The Paris Children : A Novel (2020)

by Goldreich, Gloria

  * * *

  The Résistance operatives moved swiftly, defiantly, through the long days of early summer. The hiatus of restraint was over. The trained saboteurs moved with stealthy expertise and steely determination. The sun burned fiercely, its heat and radiance matched by the noxious fires that blazed throughout the city. The mysterious, destructive conflagrations were accompanied by sudden and deafening explosions. German armament depots were destroyed, many set afire in broad daylight. Others were incinerated in the dead of night. The occupying forces could discern no pattern. Their fire trucks raced from one end of the city to the other, warning bells clanging every hour and adding to the chaos. The odor of cordite mingled with the scent of newly blooming roses. A haze of smoke hovered over the sunlit streets of Toulouse.

  The Gestapo, enraged and impotent, pursued perpetrators and witnesses but the citizens of Toulouse, many newly loyal to the cause of the Free French, were stubbornly uncooperative. There were those who reported that they had seen a redheaded woman run from the scene of a demolition. Others maintained that it was, in fact, men on motorcycles, two, perhaps three, revving away from that same scene. Perhaps a youth on a bicycle. No, a gang of boys on bicycles. In desperation and frustration, the Gestapo and their cadre of collaborators responded with roundups, incidents of torture, and random internments, but the sabotage continued unabated.

  Madeleine, exhausted but invigorated by the success of the demolitions, moved through the city and the countryside, alternating hiding places and disguises. Each day she played a different role. One day, with her hair concealed beneath a kerchief, her arms balancing baskets, she masqueraded as a mute peasant woman. The next morning, wearing a stylish beret and steel-framed spectacles and shouldering a book bag, she was a graduate student at the Université de Toulouse. Dressed in the shapeless coverall of a cleaning woman, mop and pail in hand, she managed a visit to Simone. The Levy sisters giggled like schoolgirls at her successful deception, ignoring Serge’s warning glances.

  “As though you even know how to wash a floor,” Simone said, laughing as Madeleine danced through the kitchen with the mop as her partner.

  Simone, now in the last weeks of her pregnancy, was no less daring than her sister. The string bags she carried to the market each day were filled to the brim with ripe, red tomatoes and glistening purple eggplants, grenades concealed beneath the brightly colored vegetables. She carried back sticks of dynamite, packed between earth-encrusted carrots and stalks of celery. The farmers’ barns and silos were, as Jean Moulin had assured them at that Lyon meeting, excellent hiding places for matérielle, and the farmers themselves were loyal confederates.

  “Not all of them. There are those who are collaborators. We must not grow overconfident. We must be vigilant,” Serge warned gravely.

  Serge, Madeleine knew, was echoing de Gaulle’s messages from London, transmitted through the BBC. The leader of the Free French, true to his military training, constantly emphasized that the Résistance had to follow protocol, a difficult command to obey during the hot summer days of 1943. Without warning, the SS, claiming that French officers had been too lenient, assumed responsibility for the arrests and deportations of Jews and made random and arbitrary arrests.

  Terror and fury seized Toulouse as more and more families were victimized. Anger dulled caution. Revenge replaced forbearance. Acts of retribution became daily occurrences. The tires of German vehicles were slashed. Stinking pats of manure were tossed into the doorways of German barracks. French employees filled sugar containers in German military commissaries with salt. They spat into tureens of soup, and a baker whose son had been arrested urinated into a vat of dough. Garbage was hurled into the gardens of collaborators, their windows broken, swastikas chalked across their property. A girl who was known to consort with German officers was thrust into a car and driven blindfolded out to a field in the country where her head was shaved and she was stripped to her underwear. Half-naked and weeping, she made her way back to the city, where she was scrupulously ignored. Madeleine, encountering her by chance, draped a bedsheet plucked from a clothesline over the trembling girl and led her to the shelter of the Cathedral of St. Cyprien.

  “We cannot behave like the damn Nazis,” Madeleine told herself. “We are better than they are.”

  She raced away as a priest approached the sobbing girl.

  Neither the Germans nor the Milice were deterred by what they dismissed as futile acts of mischief.

  “Idiots. What they do is of no importance,” the German commandant scoffed and ordered that arrests and imprisonment be increased.

  But, on a very hot evening, those acts that had been so casually called “mischief” exploded into violence.

  The Odeon Cinema on the Grand Boulevard showed Ohm Kruger, an anti-British propaganda film, promoted by Goebbels himself. Enthusiastic German soldiers, many of them accompanied by overly made-up and underdressed very young French girls, flocked to the theater. They stood at attention as the swastika flag was raised and sang “Deutschland über Alles” in drunken revelry. They applauded wildly as the film ended and saluted each other with Sieg Heil salutes as they left the theater, laughing and talking as they swilled beer sold from street carts. Suddenly, one grenade and then another were hurled into their midst.

  Panic and chaos erupted. Beer bottles were dropped, revolvers drawn; barrages of ill-aimed shots were fired at rapidly moving targets. Booted feet pounded the Grand Boulevard as enraged and frightened German soldiers, abandoning all their much vaunted discipline, jostled each other in their efforts to escape the scene.

  Madeleine, cycling past the cinema at that hour, braked in astonishment. She realized that the barrage of grenades had not been authorized by the Résistance and was certain to incite a draconian reaction by the Gestapo. The perpetrators had been very brave and very foolish. She wondered who they were, and she hoped against hope that they would not be caught. She sought refuge that night at an éclaireurs safe house.

  Serge arrived the next day, his face grim, his eyes red rimmed, his voice hoarse with fatigue and sorrow.

  “They caught the perpetrators, of course. Three boys. Kids. Foolish kids. Brave, I suppose, maybe heroic, but definitely misguided. It was all for nothing. Not a single German was killed, and they were all caught. Only one of the boys was Jewish. Moshe Klausner. Nineteen years old. His parents and young sister were picked up in a rafle and deported. He was out of his mind with anger and grief. His little sister was diabetic, and without her insulin, she was probably dead even before the family was herded into the damn cattle cars.”

  Madeleine and Simone listened in silence, imagining the terror of a child whose life was slowly and painfully ebbing away.

  Madeleine thought of Anna, and her heart sank. She had promised Anna that she would keep her safe always. A foolish promise perhaps, but one that she had believed even as she had believed Claude’s assurances that, together, he and she would guide Anna and the other children to freedom. His assurance, her promise, were now casualties of the whirlwind of history.

  She knew that rescue operations were increasingly dangerous, although daring feats were reported in the Résistance underground intelligence network. Near the Swiss border, Jewish children had been brought to a cemetery dressed as mourners, all of them draped in black veils. They then climbed a gravedigger’s ladder, scaled a wall, and scurried to safety in Switzerland. If only there was such a cemetery near the Spanish border, Madeleine thought wistfully as Serge rested, his large hands covering his eyes. She knew that he was weeping.

  “What will happen to the boys they arrested?” she asked quietly.

  “It has already happened. Today’s edition of La Dépêche reports everything,” he replied.

  He glanced at the newspaper and read out the salient facts.

  “There was no trial. They took the boys to the Vichy Interrogation Center on the rue Maignac, and all three of them were sho
t by a firing squad in the courtyard in full view of anyone passing by. Supposedly that was a lesson to us, a warning. Here is the quote from René Bousquet, the Secretary-General of the Police, his exact words.”

  Serge read aloud from the Fascist broadsheet.

  “‘We will crush the terrorist forces, the so-called Résistance.’ Bousquet is letting us know that he will be relentless,” Serge said, shredding the newspaper and trampling it beneath his feet. “We are forewarned.”

  “All right. We are warned,” Madeleine said drily. “But we continue as before. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. As before. But with increased caution.”

  “Of course. Always with caution,” she agreed.

  He turned to Simone. Her sister, Madeleine knew, would light three memorial candles for the three youths whose lives had ended that day. If only their deaths had been more purposeful, she thought. If only their rash act had had some small consequence.

  I would want my death to mean something. The thought fluttered unbidden through her mind, and she swiftly amended it. But I do not want to die.

  She wrote to Claude that evening, another letter that she would not send, pouring out her loneliness, her yearning to see him, describing the fear that clung to her like a gossamer shadow.

  It is not that I fear death, she wrote. But I fear dying without having lived. Without realizing the dream that we shared, days and nights together, holding each other close.

  She folded the flimsy sheet of paper covered with the words that he would never read and went to the window. She held a match to it and watched it disappear into flecks of gray ash that fluttered onto the sere earth below.

  Thirty

  July passed. August arrived. Despite Bousquet’s ominous warning, the Résistance remained undeterred. Police officers were ambushed, collaborators exposed, and acts of sabotage continued unabated. Each daring attack was executed with great caution.

  Madeleine, in her graduate student disguise, used a bolt cutter concealed in her book bag to sever German communication lines on the road to St. Cyprien. She kicked the dead wires aside and cycled swiftly away, waving gaily at the German patrol cars that sped past her as she continued on to a safe house not far from the banks of the Garonne.

  Unsettled and desperate, the Germans and their Vichy cohorts targeted the Résistance’s secret radio broadcasts. Serge learned that squad cars, camouflaged as repair trucks, used homing devices to locate transmitters. Radio operators were arrested and brutally tortured until codes were revealed. He and Simone buried their own radios and transmitters in a fetid compost heap and relied instead on couriers and illicit mimeographed broadsheets for information. Only sparse news from the world beyond Toulouse reached them.

  Madeleine plucked a copy of La Terre Française, a Fascist propaganda tabloid, from a trash can. It contained a crudely written report of a revolt at the Treblinka death camp. Five hundred Jewish slave laborers had been shot by SS and Ukranian guards.

  “We have punished the Jewish scum,” the commander of the camp exulted.

  Tears blinded Madeleine. She wept for the murdered Jews. She wept at the cruelty of the murderers.

  As she sat with a group of comrades in Simone’s kitchen that evening, the newspaper was passed from hand to hand. Silence shrouded the room. Horror muted their voices.

  Serge stood amid the shadows and very softly intoned the Kaddish. The small group of young fighters added their voices to his in a melancholy chorus of grief and affirmation.

  * * *

  The spirits of the Résistance fighters soared when they learned that the Allies were bombing Berlin and Hamburg. Surely that meant that victory was near. Learning of the American air raid on Regensburg, they lifted tiny cups of wine in celebration only to learn that the bombs that fell on the German city had killed a large contingent of French slave laborers.

  “We are playing a game of chess,” Madeleine complained to Simone. “We make a move. The Nazis counter us. Our pawns for their bishop. Our knights for their rooks. Our sadness for their joy.”

  “As long as they don’t place our king in check,” Simone retorted wryly and shifted position.

  The weight of Simone’s pregnancy this last trimester hampered her every movement, and though she did not complain, Madeleine knew that her sister was often uncomfortable. Still, despite Serge’s objections and Madeleine’s concern, Simone continued to visit the farmers markets and often worked late in the night, forging lifesaving documents. It was Simone, determined not to despair and to scavenge a few hours of gaiety, who organized a picnic reunion for their family in a low-lying meadow not far from the city.

  The Levys and Lucie Dreyfus managed transport, and Madeleine filled a basket with cheeses, vegetables, and fruits donated by sympathetic farmers.

  It was a happy day, golden hours of peace snatched from the unremitting darkness of war. Anna Hofberg tossed a bright-red ball to Simone’s small daughter, and the assembled adults watched them in wonder. The sight of children playing in a grassy field was a miracle of a kind. They munched on the picnic food, grimacing at the cheeses that were too hard and the coarsely baked baguettes that crumbled at the touch.

  “Never will I forgive the Germans for these baguettes,” Dr. Levy said jokingly. “I accept invasion, I accept occupation, but the confiscation of butter and almond paste is truly unforgivable.”

  He laughed and, wiping the crumbs from his mustache, he passed his stethoscope across Simone’s abdomen.

  “I am just checking the heartbeat of my grandchild,” he said. “And it is wonderfully strong.”

  Madeleine, watching her father, saw that despite his reassuring words, his eyes darkened with concern as he continued to palpate Simone’s abdomen. She understood that his experienced fingers were assessing the position of the fetus, and she intuited his anxiety despite his reassuring smile.

  “Is it not wonderful that a healthy Jewish baby will be born in Nazi-occupied Toulouse?” he asked. “A miracle. You are miracle workers, Serge and Simone.”

  “Miracle workers,” they echoed happily and smiled, grateful for the brief moment of levity, grateful that they had managed to come together on a sunlit afternoon.

  Letters were produced. The nuns of Valence had agreed to receive all the family’s mail so that the dangers of censorship might be avoided. Madeleine had told Claude that it would be safe for him to send any letter meant for her to Madame Lucie Duteil.

  Lucie read aloud a letter from Pierre Dreyfus. He was traveling throughout the United States, raising funds for the beleaguered Jews of Europe and the struggling Jewish community in Palestine.

  “He misses France. He misses all of us, but his work in the United States is important. He has met with Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the president, and she has promised to do what she can for us,” Lucie reported.

  “Would that her husband had similar thoughts,” Serge said bitterly. “If only he would direct one of his bombers to target the railroad tracks that lead to Auschwitz, so many lives would be saved. I hope Pierre has told that to Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  “I am sure he has,” Lucie said as she handed Jeanne letters that Jean Louis and Etienne had sent from Paris.

  Jeanne Levy’s hands trembled as she ripped the envelopes open, but her face was aglow with relief as she read each closely written page.

  “Our boys are safe,” she said, her voice tremulous.

  Jean Louis, now a qualified doctor, was working at a clandestine clinic, and Etienne was deeply involved with the éclaireurs in programs to hide and protect Jewish children. He was working closely with a courageous Christian pastor, Father Vergaras, who based his rescue operations in the Oratoire du Louvre. Etienne wrote proudly that he had accompanied the mime Marcel Marceau on a mission to spirit Jewish children into hiding places.

  “Our sons make us proud,” Pierre Paul Levy said. “As do our daughters. Is
that not so, Jeanne?”

  He spoke quietly, but Madeleine saw that his eyes brimmed with tears as he held his wife close. Jeanne trembled in his embrace.

  “If only pride could conquer fear,” she murmured.

  Madeleine and Simone glanced at each other. They understood that their mother was never free of acute anxiety, the residue of her girlhood fear for her father and her young womanhood being scarred by the bloody battles of the Great War.

  During the Battle of Verdun, Jeanne had wakened in the night screaming, her nightgown sweat-soaked, tears streaking her cheeks. She had dreamed, she confided, that her husband, her brother, and her father all lay bloody and dead on the battlefield.

  The sisters knew that such nightmares had recurred. Instinctively, they moved closer to her; Jeanne’s daughters had become their mother’s protectors.

  What strange reversals war causes, Madeleine mused.

  Their grandmother’s voice, now pleasantly light, pierced their brief, melancholy silence.

  “Madeleine, this letter arrived only yesterday,” Lucie said handing her a pale-blue envelope, double sealed with two bands of yellow wax.

  Madeleine stared at it in surprise and disbelief. The stamps were Swiss. The postmark was Lausanne. The ink was so light as to be barely discernible. But the handwriting was Claude’s. Her hand trembled. Her heart pounded. It was Simone who took the envelope from her and very carefully broke the seals. She read the letter, her lips moving silently, and then turned to Madeleine and summarized its message, enunciating each word carefully.

  “Claude writes that he is well,” she said. “He managed to lead a small group of Jewish children through the Alps and will soon return to France. He misses you. He thinks about you. He will be with you before the summer ends.”

  “Read it exactly as he wrote it,” Madeleine said weakly. “Word for word.”

  She sat back and allowed her sister’s clear and determinedly loud voice to wash over her, speaking Claude’s loving words. She took the letter from Simone, read it herself, and lifted it to her lips.