by Robin Wells
I barely dared to breathe. His eyes had a faraway look, and I was afraid that if I interrupted, he would end the conversation as he always had before. This time, he kept talking.
“The night before we left, I went to say good-bye to a girl. She and I . . . well, we were romantically involved. It is a mistake I will regret all of my life. I should not have left my family.”
“Why?” I gently prodded.
“When I got back, my mother was hysterical, and my sister . . .” He put his hand to his forehead and rubbed between his eyes. “She was catatonic. My father—he was lying in the hallway, on what looked like a red carpet. It took me a moment to realize it was a pool of blood, and he was dead.”
“Mon Dieu! What had happened?”
“Three German soldiers had come to check our house, supposedly to see what goods we were leaving behind. The real reason, I believe, is that they were looking for me. That night, they rounded up all young Jewish men in our neighborhood and sent them to concentration camps.”
I reflexively started to make the sign of the cross, then stopped myself.
“My father didn’t want to let the soldiers in. This, of course, angered them. They forced the door, then saw my sister. My father tried to get her to run. This infuriated them more. They tied my sister to the bed, strapped my parents to chairs and then, they . . .” He ran his hand down his face. “They raped her. All three of them, one after the other, like dogs, while my parents watched. My father broke free—how he managed, my mother says she does not know; outrage and courage must have given him supernatural strength. He charged—Mama said he was like a bull. They shot him, then they left.
“An elderly neighbor came over as soon as I arrived home. He had been watching the house from across the street. He’s the one who told us the Nazis were rounding up young Jewish men that very night. I wanted stay and bury my father, but my sister was out of her mind with terror and shock, and my mother was hysterical, and the neighbor insisted we go. We took only what we could carry. We walked and walked and walked until we reached a train station in the suburbs of Vienna, a neighborhood where no one expected to see a Jew, so no one was looking—and with our papers, the papers we had given everything for—well, we were able to catch a train to Paris.”
He looked up at me. “So. That is my story. That is how I came to be here. That is how I know the Nazis are brutal beyond belief.”
“Your sister—you told me she had died?”
“My mother found her in the bathroom two weeks later, at the apartment where we stayed with some other refugees when we first arrived in Paris. She had slit her wrists.” He lowered his head, but not before I saw that his eyes were swimming. “She found it impossible to live with the shame.”
I put my hand on his arm.
“I failed her. I failed my father, my mother—my whole family. I should have been home. If I’d been with them, this would not have happened.”
“No.” I desperately wanted to lighten his burden of guilt. “If you had been home, you, too, would be dead.”
“At least that would have been honorable. If I had been there, they would have just taken me and left my sister alone.”
“You cannot know that.”
He buried his eyes in his hands.
“The important thing now is that you stay alive and try to provide a future for your mother,” I said.
He rubbed his eyes, then reached for his coffee. “That is not what I think in the dark of night. I fear that is not what my mother thinks, either.”
I reached for his hand. He squeezed it. I leaned in to kiss him, but, as always, he turned away.
6
AMÉLIE
1940
The joke of war stopped being funny on May 10. That was when Yvette and I came home from school to find Maman wringing her hands as she listened to the radio. Yvette’s mother stood beside her.
“What has happened?”
“Germany has invaded Belgium,” Maman said.
“And Luxembourg and Holland,” Yvette’s mother added. “It’s a blitzkrieg.”
It was the first time either Yvette or I had heard the word. I thought it sounded like a pastry. “What’s that?”
“It means lightning war,” Yvette’s mother said. “Planes suddenly appear and drop bomb after bomb. And then panzer tanks move in and destroy everything in their path.”
A shiver ran up my spine. “Why are they attacking those countries? Has Germany declared war on them?” I asked.
“Nothing was declared. They just started bombing and invading.”
If they were doing that to countries that they weren’t even officially at war with, what would they do to us?
When I voiced my concerns at dinner, Papa was quick to reassure me. Or maybe it was my mother he wanted to reassure. She seemed to be falling apart. Her hair was unkempt, her dress was wrinkled, and her face had taken on an unhealthy pall.
“We have defenses in place,” he said, “and we have allies. There are more than three hundred thousand British troops—the great British Expeditionary Force—in our country to shore up our army.”
The British had a new prime minister, a man named Winston Churchill. No one seemed to know anything about him, except that he had never advocated trying to make peace with the Nazis, as the previous English prime minister had.
We heard that the British and French military were moving toward the Dyle River. Were Thomas and Pierre on the move, as well?
Over the next few days, life in Paris went on as usual, except for the fact that the radio played more news than music. Yvette and I went to school. Father continued to teach at university. France had become so inured to a war that wasn’t really a war that it was hard to realize how much the situation had changed. Everyone still believed the impregnable Maginot Line would hold.
Joshua was the one who told me the news when I met him at the Jardin des Plantes, in the Allée Becquerel. We had taken to meeting there now that the weather was warm. “The Germans are in France. They invaded through the Ardennes.”
“The Ardennes forest?” I had studied French geography just last year. “That is supposed to be impenetrable.”
He nodded grimly. “Which is why it was virtually undefended. No army in the history of the world has ever been able to get through.” He shook his head. “No one has ever seen warfare like this before. The Germans are using tanks and the Luftwaffe in a new way. No one could have even imagined the things they are doing.”
“What will happen?”
“We have no way of knowing. We must hope the English will save us.” He thrust his hands in his pockets. “I long to join the French Foreign Legion, but I can’t leave my mother. She says she can’t make it without me.” He blew out a sigh. “I fear it is so.”
“I don’t want you to leave, either.”
He placed his hand over mine. “It may be best that we all leave.”
“Where would we go?”
“Ah, that is the question,” he said. “That is why we stay.” His mouth took on a determined set. “But that does not mean I will not fight. The front line is not the only place to battle the enemy.”
—
The days went by. The radio told us very little—Joshua said it was propaganda to keep us calm—but we learned from travelers flooding in and from radio programs from London that Holland had surrendered.
Even after the surrender, the Germans continued their cruel assault. We heard they’d bombed Rotterdam, killing more than a thousand civilians and leaving more than 85,000 homeless. We heard that more than 10,000 French soldiers were captured in a single day.
And then we heard that the Germans were bombing northern France; the roads were jammed with millions of northern French inhabitants who’d either been bombed out of their homes or feared it was about to happen. The French and British armies, who had believed the
Germans were coming through Belgium, found themselves trapped as the Germans rolled through the forest and lowlands, backing them against the sea.
I did not understand all that was happening, but I understood that the British had retreated along the English Channel and were arranging for ships to pick up their soldiers.
“What are they doing?” Papa railed. “Everyone knows that the channel is no place for military maneuvers. It will never work.”
We later heard that it had—that the British had evacuated 300,000 British troops. “They’ve abandoned us,” Papa moaned.
Joshua saw it differently. “The British were wise to withdraw so they can come back and help France fight another way.”
We heard that tens of thousands of French soldiers had run or surrendered. Were Pierre and Thomas among them? I prayed it was so, for then they would not be among the 100,000 French soldiers rumored to already be dead.
Along with Maman, I went to mass and lit candles for them every day. We heard that nearly 150,000 French troops had been rescued by the British ships. I prayed that Pierre and Thomas were among them, that they were safely in England.
Paris was suddenly very crowded. The city streets teemed with refugees—from Belgium, from Holland, from northern France. My private school was abruptly dismissed for the summer, three weeks early, because so many students’ families were fleeing Paris.
At first, Papa said we would stay. “Leaving shows a lack of faith in France and in our military. The Germans won’t make it to Paris. We will stop them, just as we did in the Great War.”
Yvette’s mother arrived at our door with somber news otherwise.
“The Germans are on the way,” she murmured in a low voice. “I received word from Jean-Claude.”
“French troops will intervene before they enter Paris,” Papa insisted.
“He says there are no French troops to defend us. Those who haven’t been captured or killed were stationed along the Maginot Line and can’t get into position to halt the advance. Yvette and I are leaving tomorrow for my father’s farm.”
I had gone there with Yvette for several summers. It was near Dijon, in a beautiful part of the country. Her widowed grandfather was a dear man who insisted I, too, call him Grand-père. I fell into her arms. “Oh, Yvette—you can’t leave Paris!”
“I must,” she said. “And you must, too.”
Even Joshua, who thought there was no safe place to flee, thought we should leave Paris.
“Well, then, you and your mother should leave as well,” I told him two nights later when we met.
“We have no money and nowhere to go,” Joshua said grimly. “Besides, we are hosting many, many distant relatives who have lost their homes and are in worse shape than us. But you and your family— it would be best if you leave.”
Maman and Papa argued that night. After learning that Professor Chaussant thought Paris was unsafe and discovering that most of his colleagues were fleeing, Papa had reversed his opinion. He now insisted that we leave immediately. “We have no choice.”
“But this is our home,” Maman argued. “How will our boys find us if we leave?”
“They are not coming home anytime soon,” Papa said grimly.
“You don’t know that!”
“I do, Marie. And so do you. Our soldiers will be fighting a long, long time.”
7
AMÉLIE
1940
Maman and Papa continued to exchange sharp words, late into the night. The next day, the radio aired French Prime Minister Reynaud’s speech to the Senate that included the ominous phrase, “The country is in danger.”
“Did you hear that, Marie?” Papa demanded. “We are putting Amélie in danger.”
That set Maman to packing. I was told to fill a suitcase with all the clothes that I could carry. Papa sent a telegraph to his brother Roland in Marseilles to tell him we were coming. Mon oncle lived with his wife and my paternal grand-père in a small but lovely apartment with large windows, iron balconies, and a breathtaking view of the port.
“I don’t want to go there,” Maman grumbled. I didn’t blame her; my uncle’s wife, Margaux, was a harsh and disagreeable woman. “If we must leave home, let’s leave Europe altogether. Let’s go to America.”
“With what?” Papa was clearly losing patience. “We spent the bulk of our savings renovating the house. We do not have enough money for a long journey to another continent.”
I packed my clothing. The radio blathered more and more bad news, couching it in such transparently foolish optimism that even I, who secretly believed that everything would work out like a magazine short story, knew it was a lie. Out the window, all of Paris—indeed, all of France!—seemed to be flowing through the streets. I have never seen the roads so congested, never seen so many faces so grim and distressed. My stomach balled into a hard knot.
Maman insisted on taking sausage, bread, and a couple of jars of canned food. She left a note for Thomas and Pierre, in case they came home before us. She washed every dish and dusted every surface.
“What are you doing?” Papa demanded when he returned from the telegraph office. “If the city is bombed, the entire place will be covered with dust, if anything is left standing.”
“Ah, but if there is no bombing—and I pray to God there won’t be—then I want everything clean and sparkling to welcome us home.”
Papa threw up his hands and murmured something under his breath about the irrationality of women. “You have thirty minutes.” At the end of that time period, he turned off all the lights, put all our suitcases outside on the stoop, then took Maman’s elbow and firmly escorted her outside. He locked the door behind us. We climbed down the four steps to the street and were swept into the wave of humanity slowly surging forward, the crowd so thick everyone was forced to go in a single direction.
We headed toward the Gare d’Austerlitz, which is close to the Jardin des Plantes, where Joshua and I had been meeting. I kept my eye out for Joshua, but he was nowhere to be seen.
The train station was so packed you could hardly edge sideways toward the ticket office.
“They are overselling the tickets,” a woman complained to Maman as Papa got in line to handle our ticket purchase. “They are selling with no seats. And people are disregarding the dates and times. They are climbing onto the first train they can elbow their way onto.”
Maman relayed this to Papa when he finally returned with tickets for the next day. “We must board the very next train,” she insisted.
Papa, being Papa, refused to break the rules. “I will not participate in anarchy.”
Maman plucked two tickets from his hand. “Suit yourself, Alphonse. Come, Amélie.” Taking my elbow, she started pushing through the crowd toward the tracks, where a train had just arrived.
“This is not right!” Papa sputtered. “It is not fair to the people who purchased tickets for this train.”
“Those people already left on an earlier one,” Maman said over her shoulder.
“I can’t believe you would do such a thing!”
“If the situation is so dire that we must leave our home to protect our child, then it is dire enough to do whatever else it takes.”
“But all these people . . .” Papa waved his hand. “They have children, too.”
“You love to quote that English saying, ‘all is fair in love and war.’ Well, Alphonse, this is a matter of both.”
“But, Marie . . .”
My mother’s face took on a look I recognized from battles at the dressmaker’s. When her mouth flattened into that pinched set and her chin tilted to that rigid angle, there was no changing her mind. “You can come with us, or you can stay,” Maman said. “Either way, Amélie and I are boarding this train.”
—
It was a hot, crowded, exhausting nightmare of a trip. It took five hours, and w
e stood the entire time, squashed beside a family of Belgians that included a crying toddler, an old toothless woman, and a man with one eye. The scent of sweating bodies, dirty diapers, and day-old garlic breath kept me from feeling any hunger, despite not having eaten since breakfast.
The train stopped in Lyon, and the conductor unexpectedly called out, “Tout le monde débarquent.”
Papa grabbed his arm. “Pardon, monsieur. We have tickets to Marseilles.”
“The army has requisitioned this train to carry troops. Everyone must get off here.”
“When can we catch another train south?”
“I do not know. You will have to talk to the ticket agent.”
Apparently most of the train’s occupants also needed to talk to the ticket agent. We stood in line for nearly four hours. When we finally got to the window, we learned that the next train to Marseilles would not come until two days later.
“That is ridiculous!” Papa sputtered.
“It is the best we can do,” the agent said.
The hotels were overflowing. Along with many other travelers, we ended up taking refuge in a church for two nights. Maman and I slept on the pews, and Papa slept on the floor beneath. The church was hot and airless, and a child with a horrible hacking cough kept us awake most of the night.
We spent much of the next day in line—to buy bread, to buy cheese, to use a toilet. The toilet situation was the worst! At one point, I had to pee in an alley as Maman stood guarding my privacy. I thought I would die of embarrassment.
After another torturously crowded train trip, we finally made it to Marseilles. The streets were jammed with motorcars, horse- and ox-drawn carts, buses, trucks, and many, many people like us—on foot, carrying baggage, looking tired and bedraggled and displaced. My feet throbbed as we walked more than three kilometers on the cobblestone streets to my uncle’s apartment. I was hungry and tired and my shoulders ached from carrying my suitcase. I would have sold my soul for a warm bath.
