Madeleine navigated her way through a maze of uncertainty, trusting and untrusting in equal parts, reassuring the children in her care, distributing money and gratitude to those who agreed to hide the frightened youngsters, some in attics and barns, one small boy in a church steeple and another in the basement of a village library. She seized on any available locale as long as her children were safe.
Her only fear was her awareness that her hearing was steadily deteriorating. She relied increasingly on reading lips and asking those who spoke to her to repeat themselves, pretending inattention.
“Sorry. I wasn’t really listening,” she said again and again.
“Too much noise. Could you speak louder?” she asked in a strategic meeting held in a room too close to a heavily traveled roadway.
She did not want her Résistance comrades to fear that her disability might compromise their efforts. And it would not, she assured herself. She would simply be more careful, more observant.
“Let your excellent eyes compensate for your poor ears,” the kindly audiologist had recommended.
Remembering that brief consultation so many years ago, she wondered idly if he and his family had indeed reached safety. It was possible, she supposed, to defy destiny with initiative. That, after all, had been her uncle Pierre’s belief when he left for America, determined to keep his own family safe. But she could never have made such a choice. France was her home. The daring fight for its freedom was her obligation.
“Vive la France,” she said loudly, pleased that she could hear the sound of her own voice.
* * *
It had long been a Dreyfus family custom to celebrate the arrival of a new year together. It was Simone who suggested that she and Madeleine follow tradition and spend the last day of 1942 with their grandmother.
“Grand-mère must be very lonely,” Simone said. “Serge will be traveling, and I do not want to be alone.”
Madeleine nodded. She understood that Simone, ever sensitive to her sister’s every mood, her every thought, had in fact perceived Madeleine’s own loneliness. There had still been no word from Claude. His absence was ominous, his silence frightening. Madeleine did not tell her sister that she felt herself to be beyond loneliness. She had drifted into the season of terror.
“Of course. Let us go to Valence,” she agreed, grateful for the distraction of the journey, eager for her grandmother’s comforting embrace, her reassuring serenity.
Lucie Dreyfus, her pale skin papery, her thinning silver hair swept into a neat chignon, embraced her granddaughters, her blue eyes glinting with sapphire brightness. Isolated and alone, despite the attentiveness of the kindly nuns, she hungered for news of the family.
The sisters, speaking too rapidly and coating their words with an assumed optimism, assured her that everyone was safe and well. They told her that their mother had received a letter from Pierre, who was traveling across the United States pleading the cause of the Jews of Europe. Eleanor Roosevelt herself had offered assistance, he had written. The mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, had pledged support.
“Pierre can be very persuasive,” Lucie said proudly, and glanced at the framed photograph of the son whom she knew she might never see again.
Simone did not speak of Serge’s disappointment that Pierre made no mention of petitioning President Roosevelt to bomb the railroad lines leading to Auschwitz. She did not want to cast aspersions on Pierre’s efforts, nor did she want Lucie to learn about the fate of Jews sent to Auschwitz in the cattle cars that rattled their way across the steel arteries of the besieged continent. Instead, she spoke of their family’s efforts to resist, of the clinic Pierre Paul had established in their rue de la Dalbade home, her forgeries and Madeleine’s work with children in need of refuge.
Determined to amuse Lucie, Madeleine contributed anecdotes about her brother Etienne’s newly acquired juggling skill, her small niece’s progress at the underground school established by the Résistance, and her own culinary failures as she tried to prepare meals in Simone’s cluttered kitchen.
“I almost poured the dyes Simone was boiling for her rubber stamps into my soup,” she said.
“It might have improved the taste,” Simone added, and they laughed as they sipped the weak coffee and nibbled the dry, sugarless biscuits a shy novice offered. The war briefly forgotten, they were, for that precious moment, simply a grandmother and two granddaughters enjoying a relaxed and intimate evening hour.
“I remembered to bring you the Résistance newspapers, Grand-mère,” Madeleine said. “I managed to get both Défense de la France and J’Accusé.”
Lucie reached for them gratefully.
“J’Accusé,” she murmured. “The very title Emil Zola used in his appeal on your grandfather’s behalf.”
“The paper is well named,” Madeleine said. “We too make accusations. Against the Germans. Against Pétain and Vichy. Against those who will not help our people.”
“Yes. Nous accusons. We all accuse,” Lucie said as she scanned the lead article. They could not protect her from the news that two thousand Jewish children had been sent east in sealed cattle cars. The attached editorial, addressed to French mothers, was both plea and accusation. It was a passionate plea stating that “these horrors happened with the complicity of the French government collaborating with those who hold our people hostage… Do not by your silence become accomplices of these murderers.”
The message, which Madeleine had helped to draft, had been designed to encourage French mothers to hide Jewish children. Very few French mothers had actually answered the call, but even a few was better than none.
As the darkness deepened, Lucie served wine made from the pale-green grapes cultivated in the convent’s small vineyard.
“The Nazis cannot prevent grapes from blossoming,” she murmured, turning to the window that overlooked the vines, barren now and trembling in the wintry breeze.
Simone laughed but Madeleine offered no response.
Lucie looked at her searchingly.
“Did you not hear me, Madeleine?” she asked, speaking loudly now and leaning close so that Madeleine could read her lips.
“Now I can hear you, Grand-mère,” she said, her affirmation a reluctant admission.
“Has your hearing grown worse, ma chérie?” Lucie asked.
Madeleine nodded, relieved to answer honestly.
“A little worse, I think. I am not surprised. It was bound to happen. The audiologist I consulted warned me that such worsening might result from tension.”
She glanced at Simone, who nodded in helpless agreement. Tension never left them. It accompanied their every breath, their every thought, their every movement.
“You must be very careful,” Lucie warned, her voice gentle but her words laced with fear.
“I try,” Madeleine replied, but her own words were lost to her. Only weeks earlier she could hear the sound of her own voice, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, that ability had faded. How much time did she have, she wondered, before she would be surrounded forever by a wall of silence? She trembled.
Simone gripped her hand, and they sat quietly in the circlet of lamplight, the lingering taste of the wine sweet upon their tongues.
Madeleine, grateful for that gentle pressure, turned to Simone. She saw, with a burst of joy, the new radiance of her complexion. Of course. Simone was pregnant. That certain knowledge both startled her and filled her with pride. Simone and Serge, who fought death and confronted danger every day of their lives, had the courage to bring a new life into the world. They defied the darkness of the present, never losing faith in the brightness of their future. She smiled at her sister who smiled back, a wordless exchange that confirmed their secret sharing.
There was a sparse dinner, and once again they sat together in the tiny salon, talking softly, trading memories, telling stories as the convent bells tolled aw
ay the last hours of 1942 in melodic tintinnabulation.
“I am not sorry to see this sad year end,” Lucie said.
They nodded in agreement. It had been a year of darkness and defeats, of familial separations and the horrors of Vél d’Hiv, a year of desperate days and lonely nights.
Somewhere in the building, the benevolent Sisters of Valence sang hymns to the newborn year, their voices sweet with hope, vibrant with faith.
Ten o’clock. Eleven o’clock. The bells tolled. Lucie refilled their wineglasses and reached for the calendar on the small table beside her chair. Twelve o’clock. The bells rang out. The nuns’ voices soared with heartbreaking tenderness. She tore off the last page. 1942, with all its sadness, had ended. She held the calendar up. They stared at the picture of an angel holding a banner that read January 1943.
They stood and raised their glasses.
“To the New Year,” Lucie said. “To 1943. May it bring peace.”
“Peace!” they echoed as the voices of the nuns grew stronger. “Shalom,” they added in a whisper.
“Hallelujah!” the nuns sang in loving chorus.
“Hallelujah,” the three Jewish women echoed in unison and drank deeply, hands linked, eyes locked in love.
Twenty-Five
January brought a blizzard that transformed Toulouse into a gleaming white fortress. Ice coated every road, rendering the city isolated and inaccessible. Phone lines were dead. Mail could not be delivered. Madeleine was oddly grateful for the wintry siege. It spared her the disappointment of Claude’s continuing silence. The Milice and the Vichy police avoided the icebound streets, which meant that she could safely remain for consecutive nights in her parents’ home. But very late one evening, someone knocked lightly, perhaps too lightly, on the door of the rue de la Dalbade apartment, and Madeleine was gripped by fear. Her father motioned the family to remain silent as he opened the door to allow the merest sliver of light to slide through from the hallway.
“Who is it?” he asked, but there was no answer.
A white envelope was pressed into his hand, and they heard the sound of steps retreating hurriedly down the stairwell. Madeleine went to the window and saw a man jumping into a lorry, its heavy tires already plowing silently down the icebound street. It was, she knew, a vehicle from the motor pool accessible to Résistance fighters. Her heart stopped. Such transport was used only by daring nocturnal messengers who relayed the news of a Résistance fighter’s injury, arrest, or death to his family.
Claude, she thought. Claude is lost. Claude is dead.
Dizzy with fear, she remained frozen at the window as her father held the envelope out to her. She opened it, removed the single sheet of paper. She stared at it and recognized Claude’s distinctive handwriting. Weak with relief, she sank into a chair and read it through.
It was brief. He had to write quickly, he explained, because a courier would be driving a lorry through Toulouse, and this was a magical opportunity to tell her the good news. He himself would be arriving in Toulouse within the week.
“I could not contact you earlier because I was unavoidably detained,” he wrote cryptically.
She thought that might mean that he had been arrested. Why? How had he escaped? Was he still in danger? She was flooded with suppositions, atremble with fear. Could he be “unavoidably detained” again?
Let him come soon, very soon, she prayed silently.
He had signed it avec amour, “with love.” Love. How foolish her anger at his absence, his silence. How unworthy her sadness. How treacherous her dreams. His life was not his own. His fidelity, his allegiance, like hers, was to the Résistance. How could she have been so selfish, so self-involved, to descend into a dangerous melancholy, to doubt him, to doubt herself? He would come soon. They would be together. That would be enough.
It was Serge who told her the next day that Claude would be meeting with Robert Boulloche, the head of the Résistance throughout the Unoccupied Zone. Serge himself would be joining them at the Toulouse Résistance headquarters.
“Boulloche,” Jeanne Levy murmured. “Our family knows that name. His father, Judge Boulloche, advocated for my father during l’affaire.”
“Isn’t it strange that Grand-père’s story recurs now and again? It casts a shadow across history as we are living it,” Madeleine observed.
“Not a shadow. A light,” Simone countered.
“Yes. A light,” Madeleine agreed.
The thought comforted her.
* * *
Claude arrived on a morning when sunlight at last broke through the gray skies that had canopied Toulouse since the onset of winter. He and Madeleine clasped hands and stared skyward. They saw the new brightness as a happy omen, and they spent a joyous day following the sunlit path that bordered the Garonne. Those brief hours were an enchanted respite from the anxiety they had suffered during the long weeks of their separation. He did not speak of the dangers he had faced, of the evil he had seen. She did not speak of the darkness of her dreams, of the fear in her heart.
The optimistic owner of a small riverside café had placed a table in a ribbon of pale sunlight, and they lay claim to it. They ordered croissants and bowls of café au lait and ate very slowly, pretending that their world was one of peace, that sharing a meal at a sunlit table was an ordinary event rather than a wintry miracle.
“Perhaps we will come here again tomorrow,” Madeleine said wistfully.
Claude nodded but they both knew that another span of carefree hours was unlikely.
His stay in Toulouse was punctuated by urgent meetings at which agreements were forged to coordinate the efforts of diverse groups. The Éclaireurs Israélites, Combat, Sixième, and the Maquis would be integrated into one united Résistance dedicated to undermining the German occupiers and their Vichy puppets.
It was understood that time was of the essence. Vichy collaborators were moving with terrifying swiftness. Paris was newly ruled by Kurt Lischka of the German Security Police, a brutal commandant responsible for deporting Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz. With merciless zeal, he had unleashed the dread Sicherheitsdienst, Gestapo-trained operatives, on a defenseless Jewish community paralyzed with fear. Men, women, and children, the aged and infants in arms, were herded into cattle cars and beaten with truncheons, their belongings wrenched from their hands. Résistance leaders knew that the horrors taking place in Paris would soon sweep through Toulouse and every other city in the Unoccupied Zone. Escape routes through the Pyrenees would have to activated sooner rather than later.
Madeleine and Claude were sharing a meal with Simone and Serge when an encrypted message from Brussels was transmitted. Serge deciphered the code and turned to them, his face grim, his voice a monotone of sadness.
“The Gestapo made a series of arrests. Résistance prisoners were tortured in the Fresnes Prison. Some poor creature, who knew what he should not have known, talked. The Germans now know about our Comet escape route through the Pyrenees. It is totally compromised. They have already posted sentries and established checkpoints. We can no longer use it.”
Madeleine stared at him in disbelief. The Comet escape line was the route through which she had hoped to lead her children. All their months of planning had been wasted. A new escape plan would have to be devised, a near impossible undertaking given the increased vigilance of the Milice, that brutal French military unit known to execute anyone who harbored a Jew. Milice operatives had invaded a farm near Castres only a few nights earlier and shot an elderly farmer and his invalid wife who had hidden a Jewish boy in their barn. The child had been arrested, beaten, and sent to Drancy. She shivered to think of what the Milice might do if they intercepted the contingent of children she thought to guide to freedom. What if Anna were to fall into their hands? Anna! The child’s name came to her unbidden. What would they do to her Anna?
Sensing her fear, Claude drew her close. He spoke slowl
y, enunciated clearly. Her eyes were riveted to his lips.
“It will be all right,” he assured her. “There is another route. More difficult but manageable. We will make our way through the Irati Forest to Pau, and we will then be only thirty miles from the Spanish border.”
“We?” she asked.
“We. You and I. Leading the children together. Yes. I will do everything I can to make that happen,” he said.
Serge nodded.
“It is possible that you and Claude can work together,” he agreed. “We will try to make it probable.”
Madeleine breathed deeply. If Claude was with her, all her fears would disappear. He had promised to do whatever he could to make that happen. She repeated his words and Serge’s reassurance to herself. She fought back her tears as he smiled at her and took her hand in his own, caressing each of her very cold fingers until warmth returned to them.
“We must all be very careful,” Serge warned.
That need for caution was paramount as the news grew more and more ominous. Thirty Jewish children who had been hidden in an orphanage in Marseille were seized and deported to Sobibor. In that dread camp, they were almost certainly sent to the gas chambers, their fragile bodies incinerated in the crematoria. It was said that the smoke rising from the chimneys of Sobibor obscured the light of the sun and darkened the moon.
Lucie Dreyfus learned of the fate of the children. She wrote that she had lit a candle for them and said Kaddish. The compassionate Sisters of Valence sang a requiem mass in their memory.
The voices of the nuns were sad and beautiful. They wept as they sang, she wrote to Madeleine and Simone.
The sisters turned to each other, repeated her words aloud, and like the nuns, they too wept but they could not sing. Their voices were stilled by sorrow.
* * *
Claude’s brief stay in Toulouse came to an end. He would soon leave on another secret mission, but he and Madeleine were determined to snatch a few precious hours of togetherness.
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