The Paris Children : A Novel (2020)

by Goldreich, Gloria

  “I rushed to the rue l’Alboni when the Germans entered Paris, but as soon as I opened the door, I saw that I was too late. Everything was in disarray. File cabinets overturned, books and papers scattered, every drawer opened, even foodstuffs tossed on the floor. The damn Fascists had searched the pantry and the icebox for hidden documents. They had moved swiftly and seized every file of any relevance to the Jewish community.”

  “But how could they have known of his involvement? And how did they find his home so quickly?” Madeleine asked, her heart pounding.

  She imagined her uncle’s elegant apartment, its windows looking out on the quiet, tree-shaded Square de l’Alboni, fresh flowers always in tall vases, thick carpets covering parquet floors. All now sullied. All contaminated by senseless hatred.

  “The Dreyfus name has long been all too familiar to French Fascists. History has a long arm and an even longer memory. The Jew haters in Berlin and in Paris know that the son of Alfred Dreyfus is deeply involved in Jewish affairs. Your grandfather’s old enemies and their descendants, the anti-Dreyfusards, are today’s haters and are eager to collaborate with the Nazis. They have been waiting patiently for the German occupation, and their propaganda machinery is in place. Their journalists fill the pages of Le Matin with anti-Semitic garbage as vile as what appears in Der Stürmer. Gamzon believes that French Fascists may in fact be worse than the Germans.”

  His voice grew faint as though his very words had weakened him.

  “French Fascists?”

  The words were alien. Of course she knew that French Fascists existed—she had, after all, heard their shouts in the theater, seen their graffiti scrawled in Metro stations—but she had thought them harmless, immature pranksters. She had refused to believe that the minds of French citizens—ever inculcated with the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity—could so easily be poisoned by the irrational hatred and cruelty of Fascism.

  “Yes. French Fascists,” Claude responded, his voice trembling with comingled impatience and anger. “Given the information they found in your uncle’s papers, the Gestapo now have the names of every Jewish activist in Paris, including yours and mine.”

  “And the names of everyone in my family,” she acknowledged. “Perhaps they will target Simone’s little daughter. The great-granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, although she is still a baby, must surely be a threat to the Third Reich and its French collaborators.”

  Madeleine laughed, relieved to hear Claude’s laughter in return. Absurdity was a potent weapon against despair.

  “But you do understand that we must now be more careful than ever. Share this news with your uncle, your parents,” Claude continued, his voice betraying a new and frightening tone. “Paris is dangerous for Jews. Robert Gamzon has moved most Jewish Scout bases to the south and has dispatched several groups to Algeria. But our work will go on.”

  He hesitated, and she understood that even on this very secure phone line, he would not speak of their highly secret rescue program, of their vigorous training of the children they were determined to smuggle to safety in Switzerland and Spain and then, hopefully, to Palestine.

  “Yes. Of course. It must go on,” she agreed and thought of Anna Hofberg, her face pale and her blue eyes awash with tears as she was once again forced to flee for her life.

  “Your little Anna is fine. She misses you, but she is fine,” Claude assured her, and she marveled that even across such a distance with only a fragile phone line connecting them, he read her thoughts. Was that unique to lovers? She banished the thought. She and Claude were loving friends, not lovers, she reminded herself. Not at a time like this when their future was rimmed with uncertainty and their present was not their own. Friendship was possible; love would overwhelm. That, they accepted. That, they understood. Despite that farewell kiss in a darkened doorway, a memory she would not abandon.

  Was she wrong to resent that understanding, that acceptance, to think of herself and her feelings when the world was engulfed with suffering? she wondered. Not wrong, she decided. She was not, after all, a saint, only a young woman with a yearning heart.

  I am allowed, she thought defiantly.

  “Madeleine, when do you think you will be able to return to Paris?” Claude asked, a new urgency in his tone.

  “As soon as my family is settled. They say that the south will remain an unoccupied zone for now. My father’s relations in Toulouse are trying to find an apartment for us. And I want to see that my grandmother is safely placed. When that is accomplished, I will return.”

  “I worry that your journey back to Paris will be dangerous,” he warned.

  She heard the concern in his voice and was grateful that he did not urge her to remain in the relative safety of the south.

  “Everything is dangerous. But I am not afraid,” she assured him.

  “Of course. I know that. So until I see you, á bientôt, m’amie.”

  “Á bientôt, mon ami,” she rejoined.

  “Ma chérie,” he added, and her heart soared.

  “Mon chéri,” she echoed.

  She gripped the receiver, but the call had ended. The silent phone lay heavy in her trembling hand.

  An hour later, she sat beside Pierre Dreyfus in a café and shared Claude’s sad news with him.

  “Havoc in your beautiful flat,” she said. “I am so sorry, Uncle.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the flat. Sticks of furniture. Paintings. Carpets. What do they matter? But I never should have left my files. I thought there would be time enough for me to return and retrieve them, but of course, I was wrong. I knew that our family had to leave Paris at once. We are Dreyfuses, which means our lives were in danger, so I took a risk.”

  Sadness and regret wreathed his voice.

  “Our name has not been forgotten,” he continued. “Those who hated your grandfather for the crime of being Jewish fed that hatred to their children, their grandchildren.”

  “But I cannot believe that any of our countrymen will collaborate with the Nazis,” she protested.

  “Madeleine, we must be realists. The danger must be confronted. There are Frenchmen who may speak of patriotism and who believe that they actually protect their country by joining forces with the Nazis. And there are others who are simply venal and greedy, interested in their own gains. Pétain is an old man but still ambitious. He has lost no time in selling himself to our enemy. The hero of Verdun has chosen a new banner. He aspires to be the ruler of what he calls ‘the new France.’ I will expose him when I am in the United States, where I will advocate with all my strength for a free France even as you and your Claude, Simone, and your brothers will continue to resist the evil that has thrust itself upon us. We will, all of us, fight and we will prevail. Truth will triumph.”

  He sat back, exhausted by his own words, drained by the knowledge that the door to his home on the rue l’Alboni was closed to him forever.

  Madeleine sat very still.

  “Your Claude,” her uncle had said.

  She laid claim to his words. She would not forget them.

  “Let us wish each other bonne chance, good luck, Uncle,” she said and slid into his strong embrace.

  That evening the family gathered in the salon of the pensione and heard Charles de Gaulle address his nation from London.

  “France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war,” he declared defiantly. “Our patrie, our beloved nation, is in mortal danger. Let us all fight on to save it. Résistance is our battle cry.”

  Lucie nodded.

  “Charles de Gaulle is a brave man,” she said. “His father’s son. I knew his father. He defended Alfred even when such a defense was dangerous. Like his father, Charles de Gaulle is pledged to truth, devoted to saving France,” she said. “We must follow his lead.”

  “Will we be able to save France?” Etienne asked, his voice quivering.
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br />   Madeleine knelt before her younger brother and struggled to reassure him, speaking with all the calm and certainty she could muster.

  “We will all work hard, and our country will be saved. We will protect our children. Remember that we are all éclaireurs. Scouts must always be brave and prepared to fight for justice, to do what is right.”

  “I am brave,” Etienne said. “I’m at least as brave as Jean Louis.”

  “Well, perhaps you will be by the time this stupid war is over,” his older brother said laconically, and the family laughed, grateful for the teasing banter that relieved the tensions of the evening.

  * * *

  There was no laughter the next morning as they gathered in the garden of the pensione for an alfresco breakfast. Lucie, as always, had worked her magic and secured scarce delicacies—freshly baked croissants and baguettes that she slathered with the butter and jam she had coaxed from the grocer’s wife. They spoke without pleasure of the lodgings that relations in Toulouse had arranged, and sadly, sorrowfully, Pierre told them that he and his family were leaving for Marseille that very day.

  They ate in silence, overwhelmed with the sad knowledge that this might be the last meal that they would all share.

  Lucie did not weep as her son lifted her hand to his lips and kissed each of her trembling fingers.

  “Au revoir, Maman,” he murmured, the same words he had whispered all those years ago when he left to fight in the Great War that was to have ended all wars. On this spring morning, a scarce quarter century later, he worried that this new war might actually end the world, their beautiful world.

  His sister, Jeanne, held him close, and he and Pierre Paul Levy embraced, their brotherhood affirmed. Their loves were mutual, their commitment to family and country shared.

  As he said farewell to his nephews and nieces, Pierre Dreyfus’s eyes burned with unshed tears. He loved his sister’s children, and he feared for them. His hand rested for a very long moment on Madeleine’s head, his fingers briefly entwined in her thick, dark hair. He did not deny that she was his favorite, as she had been his father’s favorite. Perhaps he favored her because she shared his passion for truth, his tenderness of heart. Perhaps simply because she was Madeleine, so beautiful, so gentle, courageous, and generous, ever true to herself and sensitive to others.

  “Au revoir, Madeleine,” he murmured.

  “L’hitraot, Uncle,” she replied in Hebrew.

  “Yes. L’hitraot. Perhaps in Palestine, my dreamer.”

  She smiled. He smiled.

  “We may yet see each other again in Marseille,” she said.

  He motioned to his wife, Marie, and his children to settle themselves in the car. He drove swiftly away, never daring to look back.

  Nine

  The route from Bordeaux to Toulouse was familiar to the Levy family. Pierre Paul had been born in Toulouse, and they had lived there for some years before moving to Paris. But Madeleine’s pleasant memories of childhood days in that peaceful city were dispelled as her father swerved and braked, driving slowly down the narrow streets. She stared out the window at weary wanderers who moved aimlessly from one corner to another, stooped beneath burdens strapped to their backs, squinting through eyes blinded by sunlight and sorrow. Crowds of desperate refugees swarmed across the broad boulevards in search of lodging and food. Toddlers slept on park benches, their parents crouched on the ground beside them.

  A cacophony of languages drifted toward them. Vegetable hawkers, pushing makeshift wagons, shouted in Spanish, their voices soaring over the cries of mothers calling to their children in Dutch and Walloon. The German invasion had triggered a surge of fear and sent frightened masses streaming into France from Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Toulouse, so fortunately located in the “unoccupied zone” and with relatively easy access to the Pyrenees Mountains and the Spanish border, was a destination that offered hope, however faint, to fugitives from the Low Countries.

  Her father braked to avoid a family who moved down the road, indifferent to oncoming traffic, and Madeleine looked southward and toward the distant rise of the Pyrenees. She thought of Robert Gamzon’s daring plan to have the scouts guide groups of Jewish children across those forbidding mountain passes into Spain, and her heart sank. It would be a daunting enterprise. Daunting and perhaps impossible. But, of course, it was an effort that she would never, could never abandon. She had taken an oath. She had pledged herself to hope.

  She glanced at Simone, whose gaze was also fixed on the distant peaks.

  “It will be difficult,” Simone murmured as though reading Madeleine’s own thoughts.

  The sisters required neither words nor gestures to understand each other.

  “We will manage. Somehow we will manage,” Simone added.

  “What will you manage?” Jeanne asked.

  “A silly private joke, Maman,” Simone replied.

  Madeleine smiled. She and Simone were complicit in protecting their parents from additional stress. They were aware that Jeanne and Pierre Paul, already haunted by anxiety, would be overcome with terror if they knew that their daughters were placing themselves in danger.

  Her father paused the car to allow a funeral cortege to cross the rue de Périgord.

  “Is death following us everywhere?” Jeanne asked.

  Madeleine ignored her mother’s question as she opened the window and negotiated the purchase of shining, celadon avocados offered by one of the many Spanish vegetable sellers who thronged the streets.

  That evening, Madeleine asked Simone the question that had troubled her since she had heard the proliferation of Spanish that was spoken in the streets of Toulouse by Republican emigrants from Spain.

  “If so many Spanish Republicans are seeking refuge here in France, will our Jewish children be safe in Franco’s Spain?”

  “I asked Robert Gamzon that very question,” Simone replied. “He told me that although Franco himself is a Fascist, he has a mysterious sympathy for the Jewish people. The rumor is that he himself is of Jewish ancestry. Perhaps that is true, perhaps it is not. We must take our rescuers where we find them.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Madeleine agreed wryly.

  “Especially Jewish beggars,” Simone added, and they laughed in uneasy unison.

  How good it was to laugh, Madeleine thought. She had almost forgotten how.

  * * *

  Their first days in Toulouse were fraught with difficulty and disappointment. The house her father’s relatives had secured for them was too small to accommodate the entire family, and they were forced to separate. Simone decided to travel across southern France to Grenoble, where Anatol’s parents were eager to welcome their son’s widow and their granddaughter. Madeleine herself found a small room in an apartment rented by group of scouts.

  Still, she considered herself and her family fortunate. The smallest hovels in Toulouse were snatched up by exhausted refugees. In the chaos of transit, families were separated and children were lost. Her heart turned as she saw the long lists of the missing plastered on the walls of buildings. She feared to read them, obsessed by the irrational fear that she might find her own name scrawled on the tattered sheets of paper.

  The separation from her family afforded her guilty relief. Away from their constant concern, her privacy reclaimed, she could give way to her sadness, submit to her loneliness and the fatigue that clung to her like a gossamer shadow every waking hour of the day.

  I am tired, she thought, as she lay awake in the darkness of a moonless night. I don’t want to do this anymore. I can’t do this anymore.

  She wanted to weep, but tears would not come. She had not earned the right to weep. Instead she pummeled her thin pillow and sought a respite in fantasy. The war would end, peace would come, she and Claude would stare up at a sunlit sky.

  But sunlight remained elusive as the news progressed, inel
uctably, from bad to worse.

  Marshal Pétain moved his nascent government to Vichy, designating that resort city the capital of the Unoccupied Zone. Once known as the hero of Verdun, he now blatantly sought an armistice with Germany. It was a betrayal that invoked the fierce wrath of Charles de Gaulle and his followers in London; it reinvigorated the Résistance in France.

  Madeleine listened to de Gaulle’s fierce condemnation of the Vichy government on Radio Anglaise and thought of a favorite Kipling poem she had memorized during her student days at the Lycée Moliére. She remembered vagrant phrases.

  “Triumph and disaster must be confronted even with worn-out tools,” she said aloud.

  The words pleased her. She was, after all, an Éclaireur, a scout, prepared for both triumph and disaster, which she would confront with whatever “worn-out tools” came to hand. It occurred to her that she would have to teach that poem to Claude, and the thought caused her to smile. Yes, one day they would recite their favorite poems to each other.

  He called the next day, using the clandestine phone line in the Toulouse éclaireurs headquarters.

  “Madeleine, it is important that you return to Paris. The Nazis are now threatening to close the northern sector. Please come while it is still relatively safe. We need you.”

  She trembled to hear the plea in his voice.

  “We?” she asked teasingly.

  “Yes. The scouts. And Anna Hofberg, of course. She asks for you whenever I see her. The Résistance leaders have an urgent need for a qualified social worker.”

  She remained silent.

  “And, Madeleine, I need you,” he added ruefully.

  She smiled. She had waited for those words, waited to hear them spoken with a tenderness of tone, even as he raised his voice so that she could hear without difficulty, forgetting her ease with phone conversations.

  “Yes. Of course I will come as soon as I can, as soon as I can leave Toulouse. My family is still unsettled, and I want to be sure that the program I have organized for the Jewish refugee children from the Low Countries is in place,” she said.