The Paris Children : A Novel (2020)

by Goldreich, Gloria

  A pilot effort to test the feasibility of such escape routes was planned. Serge Perl told Madeleine that Claude had been chosen to lead that first group of escapees.

  “It will be a very small, well-trained unit. All boys, trained in survival skills in Paris. Claude and a Spanish courier will guide them through secret passes in the Pyrenees to a border encampment in Spain. Tsofim, Scouts from Palestine, will be waiting there, and Claude will then make his way back to France. I share this with you because Simone has told me that Claude is your special friend.”

  Madeleine smiled at him gratefully.

  “Yes,” she said. “Claude is special to me.”

  “Simone thinks highly of him,” he said. “As do I.”

  His gruff voice softened when he spoke her sister’s name, Madeleine smiled gratefully. She knew that Serge was revered in the Résistance for his courage and his strength. She had watched him with small children, and she understood that his gruffness disguised a tenderness. Humor erupted unexpectedly, as when he spoke of a German absurdity, such as the Gestapo mandate that Jewish veterinarians could not treat pets owned by non-Jews.

  “Even parrots and parakeets are honorary Aryans,” he said. “We must be careful not to contaminate them with our Jewish ointments.”

  Simone had told Madeleine that Serge was the son of an orthodox family, an ardent Zionist. Heroism and loyalty, knowledge and commitment were second nature to him, Simone had said proudly.

  Thinking of her sister, Madeleine breathed deeply and added daringly, “Am I wrong to think that you and my sister are special to each other?”

  He smiled shyly.

  “No. You are not wrong. And I must ask if you would welcome me as a brother?”

  It amused her to see that he blushed although his gaze was steady.

  “I would be honored to be your sister,” she replied and took his hand in her own. She rejoiced for her sister. Simone had been a widow for long and lonely years, weathering privation and loneliness as she cared for her daughter and worked tirelessly creating the forgeries that saved so many lives. Her fingers were ink stained, her skin scarred by the chemicals that too often overflowed on her arms and wrists as she worked.

  “I forge documents in my sleep,” she had confided to Madeleine. “I dream that I am drowning in a flood of ink, that I float to safety on rolls of parchment.”

  “And do you dream of Serge?” Madeleine had asked.

  Simone nodded.

  “I dream of him. I think of him. Anatol is in my memory, but Serge is in my heart.”

  Madeleine had listened in silence. She did not tell her sister that Claude lived in both her memory and her heart. She said, instead, that she thought it a miracle that, surrounded as they were by hatred, Simone had been surprised by love. She hugged to herself the jealousy that overcame her on evenings when Simone and Serge went walking hand in hand while she herself sat alone, longing for Claude’s touch, for the reassuring sound of his voice.

  Lying awake, she struggled to organize her thoughts. Of course, Simone and Serge would marry. They had the courage to lay claim to a life together despite the dangers that confronted them. Could not she and Claude to the same? Weren’t they entitled to some happiness?

  Immediately, she thrust her fist against her pillow and chastised herself for the thought. Things were different for them. Serge and Simone were both based in Toulouse, while Claude worked in Paris. They had mutually agreed that, despite their deep feelings for each other, their obligations to the Résistance had first claim on their lives. Patience would be their lot as long as war raged, but the future was theirs. Peace would come. La Paix. Peace. And with it, love. L’Amour.

  “Paix. L’amour,” Madeleine whispered into the darkness.

  But even as she repeated that mantra of reassurance, she sank into a sadness she could not control.

  “It is not fair! It is not fair,” she added and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  It was Serge who told her of Claude’s imminent arrival in Toulouse. He and his contingent of children would begin their hazardous journey from there.

  She gasped with excitement. She choked on her fear.

  Within days, Claude entered her parents’ apartment, his narrow face bronzed, his body lean and muscular, testimony to the long weeks of physical training. Wordlessly, she moved into his arms.

  “We have so little time,” he said. “I leave tonight.”

  “We are fortunate to have any time at all,” she murmured.

  They spent a brief, precious hour in a small café, talking softly, their hands lightly touching across a small table covered with a red-and-white-checkered cloth. She told him that Serge and Simone had decided to marry as soon as possible.

  “How fortunate they are,” he said wistfully.

  “We are young. Our time will come,” she reminded him, aware that her words rang false even as she spoke them.

  She was young, very young, she told herself. Of course, both her mother and her grandmother had been married and mothers when they themselves were very young. But then, war had not intruded on the years of their young womanhood. She and Claude lived in the shadow of danger and uncertainty. It was foolish of her to compare their pasts with her present.

  “Our lives will soon be our own,” she assured Claude, and he lifted her hand to his lips.

  At midnight, the hour at which he was to meet his young charges, they walked together to the secret rendezvous at the southern border of the city.

  “I want to go with you,” she said. “Why can I not go with you?”

  “Because the work that you are doing here is too important,” he replied patiently. “The Résistance du Sud, the Resistance of the south, relies on your efforts. As do I.”

  “You will come back?” she asked plaintively. “You must come back,” she insisted.

  He held her close, hoisted his rucksack onto his shoulders, threaded his fingers through her thick, dark hair, then turned and disappeared into the night. The squadron of children whose faces she could not see trailed behind him in ghostly procession.

  She realized, as she walked back to the rue de la Dalbade, that he had not answered her question.

  One week passed and then another. She stopped counting the days. She thought the worst. She willed herself to think the best. And then, returning home one evening, she saw Serge awaiting her outside, his hand outstretched.

  “What?” she asked and feared his answer.

  He smiled.

  “Comb your hair,” he said. “Claude is here.”

  Pale with exhaustion, he sat in the salon and Madeleine, weak with relief, sank down beside him and kissed his callused fingers one by one.

  That evening, he described his experience to the assembled Levy family.

  “It was not easy,” he said. “From the first the weather was against us. Two fierce rain storms flooded the filieres, the mountain passes, but our couriers, our brave Spanish guides, led us to shelter in caves and crevices. We waited out the storms and continued on to Tarbes, where a group of Résistants were waiting with supplies of food and clothing. One of our boys was ill with fever, and we waited for two days in a mountain village until he recovered. Then we hiked to Perpignan and crossed the border into the Spain. As arranged, we met three tzofim, scouts from Palestine, and they took over. I slept, I think, for two days and two nights straight, in a Perpignan safe house, and then began the trek back. As you see, I have arrived, safe and even sound.”

  He smiled; he laughed.

  “But waiting for that sick boy to recover placed you and your charges in great danger,” Dr. Levy said.

  “I could not have left him. We are pledged to protect all the children in our care. And that sick boy was David Hofberg, Anna’s brother.”

  “Then David is safe,” Anna cried.

  “David and Samuel both. Soon to arrive
in Palestine.”

  Anna leapt onto his lap and flung her arms around his neck.

  “Merci, Claude. Merci.” She trilled her gratitude, her face radiant with relief.

  Claude smiled and stretched out on the sofa. Almost at once, his eyes closed and he fell asleep. One by one, the family left the room. Madeleine remained and knelt beside him. She saw that his breath came in small puffs, that he smiled as though teased by a pleasant dream. That quiet intimacy filled her with tenderness. Never before had she seen him lost in sleep. She dimmed the lamp, placed a pillow beneath his head, covered him with a blanket. It was important that he rest. He was to leave at daybreak for Paris, yet another journey fraught with danger. But for these few hours, he was safe and they were together. She stretched a blanket across the floor and lay down beside him.

  They slept through the night and wakened together in the milky light of dawn. He enfolded her in his arms until, reluctantly, they arose and, without speaking, accomplished the morning routines. She heated water, and he washed and shaved. She handed him a clean shirt, found him a warm sweater in her mother’s storage closet. They shared a hasty breakfast. The coffee brewed with chicory was sour, the baguette dry and stale, the margarine rancid. Food was increasingly difficult to obtain, but the sparse meal pleased them. It was enough that they were eating it together. She placed a packet of bread and cheese in his rucksack. He heard a car slow down on the street below. The bells of the Basilica of Saint-Sernin struck the hour. 6:00 a.m.

  “I hear the bells. I must leave,” he said.

  “How fortunate it is that I cannot hear them,” she said and held him close.

  Clinging to each other, they walked to the door.

  “Adieu, ma chérie,” he said.

  His lips brushed her cheek.

  “Adieu, mon cher,” she replied and traced the dark arch of his eyebrow with trembling fingers.

  “Shalom,” she whispered as the door closed behind him. The bells, in teasing tintinnabulation, continued to ring and she realized that she heard them, however faintly.

  Nineteen

  A letter arrived from Lucie Dreyfus, its determinedly cheerful tone masking a sadness which her family discerned. It was Jeanne who suggested that Simone and Madeleine visit their grandmother. It would, she thought, give her daughters a brief respite from their dangerous and exhausting work and offer her mother comfort and reassurance.

  Lucie, who now called herself Madame Duteil, because the Dreyfus name was too easily identifiable, had been given refuge in the retreat house of the Sisters of Valence, a courageous order of Catholic nuns. She was delighted to see Simone and Madeleine and whimsically apologetic about her newly assumed identity.

  “It is my second nom de guerre,” she said. “During l’affaire Dreyfus I called myself Madame Valabregue, and your mother and your uncle Pierre also used that name so that they would not be bullied by the children of anti-Dreyfusards. History repeats itself. The Dreyfus name once again makes us vulnerable. Alfred is dead, but the Vichy Fascists will persecute all who bear his name. I have followed the advice of Résistance leaders and am now known as Madame Duteil. A pleasant name and bit easier to pronounce than Valabregue, n’est pas?” she asked her granddaughters, smiling mischievously.

  “Certainly easier to lip read,” Madeleine assured her. “The Levy name is also considered dangerous, too identifiably Jewish, so our entire family is now called Dupuy. We managed, with Madame Leonie’s help, to circulate the rumor that the Levy family fled Toulouse and it is la famille Dupuy that resides in the apartment on the rue de la Dalbade. Madame Leonie complains to anyone who will listen that they have too many visitors, that she does not know what to do with mail that still comes for the Levys. Her complaints, as well as the wonderful new documents Simone has created for us, keep us safe.”

  She showed Lucie the documents Simone had forged so skillfully.

  “I even created a new medical certificate for our father, complete with a gold seal and the signature of the Préfecture des Médecins. Pierre Paul Levy has been replaced by Monsieur le Professeur André Dupuy. A Gestapo general actually visited his surgery last week. He said he was relieved that a non-Jewish doctor had taken over the practice of the Jew, Levy. He would never have trusted that Jewish untermentsch to treat his hernia. Our father was pleased to tell him that his hernia was actually a cancerous tumor that would be best treated in Berlin. He left the very next day, so now there is one less Gestapo officer in Toulouse,” Simone said.

  Lucie laughed.

  “Good for our Pierre Paul,” she said. “And what name have you assumed, Simone?”

  “I call myself Madame Dupuy. Simple enough. I say that I am a widow and that my late husband, Anatol, was a distant relative of our family,” she said, and Madeleine noted that her sister could now speak Anatol’s name without the wrenching melancholy of his sad and untimely death.

  “Today you call yourself Madame Dupuy, but I hope that very soon your real name will be Madame Perl. When you and Serge last visited me, I saw how very close you were. I hope that you will soon marry,” Lucie said.

  The sisters stared at each other in surprise. Their grandmother, always supportive of their decisions, seldom offered direct advice.

  Simone hesitated, and when she spoke, her voice was very soft, her reply tentative.

  “You are right, of course, Grand-mère. Serge and I do care deeply for each other, and if these were normal times, we would surely marry. But because of the war and the dangers we face, we feel it may be prudent for us to wait.”

  Lucie shook her head.

  “Life is never free of danger. It is because of the war that you should marry and seize what happiness you can, while you can.”

  She covered Simone’s ink-stained hand with her own.

  “Ma Simone, ma Madeleine, remember that the Dreyfus name has a special place in French history. Your grandfather’s story belongs to the past, but the future is yours. Mold it as you will,” she said. “You and your Serge should claim that future.”

  Simone sighed.

  “How can we even think of the future? When we awaken in the morning we are not certain that we will be alive at the end of the day. The young wives in my Résistance cell are determined to avoid pregnancy. They do not want to bear children who may not survive, who may be orphaned. Only last week my friend Charlotte had an avortement—an abortion. Her husband had been deported, and she could not imagine going through pregnancy and raising a child alone. Also, she knew that she herself was in danger of arrest. We know that pregnant women are sent to their deaths in concentration camps so that the Nazis can end two Jewish lives. Serge and I are involved in dangerous work. We too fear arrest, deportation. Death. It would be foolish, even selfish, for us to think of marriage, of creating a family,” Simone protested.

  “Not foolish. Not selfish. Courageous. Selfless. And hopeful. Hope sustains us. It sustained me throughout my Alfred’s ordeal. I trembled. I wept. I could have filled buckets with my tears. But I remained hopeful and I willed myself to courage. That is what you must do, Simone. Have the courage to marry your Serge. Have the hope that if you have children they will live lives of peace in a better world than the one we know. Do you agree, Madeleine?” Lucie asked and turned to her younger granddaughter.

  Madeleine hesitated and then nodded. She understood why Lucie spoke only to her sister. Simone and Serge expressed their love openly, his hand reaching for hers, her head resting on his shoulder, their voices gentle in greeting and parting, their lips meeting in sweet softness. They were senior Résistance leaders, both assigned to Toulouse, their daily lives melded. They shared their days and talked softly, tenderly in the quiet of the evening. Their present was a portent of their future. She thought of them as already married.

  Her own situation was very different. She and Claude concealed their closeness, avoided any display of their ever-intensifying affectio
n, fearful of crossing into a treacherous reality already rife with danger. They lived in different cities, Claude in Paris, she in Toulouse, both pledged and trained to rescue Jews, to guide them to safety. Their treks would be undertaken separately, the terrains they would follow equally hazardous. The mountain passes of the Pyrenees and the forested trails of the Alps were both fraught with difficulty and danger.

  Her grandmother spoke of the unborn children of the future, but Madeleine’s life and Claude’s were focused on the threatened children of the present, children like her blue-eyed, small surrogate sister, Anna Hofberg. Their future, hers and Claude’s, was mortgaged to history. They dared not think beyond the day that would dawn when the sun next rose. Every hour of their separate lives was a gamble, dangerous and unpredictable.

  Madeleine sighed, but her voice was strong when she turned to Simone.

  “I agree with Grand-mère, Simone,” she said. “You have every right to happiness today. And we all must live in hope of happier tomorrows. That is what you must tell Serge.”

  Simone eyes were bright, her color high.

  “I will speak to Serge,” she said quietly. “The decision must be his.”

  But there was a lilt in her voice and Madeleine nodded. She knew how Serge would decide, and she knew that his decision would be swift. None of them had any time to waste.

  * * *

  Two weeks after the visit to the convent, Simone and Serge stood beneath a marriage canopy fashioned from their father’s prayer shawl and held by Etienne and Jean Louis. Madeleine, wearing a pale-blue linen dress, her dark hair floating to her shoulders, stood beside her sister and held her small niece’s hand.

  “I have a new père,” the child whispered happily.

  “And I have a new frère,” Madeleine replied in turn.