“And Mama? What happened to Mama?”
“After the war, Aunt Danielle sent the letters to Viera in Cuba with a note saying that they belonged to her, and that Amanda and Lina ended up in Auschwitz. No further explanation. Adele paused between each phrase. “Viera always thought the two of you had died there together. That’s why she never looked for you.”
“Yet again, Danielle saved me.” Elise’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I should have gone to Cuba on the Saint Louis. With Viera. Just think: everything would have been so different.”
“Viera had a son, Mom: Louis. And Anna is his daughter.”
“You don’t need to tell me: I understood that as soon as I saw her eyes . . .”
Elise struggled to sit up, engulfed by images that kept dissolving.
“You need to stop thinking so much,” said Adele. She was standing erect, as though guarding the room. “You’re not well.”
“What about Viera?” Elise cut in fearfully.
“Viera died many years ago. Her son Louis is no longer with us either, but before he died he had Anna with Ida, the lady you met, the one who brought us the letters.”
“The pages from the botanical album . . .” Elise was suddenly troubled by a raging thirst.
“Ida and Anna recovered the letters in Cuba. They immediately got in touch with the town in France,” Adele explained. “That’s how they found you. The abbey still had the records from the war: the day you arrived and the day you were sent to your uncle Duval. They saved a lot of children in that abbey.” Adele saw her mother shudder.
“By the time the letters reached Cuba, I was someone else. At least Danielle managed to prevent Viera from dying without knowing. When she read the letters, she must have realized she was never forgotten.”
“Ida did all she could to find you,” Adele concluded. “She didn’t give up until she discovered your name in the abbey. We owe her a great debt.”
“And Danielle sacrificed herself to save me, to fulfill Maman Claire’s last wish.” Elise’s voice was a low murmur. “My sister Danielle . . . It’s to her I owe the most.”
A week later, when she was being wheeled home, Elise came to a halt on the sidewalk where she had walked for the past decades. She gazed at the trees in the park. They’re still green, she said to herself. She climbed the steps unaided behind Adele, who had already opened the front door for her. Elise leaned on the doorframe. Her home was a cell, buried in a bunker made of concrete and reddish bricks. Outside was an unreal garden.
The hallway was an endless bridge she had to cross to face the letters again. A wedding photograph was hanging on the wall. She couldn’t recognize herself in a veil that covered half her face. At the far end was another photograph, of her aunt and uncle with a little girl. The girl’s face wasn’t hers: it was Danielle’s.
In the living room, the letters were awaiting her. Carefully folded inside the ebony box, as if they had never fallen on the floor, as if no one had read them, as if they were still waiting to be sent to the far side of the ocean.
Elise’s gentle voice broke the silence. She read all six, five of them addressed to Viera. All except one, the last, corresponded to seasons of the year. The undated letter was an order, a decree. And at that moment she realized it was meant for her. That was why her mother had not headed it with the usual “My little Viera.”
Adele looked at her, intrigued. Her mother was reading in German, and repeated phrases out loud, as though trying to decipher them. The words were intertwined with drawings of plants and flowers.
“These letters have crossed the Atlantic several times. And look, now they’re with us.”
Raising her hand to her chest, Elise couldn’t detect her heartbeats: they were too weak. She wanted to count them one by one, as her father had taught her.
“I can’t recall Papa’s face; all I can make out is a very tall man. Mama saw the world through his eyes; she told us he was an angel, and yet she didn’t follow his instructions for us all to travel together on the Saint Louis.” Elise paused, smiling sadly. “So you see, one should never go against an angel’s orders . . .”
She felt so dizzy she was unable to finish the sentence. The sun began to set, and the light in the room faded. With great effort, she went into the kitchen and came back with two candles. She placed them on the dining-room table, and lit them.
“ ‘Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to light the Shabbat candles,’ ” she said in German, then stared at the face of her beloved daughter and added, “ ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains: from where shall my help come?’ ”
Adele watched her, uncomprehending. Elise raised her hands to her eyes, then came close to her daughter and pressed them softly against her face.
Elise went into her bedroom and returned clutching a small purple jewel case. She stopped in front of the picture window that looked out over the park. She sank into her favorite armchair and watched as the sun slowly sank below the horizon. As she stroked the damask upholstery, she recalled her beloved Marie-Louise’s Atelier Plumes. She felt faint, and the jewel case fell at her feet.
“Mom!” cried Adele, rushing to help her. “We need to call the doctor!”
“I’m fine, Adele, fine. I need time, a little more time, to order my thoughts—alone. There’s no doctor who can help me now. Pass me the case, will you?”
Inside were the ring and the diamond bracelet. Whereas once they had seemed so big and heavy, now they looked tiny, fragile.
“These are yours, Adele,” she murmured, slipping them into her daughter’s hand.
In the open box, Elise suddenly noticed a small compartment. When she groped in it with her index finger, she felt a sharp prick. Taken aback, she withdrew her hand, then tried a second time to discover what was hidden in this secret corner. Feeling more cautiously, she closed her eyes.
She carefully pulled a gold chain out of its hiding place. On it was a Star of David. She realized then that her father’s gift had come back to her. She had no need to look for her glasses to read the inscription engraved on the tiny six-pointed star.
“All these years the truth was within my reach, but I preferred to stay blind.” She sighed. “Papa, now I know you were always with me.”
She took off the crucifix that had been with her since she had crossed the Atlantic and gestured to Adele for her to replace it with the chain with the Star of David. Then she said farewell to her with a long embrace.
“I want to be alone,” she insisted, her voice faint.
Gazing at her tenderly, Adele left without another word.
In her armchair, Elise slid back into the shadows. It felt as if time was expanding; that her already fading body was slowly shriveling.
In her delirium, she sees herself thrown into a boat crammed with children. After more than a week on the high seas, an island filled with skyscrapers appears on the horizon. They’ve reached their destination. Other people’s destination. In the distance, the Statue of Liberty stands proud and solitary. Finally, the boat reaches the port.
She runs to a customs official who is blocking her path. He is a wall, the frontier between today and yesterday. The uncle waiting at the quayside for her comes up and asks who she is. My name is . . . I’m not who I am. Maman Claire isn’t my mother. My mother . . .
The official takes her back to the boat. She is alone, nobody else is sailing on the drifting liner. The uncle says goodbye, the definitive goodbye, the goodbye she deserves. On her return, Danielle is waiting for her; they embrace. This time, Danielle doesn’t look at her resentfully; she smiles and wants to play with her, but there’s no time, the ship is about to sail. It’s her last chance. Come on, Danielle! This is your place. Your uncle is there, waiting for you with open arms. That’s how it should have been.
In the same port she sees her mother with a suitcase. Viera is standing beside her. Elise runs toward them and all three walk away t
ogether. Viera is no longer a child, she’s as tall as her mother. They cross a bridge, then a river, and stop to rest at the foot of a mountain. They’re safe: there are no soldiers, nobody is wearing swastika armbands, nobody is pursuing them, rejecting them. The mother smiles happily. And Papa? Papa is waiting for us.
The mother takes grandfather’s botanical album out of the suitcase. It’s intact. There are no letters, there never were any. No prayers or pleas or lit candles.
They climb the mountain up to the eternal snows. On the summit everything is white, and the white is impeccable, spotless, pure. At the point closest to the sky, where snow and clouds mingle, they open a door and step into the Garden of Letters that no one else can see.
Elise took her mother’s sixth letter, her farewell, and pressed it to her chest. Closing her eyes, she stroked the gold chain, feeling the six points of the small star, her father’s gift. With all her remaining strength she silently counted for the last time: One, two, three, four, five, six . . .
A faint voice in the darkened room:
“My name is Lina, Lina Sternberg.”
Summer of 1942
Shalom
Mama
Author’s Note
Oradour-sur-Glane
On the morning of Saturday, June 10, 1944, members of the Third Company of the Führer regiment, the feared paramilitary division of the Third Reich’s Waffen-SS, surrounded the small village of Oradour-sur-Glane in the department of Haute-Vienne, in the Limoges region. They ordered the villagers to gather in the main square and locked the women and children in the church.
Most of the men were taken to nearby barns and machine-gunned. The women and children were burned alive in the church. Altogether, 642 people were massacred, including 207 children.
The 1,500 inhabitants of the village included some Jews and Spanish refugees from the Franco regime. The Nazis, in whose ranks were recruits from Alsace, burned the village houses and shops in an attempt to erase all traces of the crime. A few children who survived the massacre sought refuge in a nearby abbey, and were saved by the monks.
A few days earlier, an SS officer had been executed by partisans in the area.
After the end of the war, Charles de Gaulle’s government decided to keep the ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane as a monument to the martyrs, a memorial of the Nazi atrocities committed on French soil.
MS St. Louis
On the evening of May 13, 1939, the transatlantic ocean liner St. Louis of the Hamburg-Amerika Linie (HAPAG) set sail from the port of Hamburg bound for Havana, Cuba. Some nine hundred passengers were on board, the majority German Jewish refugees.
The refugees had permits to disembark in Havana issued by Manuel Benítez, the general director of Cuba’s Immigration Department. These were obtained through the HAPAG company.
A week before the liner sailed from Hamburg, the president of Cuba, Federico Laredo Brú, issued Decree 937 (named after the number of passengers due to be on board the St. Louis). This decree rendered invalid the landing permits signed by Benítez.
When the ship arrived in the port of Havana on Saturday, May 27, the Cuban authorities would not allow it to moor in the zone assigned to the HAPAG company. Instead, it had to anchor in the middle of the bay.
Only four Cubans and two non-Jewish Spaniards were allowed to disembark, as well as twenty-two refugees who had obtained permits from the Cuban State Department prior to the ones issued by Benítez, who could count on the support of the army commander, Fulgencio Batista.
The St. Louis sailed for Miami on June 2. When it was close to the US coast, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government refused entry into the United States. The Mackenzie King government in Canada also refused the ship entry.
So the St. Louis was forced to head back across the Atlantic toward Hamburg. A few days before it docked, the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) negotiated an agreement for several countries to receive the refugees.
Great Britain accepted 287; France 224; Belgium 241; and the Netherlands 181. In September 1939, Germany declared war and the countries of continental Europe were soon occupied by Hitler’s forces.
Only the 287 taken in by Great Britain remained safe. The majority of the other passengers from the St. Louis suffered the havoc of the war, or were killed in Nazi concentration camps.
March 5, 2018
An Atria Reading Group Guide
The Daughter’s Tale
Armando Lucas Correa
This reading group guide for The Daughter’s Tale includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Armando Lucas Correa. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
From the bestselling author of The German Girl, an unforgettable family saga exploring a hidden piece of World War II history and the lengths a mother will go to to protect her children.
BERLIN, 1939. Amanda Sternberg’s world is upended when the Nazis descend on Berlin, burning down her beloved family bookshop and sending her husband, Julius, to a concentration camp. Desperate to save her two daughters, she flees toward the south of France. Along the way a ship headed for Cuba offers a chance at escape, but at the dock Amanda is forced to make an impossible choice—she can only put one of her children onboard.
Once in Haute-Vienne, Amanda and her remaining daughter’s brief freedom is interrupted by the arrival of Nazi forces, and Amanda finds herself in a labor camp where she must once again make a heroic sacrifice—save her daughter or save herself.
NEW YORK, 2015. Eighty-year-old Elise Duval receives a call from a woman bearing letters from a time and country that she forced herself to forget. A French Catholic who arrived in New York after World War II, Elise is shocked to discover that the messages are from her mother, written in German during the war. Despite Elise’s best efforts to stave off her past, once the letters appear seven decades of secrets begin to unravel . . .
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. In the first scene, when Ida and Anna Rosen give Elise the box full of letters written by her mother so long ago, she calls this moment a “final act of forgetting.” What do you think she means by that?
2. Near the end of Chapter 2, Amanda, Julius, and Hilde watch in horror as the books from the shop are burned in public in the Nazis’ campaign to squash any ideology that is “offensive, unpatriotic, or not sufficiently German” (p, 13). Hilde and Julius both watch sadly, but Amanda’s face is “frozen in a strange smile.” Are you surprised by her response? What does this reaction say about her character?
3. In Julius’s farewell letter to his wife, he implores her to “never forget that we were happy once.” But in The Daughter’s Tale, moments of happiness are few and far between. Consider the ways in which the novel asks us to reconsider our notion of happiness. Do you think that the memory of happiness and the promise of a future happiness are enough for Amanda? Why or why not?
4. When Amanda is packing up her few belongings, she chooses to take along her ebony box, botanical album, Star of David necklaces, and the jewelry that she uses as a bargaining chip in Lina’s escape from the camp. Discuss each of these items. What significance do they hold? Trace how each item plays a part in the salvation of her daughters.
5. Revisit the scene when Amanda decides to send Viera alone onto the ship, entrusting her in the care of the then-stranger Frau Meyer. How do you feel about her last-minute decision?
6. “For Claire, the war was just beginning. For Amanda, it was coming to an end.” Compare Claire Duval to Amanda Sternberg. Did your opinion of either of them change over the course of the novel? In your response, consider Claire’s relationship with Lina and her decision to sacrifice herself in the town square.
7. What compels Amanda to write letters to Viera that might never reach her? She
describes the act as a “pointless farce” but still “the words spilled out furiously, unrelenting.”
8. Consider the role of grief in the novel. Does the lack of freedom, both inside and outside the camp, prevent the characters from being able to properly grieve? What about after the war, for those who survive? Is there any room for grief? Consider Amanda, Danielle, Lina, Berenice, and Marie-Louise in your response.
9. Revisit the scene on page 153 when Amanda slices her hand cutting potatoes. She sees the blood rushing out of her hand and “she smiled: she was still alive.” What does this reaction say about the current state of her psyche? And how does it relate to the smile discussed in question 2?
10. The moment Amanda stabs Bertrand is shocking, in part because up until that moment she had seemed incapable of such violence. What drove Amanda to murder him? What does she lose, or gain, in this fatal act?
11. “They had lost all sense of time,” the narrator proclaims, after Danielle and Elise survive the bombing in the town square. In a literal sense, the trauma of the moment affects their sense of the hour of the day, but in a broader sense, the trauma of war renders time meaningless. Discuss what Marie-Louise means when she says “time is against us.”
12. When the children discover the dying German soldier held captive inside the abbey, they are shocked. Danielle later thinks, “She had witnessed a crime, and that made her as guilty as the criminal or more, because she had said nothing.” Do you agree or disagree with Danielle? How does this scene speak to the question of culpability explored in the novel?
13. Discuss the significance of the title. To which daughter does the title refer? Why wasn’t it called Lina’s Tale or Viera’s Tale or Amanda’s Tale, or even Elise’s Tale?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. One of the first devastating losses we witness in The Daughter’s Tale is the burning of books. Books were a threat to the Nazis because they encouraged critical thinking and independence. Yet, Amanda finds it difficult to cast off the books she has spent her entire life loving, classic novels such as Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina. Select one of these banned books with your book club. Read the book and discuss why Amanda was drawn to it, and why the Nazis might have found it threatening to their mission.
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