The Paris Children : A Novel (2020)
Page 17
“Yes. The chutzpah,” Madeleine agreed, suppressing a yawn.
She struggled against the fatigue that had overwhelmed her all that week. There had been a spurt of new arrests, and she had been warned that despite her false papers and her cover as a Vichy social worker, she was not immune to danger. She was advised to stay on the move and avoid her parents’ home. She heeded such advice and scurried from one nocturnal refuge to another, one night sleeping on the sofa of a sister scout’s rented room and the next night on a cot in Serge and Simone’s apartment or her friend Hélène’s guest room.
“Who are these volunteers?” she asked Claude.
“The problem is we’re never certain. We try to vet them. We’ve learned that some of them are soldiers who are fed up with the Vichy regime and want to desert. Others are escaped prisoners from the camps in the southwest. There are teenagers who fear being conscripted to work in German munition plants. We don’t know what to believe, whom to believe. We worry that the local Milice, the French police who work with the Nazis, are trying to infiltrate our ranks. We worry about preserving our security. We know that we must prioritize our primary goal,” he said grimly.
“Our primary goal?”
“The rescue of our children, of course. Anything that places children in danger must be avoided.”
“Yes. I know that. But are there new dangers I should be aware of?”
A foolish question, she knew. Each day brought new dangers.
Claude hesitated and then shook his head wearily. His words came slowly, his voice weighted with sadness.
“I do not want to frighten you, but yes, we have reason to be concerned. There may be informants among these new volunteers. And the news from Madrid is troubling. We are told that the Spanish are tightening their borders and we will soon be unable to use our escape routes through the Pyrenees. That leaves us only the Swiss who, it seems, are more reliable than the self-proclaimed veterans of the Spanish Civil War. The Swiss pretend to no humanitarian motive. They simply want to be paid. It now costs three thousand francs to get one Jewish child over the Alps, and there have been times when the Swiss guides threaten to abort a mission unless we offer more money. The mercenary bastards.”
“I’m not surprised.” Madeleine added sugar to her ersatz coffee but did not drink it. “My uncle Pierre negotiated escape routes with Spanish passeurs before he emigrated. He told me that one of them actually said that the Spanish wanted Jewish refugees to pass through their country as light passes through a glass. It was the Swiss who wanted their efforts to be bought and paid for. One day they sell their assistance to the Jews; the next day they may sell it to the Germans. And then they go on manufacturing their cuckoo clocks and watches.”
She remembered her uncle’s anger as he spoke, and she wondered if she would ever see Pierre Dreyfus and his family again. His letters arrived infrequently, but he had written of his meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt who was very sympathetic to the plight of European Jews. Her husband, he had added, was much less concerned, indeed, not concerned at all.
She thought to tell Claude about Pierre’s letter just as a winter wind swept through the café. The door swung open and two Gestapo officers entered. They commandeered a table, shouted too loudly at the waiter, their French guttural, their voices rasping.
“Deux café. Gâteaux. Chocolat. Vite!”
Claude stood and closed the door, which they had left open. The Germans stared at him contemptuously and turned away.
Claude drew his chair closer to Madeleine.
“Toulouse will soon be totally under German control,” he said, speaking very softly. “The danger grows. As you see. Turn around but don’t stare.”
She turned and was careful not to stare.
The Germans were now arguing loudly with the frightened waiter. Their coffee was not hot enough. Their cakes were stale. Still, they ate. They drank. They slammed plates down and left without paying the bill.
“You must take precautions,” he murmured.
“What can I do?” she asked.
He hesitated, and she read both the love and the fear in his eyes.
“The Résistance thinks you should move to a safe location,” he replied.
“There is no safe location for a girl named Madeleine Levy, although she may call herself Dupuy. And where can I be more useful to the Résistance than here in Toulouse, where I have friends, where I masquerade as a Vichy employee? Would you want me to leave my parents, my brothers, Simone and Serge?” she asked.
“I would not want you to do anything you yourself would not want to do. But I worry about you being in Toulouse,” he replied.
“And I worry about you wherever you may be.”
They exchanged wry smiles. Their mutual fear for each other was testimony to their love.
Claude left Toulouse the next day. As always, Madeleine did not know where he was going or when he would return. Depressed but resigned, she continued her nomadic life, darting into her parents’ home to reassure them that she was safe and to speak briefly with Anna, whom Jeanne Levy protected and coddled.
Madeleine sought out various nocturnal refuges, a small canvas bag containing a toothbrush, a nightdress and a change of underwear always concealed in the pannier of her bicycle. An urgent encrypted warning had been issued by combat headquarters advising that there was extreme danger and all militants were to change residences immediately and often. They further stipulated that there be no meetings in restaurants and cafés, that no one was to be trusted.
Madeleine knew the validity of such warnings. Many Résistance leaders and Jewish Scout leaders had already been arrested. She felt safest staying with her friend Hélène, a midwife and avid Résistance worker who also delivered the babies of German women and French prostitutes. That dual role offered her information as well as immunity, however fragile.
Strong, competent Hélène was indifferent to all warnings of danger and death.
“My job is to bring life into the world,” she told Madeleine as they relaxed over small glasses of anisette, obtained by using Simone’s expertly forged ration stamps. “Let us forget about death.”
“I will try,” Madeleine promised, but she knew that it was a promise she could not keep.
Her false identity as a supervising social worker for the Secours National brought her into close contact with the Gestapo Français, French collaborators who were willing accomplices to German interrogators in the torture chambers of the rue Maignac prison. She hid her contempt for them and maintained casual flirtations.
Leon, a Gestapo Français lieutenant was a persistent suitor, contriving to escort her to meetings and holding her hand as they crossed a busy intersection.
“These Résistants are dangerous. They would think nothing of running you down. Did you know that there are Jews among them?” he said.
She nodded, thanked him for his concern, and flashed him a beguiling smile. But when he bent close and whispered an endearment in her ear, she shook her head.
“I cannot hear you,” she confided. “I see that you didn’t realize that I am somewhat deaf.”
“I am, in a way, relieved to know that,” he replied.
That relief translated into invitations to accompany him to cafés where he met with both his superiors and his subordinates to discuss the names of suspects and locales that would be raided. All secrets might be revealed because he assumed that Madeleine was unable to hear the conversations, and he shared that knowledge with his comrades.
Madeleine, of course, had exaggerated her hearing deficit. She read lips, listened attentively, and memorized every scrap of information to pass on to Serge, who moved quickly. New identities were created, meeting places and safe houses abandoned, lives preserved.
She was relieved when Leon was transferred to Paris and consoled him at their parting with the promise that she would join him there.
“I know a wonderful hotel in Neuilly,” she said and struggled to remember the name of the hotel she had invented when she played the role of Adele Valheur. It was of little importance. He would not try to find her. Paris was full of beautiful young collaborators.
* * *
The weeks of winter passed slowly. Claude was rarely in Toulouse, and Madeleine treasured the hours she spent with Simone’s small family. Her time with them was a respite from her own frenetic existence and the loneliness that never left her. She fantasized that her sister’s incandescent happiness, undiminished by the darkness of the times, was a portent of her own future.
“Your day will come,” her grandmother Lucie had whispered to her on Simone’s wedding day. Madeleine hugged the words. Her wise grandmother was seldom wrong.
As a Résistance leader, Serge maintained a radio. Hidden in a kitchen cabinet beneath an uneasy pyramid of onions and potatoes, it was equipped with a frequency powerful enough to receive broadcasts from London. The French language Radio Londres offered the only credible news of the actual progress of the war. Radio Paris blared anti-Semitic diatribes, and both Radiodiffusion Nationale and Radio Jeunesse were Vichy controlled, their newscasts blatantly false.
The kitchen was darkened during broadcasts and the volume kept low because listening to the BBC was deemed a serious crime punishable by imprisonment or death. Madeleine huddled with other Résistance workers to listen to the news. She heard the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony followed by the tapping of a single letter in Morse code. Dot-dot-dot-dash—the letter V—V for Victory. She moved very close because the voice of the Free French newscaster was barely audible to her. Still, she grasped the words. “Ici Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français. London here. French citizens speaking to French citizens.”
The news was never good. With sinking hearts they learned of the deportations of Jews from every European country under German occupation to infamous destinations. Treblinka, Sobibor. Chelmno, Belzec. Auschwitz, Birkenau.
“Death camps.” Serge spat out the words, his fists clenched. His own family was somewhere in Eastern Europe, wandering through the killing fields or perhaps already murdered.
On a dreary March evening, Madeleine joined her brothers in Simone’s kitchen. Jean Louis and Etienne, pale and exhausted, stretched out across the floor. She did not ask them what had caused their fatigue. Tongues of frost licked the grimy windows. Serge slammed down blackout shades, unscrewed the weak electric bulb, and lit a small candle that flickered and died, leaving the room in darkness. A bad omen, Madeleine thought.
Sipping the bitter coffee Simone brewed from chicory and acorns, she heard the newscaster’s dull, almost unbelieving voice report that a “special train” had left Paris for Auschwitz with 1,112 Jewish prisoners, many of them Résistance fighters. Her throat tightened, her hands trembled. She dropped her mug, indifferent to the dark stain that spread across her skirt.
“Claude,” she whispered and shivered with fear.
Serge, who knew the movements of every Résistance operative, moved swiftly to her side. He spoke very softly. He was, she knew, breaking Résistance protocol.
“Claude was not in Paris,” he said and she leaned against him in gratitude and relief.
“Where?” she asked but that was information he could not share.
He turned back to the radio and dialed a secret frequency on which a Résistance operator was issuing coded messages.
“My call letters,” he said grimly.
He copied everything onto a slip of paper, decrypted the code, and memorized it, his lips moving slowly, silently. He then shredded the paper, opened the darkened window, and tossed out the tear-shaped fragments that were carried away by the wild wind.
He turned to Jean Claude and Etienne, their fatigue now replaced by grim determination. They stared at him, knowing that a mission would soon be undertaken. They were ready. They were willing.
“We have learned that the Gestapo are awaiting a shipment of arms to be delivered to the Castres train station sometime tomorrow. We do not know exactly when, but we know where and we know what we must do.”
He opened the icebox and removed a carton thrust in the rear and marked Beurre. It did not contain butter but a compact transmitter. He worked quickly, his fingers racing across the keys as he tapped out a coded message.
“I have told combat headquarters that we will make certain that such a shipment will never arrive because by tomorrow morning Castres will not have a train station.”
He motioned to his young brothers-in-law. Wordlessly Jean Louis and Etienne darkened their faces with the sticks of charcoal Simone handed them as Madeleine pulled heavy socks over their boots to soften their tread. Their mission and intent was clear to her. She and Serge, both her brothers, and other scout leaders had spent long hours in the basement of a darkened schoolhouse where an instructor from England had conducted a workshop on the use of explosives.
Smuggled across the Channel, the diminutive Cockney engineer with a ready laugh and horrific French had managed to teach them the secrets of effective sabotage. Their targets would be bridges, ports, trains, and terminals; dynamite and gelignite their weapons of choice. Primers were easily available. Heavy rope made excellent fuses. Serge, Madeleine knew, had more than once translated that clandestine training into action, often assisted by Jean Louis and Etienne.
She watched as they pulled burlap sacks of equipment from beneath the beds. Serge kissed Simone, the brothers embraced their sisters, and they all disappeared into the night.
Simone sighed.
“The Gestapo will not receive this shipment, but they will send another one tomorrow and another the day after that. We are shooting arrows at machine guns.”
“We are doing what we can,” Madeleine said quietly.
“I know. But I know too that Hitler will not rest until every Jew in Europe is dead.” Simone stared at the documents spread across her kitchen table, at the pile of photos she would affix to them, Photomaton snapshots that she had learned to doctor. Shrugging, she opened a pot of paste and turned to the task at hand. Madeleine also took up a brush. This much they could do. This much they had to do.
At last, the completed documents were boxed up and Simone went to the window where she would stand vigil throughout the long night, waiting for her husband and her brothers who might or might not return.
Madeleine, in turn, crept into the narrow bed where her small niece slept and tried to think of a prayer that might offer solace. Words did not come and she fell asleep, soothed by the rhythmic rise and fall of the child’s breath, dreaming dreams now threaded with terror, now threaded with joy.
As the first light of dawn streaked across the wintry sky, the three men returned. Madeleine heard Simone’s cry of joyous relief, and she was suffused with gratitude.
“Thank you,” she murmured, and realized that the words were a prayer.
Twenty-Two
The cruel winter slowly drifted into spring. Tender new grass covered the meadows, and wildflowers grew in colorful profusion. Golden forsythia and violet masses of grape iris waved in the gentle wind. Riding through the countryside to meet with her Vichy supervisors, Madeleine leapt off her bicycle and gathered up sheaths of bluebells and clumps of lavender. She smiled and offered them to a rotund Vichy officer who accepted them gratefully. He threaded a bluebell through his epaulette so that it rested against the burnished pin on which the Battle Ax of Gaul, the official Vichy emblem, was engraved. She flinched, angered by the contiguity of the sweet, small flower with the emblem of betrayal and hatred.
She discussed the incident with Claude later that night as they shared a hasty dinner on one of his brief and infrequent visits to Toulouse.
“And of course I advised him to put the flowers in water,” she concluded. “He thanked me profusely. That might earn me some protection.”
Summer swept in with a burst of warmth. Wild roses bloomed along the banks of the Garonne and forced their way through the hedges of country roads in a riot of color. Lucie Dreyfus favored wild roses, Madeleine remembered, as she clipped sprays of red and white blossoms and lilacs of a vivid blue. A Bastille Day bouquet, she thought as she inhaled their fragrance. A memory of Bastille Day 1935 came to her with startling clarity.
Seven years had passed since her grandfather’s death. Standing in a circlet of sunlight, holding the flowers close, she thought of all that had happened during that span of years. War and occupation. Painful separations. The Dreyfus family scattered, friends vanished. Death and danger. Her dreams were an amalgam of visions of smoke curling darkly skyward from chimneys of death in Poland and roses that burst into blossom. She smiled, marveling at their beauty and their imagined fragrance.
She was grateful, she assured herself as she inhaled the scent of those red, white, and blue blossoms, for the companionship of her comrades, of Simone, her brothers and parents, for Claude’s protective tenderness. Hope was alive, memory endured. Bastille Day offered both sadness and solace.
She decided, impulsively, that she and Simone would visit their grandmother at her convent retreat, her most recent hiding place; together they would light a memorial candle and mark the anniversary of Alfred Dreyfus’s death.
She cycled swiftly back to Toulouse. The boulangerie was open, and she purchased the last remaining apple tart, Simone’s sweet of choice. A good omen, she thought happily.