hate. Then the gun goes Da, datta, DA. And you can see he’s saying ‘Ha ha, Frenchie, you’re dead!’”
That wasn’t fair. The people from Paris had no guns.
Jean-Paul didn’t even know where he had been with his family but they lost their dog, Whistle, somewhere. That was the worst thing of all because we’d been training Whistle to walk on two legs. Now someone else has a clever dog without doing any hard work of their own.
Yes, I know. I did begin with the war after all. It’s hard to ignore it, I suppose.
Never mind, I’ll begin again tomorrow with the day my family had to move from rue de la Harpe. You can bet not everybody in the world knows about that. But first I have to explain about the shop and my family.
26 AUGUST 1942
PAPA AND OUR SHOP
My father is a watchmaker and jeweller. He learned his trade in Switzerland when he was young. That’s the absolute best place in the world to learn watchmaking.
Papa was born in Germany but when he was my age his family moved to Strasbourg. When he was only fourteen he took the train all the way to Geneva on his own and he became an apprentice in a famous clock-making place. They wanted him to stay because he had clever hands and could speak French and German. But Papa wanted to come back to France. And when he did, his clever hands were no use at all.
“I could make a clock for the man in the moon,” he’d say to us. “Or a watch that would go on ticking twenty thousand leagues under the sea. But was there any work to be found in Strasbourg?”
“NO!” we had to shout back, quick as quick, because this was his joke. “So, hurry along to platform number 5, Papa. Get the fast train to Paris!”
The joke was that it was a really good thing there was no work for Papa because right after he got off the express train in Paris he met Mama. So it all worked out just fine. That’s how our family began.
Papa made a very beautiful ring of pearls and rubies for my mother and engraved her name in fine writing along with his, on the inside. I can read it without a magnifying glass but Nadia can’t.
It says: * Anne Berlioz et Léopold Alber * 7 January 1930.
It’s true. Mama has the same name as the famous composer Hector Berlioz. (But that is all. We are not related!) She always says that is probably why she learned to play the piano. She nearly became a famous pianist but then she got married instead.
As well as all his other jobs, Papa does some special work that he learned to do all on his own, when he was young: he makes eyes for stuffed animals and sometimes claws and beaks too, if they are missing or broken. He does this work for museums, but also for my favourite shop in Paris, Deyrolle. If you’ve never been there, it is like a zoo that’s inside a shop. Except all the animals are stuffed.
When I was eight I was old enough to do deliveries there for Papa even though it was quite a long walk from our shop. The lady clerks and the taxidermists who stuff the animals always came over to the desk to see what I had brought. They would open the boxes in front of me and they were always delighted with Papa’s work.
“Such fierce eyes!” they would say. “Perfect for our new panther.” Or, “Jonas, tell us the truth. This claw is not just porcelain. Your father must have fought a grizzly bear in the park!”
That is why it was so strange later on when Signor Corrado found the pile of Deyrolle notebooks. He said they’d been left behind at the circus after a show. I don’t think I had told him about the work Papa did for the shop. But when I did, all he said was, “Did I not tell you La Giaconda has great powers?”
I wonder about that.
La Giaconda is another name for the Mona Lisa, the famous painting in the Louvre. It’s also another name for Signor Corrado’s wife. It’s her stage name. She’s Italian too. But they are not in the war against France, like lots of Italians are.
OUR HOME
Our apartment had five full rooms on the second floor over Papa’s shop on rue de la Harpe. Old Madame Perroneau lived on the first floor with her cat, Grimaldi.
My bedroom was in the front, beside Mama and Papa’s, so it overlooked the street. Nadia’s room was bigger than mine but all she could see was the backs of the houses behind us and all their washing, so if she was bored she’d come into mine and we would sit on the windowsill and look out.
That could be boring too, unless there was a fancy horse carriage or a brand-new American car going down the street. They did come, sometimes, because foreigners like to do that sort of thing, especially in the old narrow streets like ours. Then we’d rush down onto the street to cheer them on.
At least you can drive down rue de la Harpe, not like poor little rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, which is close by. It has nothing in it, nothing at all, and only a bicycle can ride through it. Because of its name Nadia says it should be for cats only. Especially Grimaldi, who loves fish.
Anyway, there are no foreigners now, only Germans and they don’t count because they are invaders, not proper foreigners. And there are hardly any cars any more because there’s very little petrol. Top brass Germans grab everything they want, so they’re pretty much the only ones with big cars now. They’re the ones with the medals and ribbons over their pockets who get driven everywhere.
“The ones with the golden nooses,” Papa said. “The lords of misrule and destruction.”
Mama said, “Shh,” but Papa said nobody would know what he was talking about even if he went and shouted it outside the Hôtel Meurice, where the top brass Germans have their parties. Then she said he should think of his family if he wasn’t going to think of himself. What would happen to us if he was dragged off for shouting insults at German soldiers? He didn’t say anything for ages.
There are horses still, of course, lots of them, but they don’t pull carriages any more, only delivery wagons.
MY SISTER
Nadia is only a year younger than me but I am allowed out on my own and she is not. This is not just because she is a girl and younger than me but because she is almost completely deaf, and Mama and Papa are afraid she might not hear a car coming and would get knocked down.
She used to go a special school for deaf children which is not too far from my school. She can talk pretty well and people often do not realize she is deaf, but we have to write everything down for her, or else use signs.
Mama made up a special language of signs just for Nadia when she was a baby and couldn’t read. We, all of us, learned how to use it and now we can say most things we want to s
ay to her with our hands. But she had to learn different signs when she went to school, and so did we. She can lip-read now too.
My sister can even listen to music. She would put her ear to the side of the piano when Mama played and she could tell when the music was Beethoven and when it was Chopin. Well, anybody could do that, I am sure, but Mama thinks it is very clever because Nadia’s ears do not work like everybody else’s.
Nadia says she likes Berlioz best but that’s only because his name is the same as Mama’s. I like Mozart best. Mama says when I pass my next music exams I will begin to learn either the clarinet or the flute. She’ll let me choose.
But all that talk was when we had a piano, and a living room to put it in. I haven’t been able to practise music for a really, really long time. And now, even though the Professor has his fine old piano, here I am, stuck up in the attic, like a monkey in a monkey-puzzle tree.
When I was with Signor Corrado’s circus, sometimes I used to play the little organ they kept in its own little tent, but it always sounded funny. People laughed no matter what I played. They laughed most of all if I played a funeral march. Signor Corrado said there was a clown inside the organ and he couldn’t get rid of him.
I will continue my testament tomorrow because it is getting dark now. There is no special black-out bulb in this little room and the Professor told me the curtain must be pulled across all the time, even at night. I can’t even have a candle in case I burn the house down.
He’s just brought me up some beans and cabbage. I heard him coming so I hid the notebook. I didn’t want him to see me writing anything down. He’d probably get too worried. But I wouldn’t say anything bad about him, of course.
Except that the beans and cabbage were cold because this room is so far from the kitchen. Or else maybe he couldn’t heat them because there was no gas. That often happens.
27 AUGUST 1942
THE FILE WE WERE NOT ON
The Germans changed the laws of France.
Our neighbour Monsieur Zacharides said they did it just for spite because they were annoyed by the planes that came from England dropping bombs and spies. The spies had to rush off and hide their parachutes and then try to blow up the railways. But Papa said it was a much more serious plan the Germans had. He wouldn’t say what, though, he just seemed to go into himself and got thin in the face. But Papa said it wasn’t just spite: the Germans had a much more serious plan.
Some of the plan was just for Jews. Mama said that some people want Jews to live all together in one place. How stupid is that? But Mama said there was no need for us to worry even though we are Jewish because there was no record of us in any synagogue.
“Our identity cards say nothing about it,” she said. Then she put her hand to her mouth. “You are never to repeat one word of what I just said. Do you hear me, both of you?”
Nadia and I looked at each other. Did Mama really think we talked about things like that?
But then Mama explained that after the Germans arrived we were supposed to have put our names down in some sort of file. There was a special order for all Jewish people to go along to an office and do this. But Papa didn’t want to because he was born in Germany. So he thought the German army might come looking for him to join up.
When he heard we knew about the file we weren’t on he roared, “Do my children think I’m going to fight against France?”
We certainly did not.
The bit about not going to the synagogue is true because neither Mama nor Papa is religious at all. My friend Jean-Paul said I was dead lucky because I didn’t have to go to Mass every Sunday, or be an altar boy like him. He had to wear a kind of dress but you couldn’t call it that or he got mad.
Mama said there were good bits in every religion and it was wrong for anyone to boast that theirs was the best. Papa said she was foolish if she thought the good Catholic Führer, Herr Adolf Hitler, agreed with her on that. He said that being Jewish was not just about having a religion anyway, but about having a whole history.
Papa would never have said Mama was foolish before the Germans came. Nadia cried for a long time.
THE POTATO BUGS
At school, in the yard, we called the Germans “potato bugs” because they chewed their way through everything that was good in France and turned it all rotten.
It’s a good name for them but you had to say anything like that in a low voice because walls have ears. Jean-Paul said there were German-lovers everywhere who would report you if they heard you call the soldiers “potato bug” or “Fritz”.
“Then you’ll be hanged from the nearest bridge and people will pelt you with rocks and dog poo,” he said.
I said they wouldn’t be allowed to do that to children but he got really cross with me.
“They can do what they like, pea-brain. Remember, I saw those pilots shooting people on the roads. You didn’t. There were real bodies that we had to pass by. Even babies in prams. It was awful.”
One of the first new laws was that there were to be two parts of France.
Potato bugs are so stupid they cannot even count on their fingers as far as Julius Caesar did. He divided France into three parts even though he had no trucks or tanks to get around the country in. But everyone with a brain knows that France has lots of parts!
Paris and the north are in the worst half. It has the most Germans and the most rules. People say the other part is not so bad, though Papa makes a face if anyone says “Vichy”. That’s the town where the French government ended up after they stopped running away from the Germans. Papa says all there is in Vichy is smelly hot baths and smelly drinking water.
“The people there must smell pretty bad too,” he said.
The head of the government is old Marshal Pétain. He always wears a hat that’s dripping with gold stuff. He’s got more gold than any of the Germans. That’s because he beat them in the really old war. But they like him anyway. Which just shows how stupid they all are.
Whenever you go to the pictures you see the Marshal. He’s always up there in the newsreels, shaking hands with really clean children. They must get hot baths in Vichy because here in Paris we’re filthy! We can’t have baths because there’s no coal to heat the water.
“Wash like Grimaldi does,” Mama said. “Just watch him lick his paw and dab behind his ears.”
Sometimes we use the boiled water from the vegetables. It stinks, but at least it’s warm.
The only bad part about going to the pictures is that you have to watch the potato bug newsreels. The German soldiers tramp all over maps of Europe and cheer when they knock a place down. Everybody in the cinema wants to say “BOO, HISS”, but you can’t because then they’d turn on the lights and find out where you’re sitting. Then it would be off with you to the guillotine, or somewhere like that.
One time Papa looked at his watch and said it had taken nearly an hour before Robin Hood came on. To the rescue! Tarantara!
But we haven’t been to a film for ages and ages. Jews can’t go any more. That was another law they made.
28 AUGUST 1942
WHY WE HAD TO MOVE FROM OUR HOME
Even though Paris got stuck in the worst part of France, rue de la Harpe is a good place to live. It’s near the river, you can walk to the Luxembourg Gardens to play and it’s got all kinds of good shops. My school is just a few streets away and Nadia’s is only a bit further.
But guess what, that was why we had to move. The Germans don’t want any Jews to have nice places to live and work in. And even though we don’t go to the synagogue, they found out we were Jews anyway. We had to get new identity cards and J was stamped on all of them.
Mama said it was a mystery how they had found out. Papa said, “Don’t be so foolish, Anne.”
“I’m frightened, Léo,” she said. “What you said about your cousin—”
Then she saw I was listening and she went into the kitchen. She cried and cried for ages.
The next thing was that Papa got a letter fro
m the Germans which said our shop and quarters were to be “requisitioned”. That means stolen. The letter said that under the new laws he was not permitted to operate his business ever again. It said we had to move to the fourth district and he would have to register our family there. We’d have to show our new identity papers, including proof of our race. The letter said Papa was lucky not to be thrown in jail, or sent away this time round, because he hadn’t signed us up as Jews when the special order was made.
I know all this because Papa read the whole letter out to us. He looked like a statue when he finished. Nadia and I knew we’d better not ask any questions at all.
But we are French! It was hideous what they did, taking our home and our things. The potato bugs are the ones who should move. They are thieves and bullies. And invaders.
They are the enemy.
Back then, I didn’t know what they meant by “this time round”. Now I know.
GOODBYE TO OUR HOME
We had only one day to get ready. The most important thing was Papa’s tools because he needed them in case there was any jewellery work or clock-mending where we were going. He didn’t care that the new laws said he couldn’t work any longer.
“They’ll not take my hands away from me,” he said. “Every last spanner comes along.”
He put every tool in its place in the leather carry-case. His loupe eye-piece has its own velvet box and the spanners and screwdrivers fit around it like tiny knives. The loupe is my favourite of all his tools. It lets you look into a diamond and see stars.
But of course Papa couldn’t take all the beautiful old clocks in the shop. He picked out all the jewels and watches that were ours and Mama wrapped them up in strips of soft chamois skin. She said we had to hide these in our clothes.
