The Paris Children : A Novel (2020)

by Goldreich, Gloria

  The optimism ignited by the Italian surrender dissipated as the Nazis tightened their noose around all of France. The position of Jews in the Southern Zone grew more tenuous with each passing day. An advisory issued by Résistance headquarters in Paris advised all Jewish Résistance leaders in the south to go underground immediately. Many operatives disappeared while others remained active, but it was clear that the ranks of Jewish Résistants were dangerously depleted.

  “I am running out of disguises,” Madeleine told Serge and Simone with bitter humor, removing the kerchief that covered her hair, newly dyed red. She shed the white smock worn by junior pharmacists and riffled through her packet of forged identity cards, each with a different name, a different address, a different birth date.

  “Sometimes I forget my real name. I must remind myself that I am Madeleine Levy, not Danielle Durand or Arielle Maupin. Although I have grown rather fond of Arielle,” she said. “Arielle will soon have a doctorate in pharmacology, and soon, too, she will marry her classmate Philippe,” she said, amused by the identity she had created for her alias. “She and Philippe are planning to leave Toulouse very soon.”

  Serge shook his head bitterly.

  “We should all leave Toulouse, but Simone and I must wait until our baby is born. She cannot travel in her condition. It is a miracle that we have remained safe. Probably because the Milice is biding its time as it spies on us. We are more valuable to them here than in prison. And of course the bribes that I pay to their commandant are useful. Prisoners do not pay bribes, and Vichy and Milice officers have developed a taste for champagne and pâtés.”

  The few members of their cell who remained in Toulouse often clustered around Serge’s clandestine radio. Huddled in the darkened room, they listened to the BBC broadcasts and learned that despite defeats in Italy and Russia, Hitler had not abandoned his war against the Jews. He was manically determined to see that all of Europe was judenrein, free of Jews. There were vicious deportations of Jews from Holland, Belgium, and France to death camps. Radio Londres reported that during the first weeks of September, two thousand Jews from Holland, fourteen hundred from Belgium, and one thousand from France had been sent to certain death in Auschwitz. There were reports of mass executions over mud-filled trenches. Those who were soon to be murdered were forced to dig their own graves.

  “Hitler seems more focused on killing Jews than on winning the war,” Serge said.

  He turned to Madeleine.

  “The time has come. We must do something to slow the deportations,” he said.

  She nodded. They could no longer rely on directives from Paris or Lyon. They were on their own.

  “And we know what we must do,” she agreed. “The bridges. Moulin told us that we must target the Ponts Jumeaux.”

  “He was right, of course,” Serge asserted. “And that is what we will do.”

  Moulin, so prescient in strategic planning, had recognized the importance of the bridges and mandated that they be made inaccessible. The brave Résistance leader was dead but his advice endured, eerily relevant all these months later as the deportations accelerated and Nazi cruelty intensified.

  The three bridges that spanned the banks of the Garonne River—Pont St. Pierre to the north, Pont St. Michel to the south, and Pont Neuf to the center—had to be destroyed so that Jewish lives might be saved.

  The very next day, Madeleine cycled along the riverbank, concentrating intently on the structure of the three spans. It was clear that they had been built by masons of great skill. The serried gray fieldstone escarpments, threaded with rose-colored mica, were supported by concrete bases. They had been reinforced over the years with additional layers of cement, which rendered them a strong and formidable target. Formidable but not impossible. She made a swift sketch and then hid behind a tree and waited.

  Within an hour, several open trucks crammed with prisoners lumbered across one bridge and then another. She counted the vehicles, monitored the intervals of their passage and took note of the motorcycle squads of SS officers that escorted them. She recorded all the information in a notebook that she handed to Serge when she met him in a designated safe house.

  “We waited too long,” he said worriedly, assessing each detail.

  “No. We had to be certain of success,” she said.

  She reminded him that they had discussed targeting the bridge earlier but the summer days were too long. They needed the cover of darkness and time to accumulate a sufficient supply of more powerful explosives. That had meant cultivating both townspeople and farmers whose complicity would be vital to their success. Caution and patience had been their watchwords. But the time had come to abandon caution and patience.

  Serge nodded his agreement.

  “We have new intelligence,” he told her. “ The Germans are increasing the number of convoys. They pack the trucks with prisoners from the internment center of Brens and the transit camp at Drancy for transport to railroad depots. There the prisoners—Jews, Roma, political dissidents—are forced into cattle cars that carry them eastward to the slaughterhouses of Auschwitz and Treblinka.”

  He spat out the names of the death camps as though they were poisonous pellets lodged upon his tongue.

  “We will need confederates, transport, funds. We will proceed but we need help,” he added worriedly. “Where will we find the resources?”

  Help came from an unexpected source.

  A Parisian Résistance group, Defénse de la France, published a journal entitled “The Fruits of Hatred.” It included photographs—somehow smuggled out of Sobibor, Auschwitz, and Treblinka—of emaciated men, women, and children, their pleading eyes sunk into skeletal faces. That publication was distributed throughout France. The truth of German inhumanity was now hideously validated.

  The Toulouse Résistants stared in horror at the images of malnourished children in ragged, striped uniforms, at half-naked women, gaunt faced, their bones jutting through skin scarred with ugly lesions. There were grainy shots of cadaverous men harnessed to carts laden with the corpses of small children. The Résistants closed their eyes as they viewed obscenities that could not be denied. Women wept. Men spewed vomit across the floor. They knew that the convoys that crossed the bridges carried men, women, and children to torture. To slave labor. To death.

  The photos had been sent from the Gaullist network in London to Paris with instructions that they be published as soon as possible. It was a desperate effort to jolt the French public into recognizing Nazi barbarity. Such recognition, it was hoped, would weaken cooperation with Vichy and strengthen the Résistance.

  That effort had success, however limited. It had an impact on French citizens known to be of stoic and pragmatic temperament, those who had opted to join neither Vichy nor the Résistance. The photos in “The Fruits of Hatred” penetrated that stoicism, that pragmatism. Many turned to the Résistance. In Toulouse, a contingent of volunteers found their way to Robert Boulloche. He vetted them carefully and directed them to Serge and Madeleine.

  “Your help has arrived,” he assured Serge. “These new recruits have access to matérielle, to transport, to hiding places, to money. There is no need to wait. There is no time to wait. Death sentences are being written as we speak.”

  Listening to his plea, Simone recalled her conversation in Paris with the master forger Adolfo Kaminsky.

  “If I sleep for an hour,” he had said, “thirty people will die.”

  She transposed his words.

  “If we do not attack the Pont Jumeaux, if we wait for an hour, a day, a week, hundreds—no, thousands will die. Jews. Political prisoners. Gypsies. Innocents. We dare not sleep. We dare not wait.”

  Serge and Madeleine nodded their agreement. They needed no persuasion. Other Résistance comrades were summoned and arrived one by one, a stealthy parade of courageous warriors. Madeleine spread her drawings of the bridges across the table, and methodi
cally, quietly, they planned the operation.

  They worked through the night, covering every surface with lists scrawled on sheets of brown paper, topographical maps, inventories of available matérielle, coded lists of safe houses and hiding places. Names were discussed. Six saboteurs would be needed, two for each bridge. Serge and Madeleine, working together, would form one team, but who would the other four be? Stubs of half-smoked Gauloises and mugs thick with dregs of chicory-infused coffee were scattered throughout the room as decisions were made, discarded, reviewed, every detail considered and reconsidered. Agreement was reached. The operation would be difficult, dangerous, but neither the difficulties nor the dangers were insurmountable. Volunteers stepped forward, and at last two other teams were selected.

  In the early hours of the morning, Madeleine lay down to sleep on the narrow cot Simone kept in readiness. She realized as she closed her eyes that this was the first time in many weeks that she had not thought of Claude. His absence did not trouble her. He was with her in spirit. She would do what she had to do.

  She slept peacefully that night, her hand upon her breast, pressed to his letter sent from Lausanne all those weeks ago. It was worn to tissue thinness, its promise unfulfilled but its hope reignited. She had no need of dreams.

  Thirty-Three

  The team of saboteurs, led by Serge, proceeded with meticulous attention to detail. An architect made intricate drawings of the bridges, and they were photographed from strategic angles. Every eventuality was considered. It was understood that unimaginable situations might arise, that their act of sabotage might itself be sabotaged. But they persisted. The three strike teams studied the photos, the drawings. Madeleine and Serge would be responsible for detonations at the Pont St. Pierre, the northern span, the most important crossing.

  There was a clandestine meeting with members of the Toulouse Masons Guild who had volunteered their services. They were grizzled artisans, their eyes sharp, their hands calloused. They nodded with professional certainty as they discussed the construction of the bridges. They all agreed, with pride and regret comingled, that the stone formations of each bridge, built of boulders hefted into place by teams of master masons, were almost impregnable.

  “But surely there are vulnerabilities,” Serge said.

  “There are always vulnerabilities,” Maître Jean, himself a master mason, agreed.

  He spread the architect’s drawings and the photographs across the table.

  “Take note of the arches beneath each bridge. Do you see how they are roofed with cement? Much patched cement. That indicates weakness. If explosives were attached at those locales and then detonated, the roadway above the arch would be so severely damaged that no vehicle could pass over it. It would be repaired, of course, but a repair of such extensive damage would take considerable time. If in fact, the Germans could find a single mason in Toulouse who would work for them,” he added, smiling.

  “And until the repairs are accomplished, German convoys will be unable to pass over the river,” Serge said thoughtfully.

  “Of course.”

  The masons erupted in laughter at the foolishness of his question. But they forgave it. He was a Jew. Jews did not understand such things. Still, this Jew was brave. And daring. As was the beautiful woman called Madeleine, who worked with him. That too they knew.

  “Then we will target the arches, of course,” Serge said decisively. “But how will we attach the explosives to the ceilings of the arches?”

  A chorus of suggestions poured forth.

  “Tape.”

  “Quick drying cement.”

  “Industrial glue.”

  “You must not worry about how the explosives will be attached,” Maître Jean assured Serge. “We masons will manage it. It is not unusual for the Corps de Metier des Maîtres Maçons—the Guild of Master Masons—to inspect bridges and undertake repairs. We will explain to the Germans that our work is routine and that we are concerned for the safety of their vehicles. We will assure them that our fee for such labor will be moderate.”

  He laughed, pleased with his own plan, pleased that the Gestapo would pay for the demolition of the bridges. He himself had never officially joined the Résistance, but like many French citizens, he had long detested the Vichy government. His only son had been recruited under the hated Service de Travail Obligatoire and sent to Germany as a slave laborer. But it was seeing the photos of the concentration camp prisoners in “The Fruits of Hatred” that had spurred him to action. He had, he confided to Madeleine, shared the photos with his comrades in the Masons Guild who had been horrified and immediately pledged their support.

  “We are grateful to all of you,” Serge said and he circled the room, shaking hands with each mason.

  “And we are grateful to you. We will work together to save our France, our patrie,” a grizzled, elderly mason replied.

  Serge and Madeleine worked tirelessly, ever aware of the dangers that confronted them. They assessed their supplies of matérielle. Whatever was missing could be improvised. They had not forgotten the instructions of the weary English expert who had led the demolition workshop in Lyon. They shared that knowledge with the rest of their team.

  They gathered lengths of rope, piles of cotton wool, sticks of flint, long wooden matches. Local farmers ferried the explosives long concealed in their barns and silos to the green market, concealing them on their wagons and flatbed trucks beneath pyramids of harvest vegetables—golden squash, long green zucchini, sacks of new potatoes. They drove the contraband with great care to the marketplace in the heart of Toulouse.

  Complicit housewives scooped up sticks of dynamite, accelerants that had been poured into vials labeled olive oil, canisters of lampblack. They crammed them into their baskets, beneath their produce and baked goods. Smiling and chatting, they waved to Milice officers and headed to Simone’s kitchen. The collaborators, paid by the Gestapo to keep vigil outside the Perl residence, were not suspicious of such visits, seeing them as innocent coffee breaks, occasions for idle gossip. The women waved cheerfully to the surveillance team as they left. Behind the blackout curtains of her cluttered kitchen, Simone swiftly concealed the demolition matérielle in her pantry and her larder.

  At night, in that same darkened kitchen, Simone, Madeleine, and the midwife, Hélène, working by the faint glow of an oil lamp, carefully, almost tenderly inserted detonating caps under the paper covering of each explosive. They filled milk bottles with cartridges, primers, and the precious vials of accelerators, then waited for the arrival of François, the dairyman, a Résistant with an excellent cover.

  In predawn darkness, Francois loaded the bottles, concealing them beneath cases of butter and cheese. Driving through the half darkness, he deposited the laden bottles in a burrow close to the bridges and then proceeded to Gestapo headquarters where he cheerfully helped a German soldier unload the crates of dairy products.

  “Bon appétit,” he said, and the soldier waved as he drove away.

  The jolly boulanger closed his bakery late in the evening and drove his truck to the shed that Serge supposedly used for woodworking. He and Serge heaved sacks of flour into the small enclosure. Hidden within the snowy mounds of finely milled grain were yards of coiled cord to be used as fuses.

  Madeleine counted and checked every component, and Serge counted them yet again. They measured the cord and wrapped the wooden matches in surgical cotton wool against dampness. Everything was divided into three separate containers that the masons carried nonchalantly to the three bridges.

  “Supplies for the repairs of the arches,” they told the German unit that stopped them. They were waved on. The Gestapo understood that the bridges had to be kept in good repair. It was important that their convoys be able to proceed without difficulty. They wanted to be rid of those damn Jews, those filthy gypsies, the lousy Communists. They wanted to be done with the long, cold nights of standing guard. The
y hoisted their rifles and thought of the warmth of the beer cellars in Hamburg and Berlin, the brightness of the coal-fed stoves, the peppery taste of the wurst.

  “Schnell. Work quickly,” they instructed the masons who nodded amiably and did indeed work quickly. They finished in record time and assured the German guards as they left that their work had gone well, that the bridges would now pose no problem.

  “Alles gut,” they said and drove quickly back to the city.

  “Stupid Boches,” Maître Jean said an hour later, as the guild members gathered in a bistro and toasted their success with oversize glasses of vin ordinaire.

  It had been determined from the onset that the operation would be carried out under the cover of darkness, preferably on a moonless night. The pattern of nocturnal activity on the road leading to the bridges was diligently recorded. It was noted that the road was sparsely patrolled in the late evening and almost totally without any traffic or surveillance after midnight. They knew, of course, that the Germans relished their beer and submitted happily to the pleasant drowsiness that followed their drinking.

  “We will wait for two, perhaps three hours after midnight, when they will be dead asleep,” Serge decided. “It is good that our enemies have such fondness for their Lowenbrau.”

  “And for their cognac,” Madeleine added drily.

  Clothing was prepared for the saboteurs. They would wear close-fitting black trousers and jackets and rubber-treaded boots coated with black polish. Deft needlewomen sewed pockets into the jackets to contain small knives, torches with the slenderest of beams, miniature tools, and long wooden matches.

  “In case,” Serge said cryptically, flicking a knife open to reveal a deadly blade.

  Madeleine did not ask him to finish the sentence. “In case” meant a multitude of dangers too frightening to contemplate.