The Paris Children : A Novel (2020)

by Goldreich, Gloria

  Clutching the white bakery box and the flowers, she entered her sister’s home. She was surprised, at this unlikely hour, to find a small group of Résistants in the kitchen, listening attentively to the radio. The room was dimly lit. The shades had been drawn again, and the air of the small room was heavy with the smoke of Gauloises and unwashed bodies. No one turned to greet her. A grim silence prevailed. Simone looked up at last, her eyes red-rimmed, her face a mask of unbelieving grief.

  Madeleine set the flowers and the cake down.

  “What has happened?” she asked, but Simone lifted a finger to her lips and motioned her to a stool close to the radio. Madeleine sat and leaned forward, but the volume was even lower than usual and she could glean only a few words. Vél d’Hiv, she thought she heard, although the newscaster’s familiar voice was muffled, his words emerging slowly, sorrowfully.

  “Vél d’Hiv.” She heard the words again. A name she knew. The accepted abbreviation for Vélodrome d’Hiver, a Paris landmark. Situated on the boulevard de Grenelle, not far from the Eiffel Tower, it was an imposing structure. Her grandfather, who was so in love with Paris that he knew the history of every building of note, had told her that it had been built for the track cycling event of the 1924 Olympics and had become the venue for fencing, boxing, and weight-lifting competitions. Its glass dome, he had claimed proudly, was the envy of all of Europe.

  Why, she wondered, had mention of the velodrome created such anguish in the room? Why was Simone holding her daughter close as tears streaked her face? Madeleine cursed her inability to hear and bent her head to the radio.

  She caught another word. Rafle.

  Vél d’Hiver. Rafle. She struggled to piece them together, to vest them with meaning, but they remained a jagged puzzle, captured words that she could not fit together. The radio fell silent. Simone turned to Madeleine and took the bouquet of roses and lilacs, pressing it to her cheeks, Her tears fell like dewdrops onto the soft, bright petals.

  “Simone, what has happened?” Madeleine asked.

  Her sister spoke slowly, clearly.

  “In Paris, very early this morning, even before daybreak, the Nazis rounded up thousands of Jews and Résistance fighters. They arrested entire families. They took small children. Infants. The elderly. No warnings, no explanations. They shouted that each prisoner could take one blanket, one sweater, one shirt. No food. No water. No medical supplies. No nappies for the babies. They were herded onto buses and trucks. Families were separated without rhyme or reason. Some were taken to Drancy, but most were transported to the Vél d’Hiv. We’ve now had reports on conditions there. Horrible. Inhuman,” Simone said, her voice breaking as she spoke. “A Quaker volunteer who went in to try to care for sick babies choked up when she tried to describe the horrors she saw there.”

  “Babies. Why would they imprison babies?” Madeleine asked and immediately recognized the absurdity of her question.

  Why, indeed, would they imprison anyone? Mothers, fathers, the elderly, the infirm? She knew the answer, of course. Because all were guilty of the crime of being Jewish. There was no rational answer to her why. Hatred defied reason.

  Dizzied with sorrow, Madeleine clutched Simone’s hand.

  “What will happen?” she asked.

  “We don’t know. Serge is in touch with Résistance leaders, with Claude in Paris and Robert Gamzon in Algeria.”

  “Then Claude is safe,” Madeleine said.

  She forgave herself for the relief she felt. It did not diminish her sorrow.

  “Yes. Serge has been in radio contact with him. He is in a safe house where he has some contact with the Red Cross and the Quakers, who seem to be the only source of information,” Simone replied.

  She glanced across the room where Serge sat at the kitchen table, studying a large-detail map of Paris.

  He was, Madeleine knew, searching for a possible escape route although he surely knew that for the prisoners in the Vél d’Hiv, no escape was possible. She looked up as her brothers burst into the room.

  “The Nazi bastards, the rotten Vichy traitors,” Jean Louis muttered. “They waited until the Bastille Day celebrations were over to turn on their own people. French Fascist scum betraying French Jews, French Résistance fighters, their own neighbors. Give them a few francs, a bottle of wine, and they’ll sell their own parents to Hitler. Incroyable. Unbelievable.”

  “Bastille Day has no meaning for the Vichy French,” Etienne added. “They are the shock troops for the Nazi occupiers. Do you think that the mobs who follow Pétain and Laval, who pledge allegiance to Hitler and wear swastika armbands and the Battle Ax of Gaul on their lapels believe in liberté, égalité, fraternité?”

  “Try to remember that we have many friends who fight Vichy,” Simone reminded her brothers quietly. “Our comrades in the Résistance, the Christian scout troops from L’Oratoire du Louvre who work with the Éclaireurs Israélites, rescuing and hiding Jewish children. There are courageous householders and farmers who hide our children and the children of Résistance fighters at great risk to their own lives. Not every victim of the Nazis is a Jew.”

  “But every Jew is a target,” Serge reminded her, his voice echoing ominously across the room.

  He folded his map, acknowledging that the search for an escape route was an exercise in futility. He turned to the radio again in an effort to reach Radio Londres but there was no transmission. It seemed, Madeleine thought, that the horrors in Paris had choked the Free French in London into silence. Her bouquet of red, white, and blue flowers lay on the table in a wilted mass. No one had thought to put them in water.

  * * *

  Days passed and news from Vél d’Hiv filtered in, each report, each rumor, more horrific than those that had preceded them. Quaker volunteers and Red Cross workers abandoned their guise of neutrality and spoke bitterly of the inhumane conditions. The famous glass roof of the Vélodrome had been painted dark blue as camouflage against the RAF bombers that made sorties over Paris. The dark color raised the daytime summer heat to unbearable temperatures. Because the windows were bolted shut to prevent escapes, no air circulated.

  There were only five lavatories for the estimated thirteen thousand prisoners, no nappies for infants, an inadequate supply of buckets for human waste. The stench of excrement, urine, vomit, and unwashed bodies sickened even the guards. Rust-colored trickles emerged from water taps. It was said that those who tried to escape were shot on the spot. Their blood congealed on the concrete surfaces where once brightly costumed cyclists had raced. There were stories of suicides. Death by self-imposed starvation. A man strangled his wife with his necktie and then choked himself to death. A desperate mother, driven to distraction, suffocated an infant who would not stop crying.

  Simone wept. Madeleine’s grief rested heavily upon her heart. They listened to the threatening radio address of Pétain’s vice premier, Pierre Laval. His words increased their despair.

  “No one and nothing can deter us from the policy of purging France of undesirable elements, without nationality,” he proclaimed.

  They stared at each other. Their families had been resident in France for generations, yet now they were “without nationality.” They were the “undesirable elements.” Nazi policy was now French policy. Their worst fears had been realized.

  Serge held Simone close, his hand resting tenderly on the almost imperceptible rise of new pregnancy. Madeleine cycled to the rue de la Dalbade, embraced her parents, and held Anna too tightly.

  Within days, the Vélodrome was emptied. Radio Londres reported that its prisoners had been transported to Drancy, Beaun-la-Rolande, and Pithiers, the way stations leading to Auschwitz.

  “The way stations leading to hell,” Serge amended bitterly.

  Twenty-Three

  The tragedy of Vél d’Hiv ignited a new urgency. The country was haunted by the fear that the cruelty enacted in Paris might occur w
ithout warning in Toulouse, in Lyon, in the smallest villages of the Unoccupied Zone. All equivocation ended. The leadership of the Jewish Résistance knew that they were in a race against time. As rafles increased and mothers and fathers disappeared, there was a desperate search for additional hiding places for abandoned Jewish children. Madeleine and her comrades worked endless hours in search of any possible refuge. Sleep was a luxury. Meals were snatched on the run.

  She lived a double life. Her Vichy employment provided her with excellent cover for her Résistance activities. She wore the lapel pin of the Vichy Battle Ax of Gaul. In the eyes of her supervisors, she was Madeleine Dupuy.

  But she knew herself to be Madeleine Levy. The blue-and- white scarf of the Jewish Scouts was tucked into her camisole. When exhaustion overcame her, she slept at her parents’ home, dismissing Jeanne Levy’s insistence that she be aware of the need for caution.

  “I am very careful, Maman,” she told her mother, the reassuring lie uttered with ease.

  She offered Claude no such reassurance. During their brief and breathless phone conversations, they spoke guardedly of the dangers they confronted, speaking in a code of their own invention.

  “A good day is over,” she might say, which meant that she had survived and was safe.

  “Lonely here,” he murmured which meant that he missed her, that he loved her.

  “Lonely here too.”

  She never knew where his “here” was. Résistance secrecy transcended lovers’ needs.

  She thought herself to be a skilled thespian, performing on an unsteady stage. She greeted her Vichy coworkers amiably on her routine visits to the Secours National offices, her smile masking the hatred in her heart. She completed her official duties and sped on her bicycle down unfamiliar roads and across rural pathways in a desperate effort to find hiding places for endangered boys and girls, always moved by the courage of those who offered assistance, always angered by those who refused to help.

  “I cannot risk putting my family in danger,” the owner of a small inn said regretfully.

  “All of France is in danger, monsieur,” she retorted wearily but did not add that the situation of Jewish children was the most dangerous of all.

  She was very careful, aware that there were those who volunteered assistance and then surrendered the very children they had offered to shelter to the Vichy police, claiming the rewards on constant offer. A betrayed Jewish child might yield a bonus of extra ration books, perhaps even several liters of petrol. She asked pointed questions, consulted with parish priests, explained her rejections circumspectly.

  The news that the SS Commandant, Klaus Barbie, had been assigned to Gestapo headquarters in Lyon dismayed the Résistance leadership. It was yet another indication that the Southern Zone would soon be entirely under Nazi control. Any pretense of French governance would soon be abandoned.

  “But of course we do not have a French government. Pétain and Laval are Hitler’s puppets,” Serge said bitterly as he read aloud from Le Matin, the leading collaborationist newspaper. Pétain had written an article accusing the Résistance of “a betrayal of the fatherland.”

  Serge ripped the newspaper into shreds which Simone gathered up.

  “Serge, please do not destroy this excellent papier de toilette,” she chastised him laughingly.

  Madeleine and the other Résistants gathered around the Perls’ kitchen table joined in the laughter.

  The smallest of successes reassured her. She found refuge for twin brothers in the basement of a tavern. The abbot of the Lavour monastery took in three boys who had miraculously escaped a rafle that had entrapped their parents. Three lives saved. Four.

  She waited impatiently for Claude’s phone calls, which grew more and more infrequent and then ceased. Serge told her that Claude was traveling a great deal but could say no more.

  Madeleine understood that he was obedient to Résistance protocol. His silence was her protection. Claude’s journeys would have to remain impenetrable mysteries for his safety and for hers. She imagined him in danger. She imagined him safe. She imagined herself in his arms. She wakened from a nightmare, tears streaking her face, because she had dreamt that he was dead.

  At last a courier handed her a letter from him. Weak with relief, her hands shaking, she read it. He wrote cryptically, aware that the courier might be intercepted, but she deciphered his carefully worded message with little difficulty.

  He wrote that he was in good health, fully recovered from a lingering infection. She understood that to mean that he was out of danger after a long ordeal. He boasted that his store had held a successful sale with all merchandise sold and delivered. That, she knew, meant that a rescue mission had been completed and the children in his care were safe in Switzerland.

  “We really should plan un vacance, a holiday, in the very near future,” he wrote in conclusion. She smiled. The word vacance had disappeared from their personal lexicon. He meant only that they might soon see each other, possibly in the near future.

  She committed those carefully chosen words to memory, newly optimistic. The war had transformed each shared hour into a burnished gem of time.

  “The near future,” she repeated to herself as she cycled to a rendezvous in the countryside with the owner of a granary who had agreed to hide two Jewish boys in his silo.

  “They must be very small, these boys,” he stipulated as he counted out the money she handed him. “The space is very narrow.”

  “I understand,” she replied and wondered if she should caution the youngsters that they must not grow. Another inch in height, another ounce of weight might betray them. Ever the actress, she smiled at the man who was, after all, risking his life and that of his family. His words were foolish, but his courage was manifest. She arranged for the two boys, orphaned cousins whose parents had disappeared in the Vél d’Hiv, to be transported to the granary the next day. Each month, she cycled there, smiled at the owner, and thrust an envelope of twelve hundred additional francs into his hand. The agreed-upon price for sheltering a child was six hundred francs a month, sums which the Résistance raised with great ingenuity and great difficulty.

  * * *

  Madeleine waited. The “near future” of Claude’s message was increasingly illusory as days and then weeks passed. She continued her nomadic, nocturnal wandering, no two nights in the same place, staying too often with Serge and Simone. She no longer listened to Radio Londres. The news had become unbearable. Exhausted, she slept, her sleep punctuated by dreams woven of memory, threaded with hope.

  She dreamed she was in her girlhood bedroom, reclining on a chaise longue upholstered in rose-colored velvet and singing her favorite lullaby, “Entends-tu le coucou, Malirette?” She awakened, still humming the simple and soothing tune. But later that morning she remembered that there had been no such chaise longue in her bedroom. It had been a promised birthday gift, forfeited when her parents’ home had been requisitioned. Her bedroom, she was certain, had been stripped of its rose-colored draperies and transformed into a sterile military office.

  “No chaise longue,” she murmured and winced at the foolishness of the thought.

  On another night, she dreamed that she wore a simple white dress. Organdy. White roses were threaded through her long, dark hair and she stood beneath a leafy canopy in a sun-spangled forest, holding a beribboned bouquet of bluebells. She was happy because she was waiting for Claude. It was the “near future” of his letter. But all too soon, the light faded, the flowers wilted. Shadows fell. She remained alone. The dream ended and she wakened, weeping, calling his name.

  “Claude! Claude!”

  Her desperate dream wakened Simone, who rushed to her side.

  “Hush, Madeleine. He will come. Soon. Very soon. Tomorrow perhaps. The next day.”

  Her sister’s voice was very soft, its cadence reassuring, and Madeleine fell back and slept a mercifully
dreamless sleep.

  She awakened, angry at herself for the despair that had come upon her unbidden. She would have to be stronger. She would have to learn patience. He would come.

  He did not come, either the next day or the day after that. Defeated, she did not dream of him again. Either of his presence or of his absence. Hope, she decided, in a burst of cynicism, was treacherous and had to be abandoned. Disappointment weakened resolve. She would concentrate on her mission, on the children she was charged with protecting. She needed every milligram of strength. Dreamless sleep became her refuge, muted optimism her sustenance, irrational anger at Claude’s absence and his silence a secret source of strength. And yet her dreams persisted, chasing after her, twirling rainbows of hope, briefly banishing despair.

  Twenty-Four

  As the German occupation became more onerous, the Toulouse Résistance was overwhelmed by a multitude of volunteers. Serge and Madeleine interviewed applicants considered suspect. Betrayal was feared. The Milice offered tempting rewards for the smallest scraps of information and it was known that there were those who traded rumors and scant intelligence for a carton of Gauloises or several bottles of vin rouge. No risks could be taken. Possible Vichy infiltrators were rejected with elaborate excuses.

  Still, so many young men and women were welcomed as fighters for a free France that the Jewish Scout camp near Moissac, slightly north of Toulouse, could not accommodate them. Secret barracks were established in Villefranche and Muret, where those newly admitted to the Résistance were trained.

  As Allied air sorties increased, special stress was placed on operations undertaken to assist downed RAF pilots. The rescued airmen were provided with new clothing and new identities and transported to safety. Simone worked late into the night, gripping her quills tightly, boiling inks and dyes that stained her fingers, transforming a Welsh navigator into a Paris shopkeeper, a Scots mechanic into a Grenoble schoolmaster.