by Heather Munn
“They thought that you are taking them there,” said Nina, pointing with her chin at the mairie. “They saw the French flags. They say, they were before arrested in such a place. I have said to them, they are safe with you. Where do you take them?”
“Just to the pastor’s house.” I swallowed. “Uh, Nina? Uh …” Are you free in the afternoons? Around five thirty?
I asked her about it as we walked back from the parsonage. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye when I said meet the train, and by the end there was no expression at all on her face. Like it was frozen.
“And, um, it helps Paquerette so much … um … Nina?”
She didn’t say anything for a good three seconds. Then she spoke in a low voice. “You want that I go to the train station?” Her eyes, when she said train station, looked like she was saying hell.
“Um …”
Nina shook her head, fast little shakes. I could hear her breath starting to come hard.
“Nina, Monsieur Bernard’s not going to do anything to you. I’ve seen at least ten or fifteen groups of refugees get off the train and he hasn’t tried to stop a single one.” The next moment I remembered a few things I’d seen and realized I should have made that hasn’t tried very hard. But the kids, and Paquerette, she could help them so much. “My mother says he’s given up. I bet he even knows you’re here, anyway.”
At that last sentence her eyes got bigger and darker. She drew back. “Has someone told him? Are you sure?”
“No! I just mean, you’ve been here for half a year, all I mean is …”
She stood there and looked at me, one of her looks that goes on way too long. I scuffed my boots in the old snow.
“I cannot go,” she said finally, and turned away.
I went home angry. Yeah, that’s the thing about Nina. That. Mama says she’s right to be scared. Fine. Papa says that courage isn’t being without fear, it’s doing what has to be done in spite of your fear. I wouldn’t let being a refugee make me like that, when somebody needed my help. Afraid of Monsieur Bernard. As if he was the Gestapo or something.
I told Rosa about it that night, while Madame Sabatier was bathing Grigory. She just sat there looking troubled. And then she told me Nina was right to be scared. I almost put Lilli down and walked out.
On Wednesday Paquerette left for Gurs again. On Monday I started meeting the train every day to look for her. I went at noon with Rosa, and we stood shivering in the bright, cold air. At five thirty I went by myself, with my hood up against the burle that had started to blow. I felt someone come up beside me, and turned. “Hi,” said Rosa quietly.
“Your mother let you off?”
“Just for fifteen minutes.”
The train came in. Paquerette wasn’t on it. We turned back and walked back up the street toward the place du centre, and as we passed the Rue du Rosier on our right, Nina came out of it, walking carefully, her crutches clicking on the ice. She looked at me and immediately looked away. She was pale.
“Hi Nina,” said Rosa without surprise.
I looked from one to the other. Neither of them met my eye.
NINA WAS there again the day Paquerette came in—Wednesday, a full week after she’d left. Paquerette’s eyes were rimmed with red, as if she’d been crying or hadn’t slept for two days, I wasn’t sure which. She was trailing seven kids.
“Paquerette, are you all right?”
She gave me a quick headshake, and turned to count the kids. Two of the youngest—six-year-olds or so—had those swollen bellies. The older ones were looking round the station platform like someone was going to show up and shoot them. One of them had a bandage over his cheek. Paquerette turned around, appearing profoundly relieved that her count had come out right. “The younger ones are for Sylvie,” she said in a ragged voice. “Spanish. Rosa, you can take them if you’re willing. The oldest three are for les Chênes. They don’t speak French and they’re in a bad way. I think I’d better take them myself.” She took a deep breath and her spine straightened. She looked at me. “You can help.”
“We’ve got Nina,” I forced myself to say. “She’s … back there. What do they speak?”
They spoke Yiddish. We stood in the mouth of Nina’s alley and she spoke to them in a low voice in Yiddish, and they started to look a little less like they were about to get shot. I knew I was right about bringing her. She spoke, and they nodded. She turned and told us she thought she and I could take them where they were going. Paquerette looked at her like she’d just handed her the world, all fixed. It was my idea. Mine.
It was a very long walk, at the pace of Nina and her crutches. At the pace of the boy with the bandage and his scared, angry eyes, and the girl beside him that jumped like a frightened deer when some farm kid whooshed past us on skis, and then doubled over and started dry-sobbing uncontrollably. Nina crouched awkwardly, her bad leg stretched out stiff in the snow, and held her around the shoulders and talked to her. In Yiddish. I stood there not knowing what to do with myself. I carried the seven-year-old on my back most of the way. So at least I did that.
When we rounded the bend and came in sight of les Chênes, I actually prayed. I looked at those two bare oak trees with their roots deep down in the soil, down where the freeze doesn’t reach, and this wordless feeling rose up inside me, something like pain and hope. Oh God, may this place heal them. Please. I think that’s what it would have been. If there’d been words.
“I FELT like I had to take them all. Had to. I couldn’t leave them in that state, I couldn’t choose between the two families or split them up. And then …” Paquerette scrubbed her hands over her face. “Then our train was stopped because of a wreck down the line. We stayed in one place for a full ten hours. All I had was a loaf of bread in my bag, that was all I had to feed us all. And they fought over it—physically. They used their fingernails. Did you see Rosario? The next youngest? You can still see the scratches on her arm.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t eat, then?”
She shook her head. Madame Sabatier pushed another piece of bread at her. She started to shake her head, but then picked it up and took a bite. Then she took a breath, and put her hands on the table. “But I haven’t told you my news yet. Rivesaltes has opened up!”
I blinked at her. “Opened up?” She couldn’t mean they’d let everyone go …
“They’re finally letting us place a worker in the camp, and it’s going to be one of my dearest friends. I’m going there to help her get established. That’s the other reason I took all these children from Gurs—Jeanne has no more releases pending after those. So I’ll be able to spend a little time with M—Marylise—without making anyone wait.” She smiled, and I got a suspicion that wasn’t her friend’s real name.
“How long?”
“I don’t know, Magali. It’ll depend.”
SHE WAS gone for almost three whole weeks.
I fed babies and put them to bed. I washed diapers. I sat in my classroom and wondered what Paquerette was doing, and I looked across the aisle at Jean-Luc Rivas and wondered if he’d ever figure out how much more interesting I was than pretty little Claudine Faure. At break I stood out on the riverbank beside our barn classroom with Lucy and Murielle and Sylvie, looking at the ice that crusted the Tanne and the dark, cold, swift-flowing water out in the middle. March came, and kept on coming; the ice began to crack and wash downstream. Still no Paquerette.
I helped Mama make supper. I went over and did homework with Lucy. Rosa came over and did homework with me. We spread our books out on the carpet by the fire. Benjamin joined us. He helped Rosa with her geometry and was much nicer about her not understanding what a hypotenuse was than he’s ever been with me. One night he walked us down to l’Espoir. But he didn’t go in. Babies, you know.
Benjamin got a letter from his parents that some traveler had brought to Pastor Alex, and he walked out the door into the cold and dark after supper, going nowhere, without his hat, and was gone all evening. I don’t know t
hat I would have noticed he’d gone out if he hadn’t run into me and Rosa as we were walking back late after a tough evening with Lilli, who seemed to have something wrong with her. We saw him up the street from us, walking slowly with his hands in his pockets, and when he turned for a moment his face gleamed in the moonlight as if he was crying. Rosa quickened her pace.
I slowed down. I don’t like to mess with Benjamin when he’s upset. It can be kind of embarrassing.
“She hasn’t been able to breathe right for two months,” Benjamin was saying when, having nowhere else to go, I finally reached them. There weren’t tears on his face now, but his eyes were red. “There’s a doctor who’s safe for them, but he hasn’t been able to help her.”
“I’m so sorry, Benjamin,” Rosa said softly.
“Who?” I asked.
“My mother,” said Benjamin, and turned away.
“Oh … she can’t go to the hospital?”
He shook his head angrily. “What do you think? Every time they go anywhere someone might check their papers, they’re risking their lives!”
“Wow,” I said. “I’m sorry.” Rosa just looked at him with her big dark eyes.
“And he can’t have a job either. They can barely pay their rent and I’d bet anything that place they live in is a rathole. And my father’s no closer to getting them a visa out than the day he set foot in Marseille.” He took off his glasses and wiped his sleeve across his eyes. He looked away from me, toward Rosa.
There was a moment of silence. I saw Rosa reach out tentatively and put her hand on his arm. I froze, looking at them. Looking at each other in the moonlight.
No, now. Not really, right? Surely your mother wants you to marry a nice Jewish girl …
The answering thought sent a chill down my spine. His mother might never know.
I stood shivering, there in the dark.
“You look so cold, Benjamin,” said Rosa. “Can we walk you home?”
We did.
HE BARELY said a word at breakfast the next day, or at lunch. He barely ate. I heard him and Julien through my wall that night, talking in muffled voices … I guess about his parents again. Unless it was about Rosa. I lay on my bed and imagined living on my own. So far from my parents they didn’t need to know a single thing I didn’t choose to tell them. So much weight lifted off my heart at the thought I wanted to jump up and shout. But no: knowing they were sick, in trouble, in danger. Knowing I might never see them again.
Never.
I thought about the people in the camps. Paquerette said families were split up there, the men in one block and the women and children in another. And there were kids who didn’t know where their parents were at all. Hanne and Lise’s father had been arrested back in Germany. No one knew where he was now. He probably didn’t know where they were either. Where was the father of that girl who’d broken down sobbing on the road to les Chênes? What had happened to her to make her do that? What made people capable of things like this, of putting ten-year-old girls behind barbed wire?
I want to do more than this. Than washing diapers, putting babies to bed. I want to go to those places with wire cutters. Get them all out. I want to do something, I want to do.
But I washed diapers. Put Grigory to bed, while Rosa rocked Lilli. Lilli cried, weakly and constantly, her little face screwed up as if she was in pain. Rosa bent over her, whispering sh, sh, and little words in Spanish, things about mama. I wondered what she was saying. If she was saying, Your mama’s coming, it’s all right. I wondered if it was wrong to lie to babies.
I wondered if the world would ever make sense again.
PAQUERETTE CAME back.
It was a windy, raw-cold day, with the dirty melting snow all frozen again overnight; jagged ice in the streets, the wind whipping la Galoche‘s steam into ragged clouds. But Paquerette, when she stepped out of the passenger car, was smiling, with color in her cheeks.
“Magali!” she said, giving me the bise. “Just the person I wanted to see.” My heart warmed like a bonfire. “But for now,” she added, “do you suppose you could run to the Café du Centre and get Rosa? I’ve got some Spaniards here who don’t speak any French.”
She’d brought a baby, a little boy, and a teenage girl named Sonia, dark-eyed and dark-haired and thin. We took them to l’Espoir first. When Madame Sabatier got out a bottle of formula to feed baby Marta, her sister Sonia started to cry. She said some things to Rosa in Spanish, and Rosa told us Marta had been born in the camp, and you couldn’t get anything for babies there. Rosa was pretty close to crying herself.
Rosa and Sonia left to take little Julio down to les Chênes. Paquerette made tea for us all while Madame Sabatier took care of Marta. When we were by the fire drinking our tea, hearing the soft sounds of Madame Sabatier crooning from the nursery, Paquerette turned to me.
“Magali,” she said, “I have something to ask you.”
I gave her a swift glance and my heart started beating hard. “Yes Paquerette?”
“I’ve been thinking about Rivesaltes, and about how it’s been for me, these past two months or so. It’s been … difficult.” She looked into the fire. “That last trip from Gurs truly made me think. I likely either need to give up my resolution to leave no one waiting, or I need help.” She turned to me. “Especially if Marylise can get as many releases at Rivesaltes as she hopes.”
My blood was pounding in my ears.
“You seem to care about these children a lot, Magali, and I’ve seen you deal rather well with them. What would you think,” she said slowly, “about traveling with me?”
It was all I could do not to jump up and shout. “Yes!” My voice cracked. “Yes, yes, I’ll do it, Paquerette, I—”
“Magali. Just a moment. Take a deep breath now.” Paquerette looked at me, the firelight dancing in her gray eyes. “Has it occurred to you that you’re going to have to ask your parents?”
I RAN up the stone stairs three steps at a time and threw open the door. Mama stood up fast from her seat by the fire, staring at me.
“Mama? Can I ask you and Papa something?”
There was absolutely no way I could wait. I wouldn’t sleep all night. Mama looked at me for a long moment and then said, “Your father’s in his study. We can join him there.”
We sat down in Papa’s study, in the high-backed chairs around his desk. I took a deep breath.
A trial run, she’d said, over Easter vacation. Emphasize to them that it’s legal, the children have papers, and we have the full consent of the authorities. It’ll be hard, Magali. We’ll sleep on train station floors. And keeping the kids together, keeping them fed, keeping them safe, you can’t relax for a moment. It’s not glorious, Magali. I want you to know that. It’s just very difficult babysitting. I had listened to her, my heart beating. Picturing it.
“Would it be okay—if—” They were both looking at me. “Um.” The words came out in a rush. “Paquerette asked me to travel with her. To the camps.”
Total silence.
My mother was chalk white.
I should have known.
I tried to gather the words, tried to force them past the pain that was growing in my throat. They were gone, scattered like birds. “It’s … it’s legal. She needs help. So she can bring more. She wants to do a … a trial run with me, during Easter vacation—”
“And what made her think she could ask you without saying a word to your parents?”
“She wanted me to ask you!” My voice was high. My throat hurt, my eyes hurt, I could feel the awful, awful welling of tears. They were the only ones who could do this to me. Make me break down and stammer, make me cry. My voice broke. “It’s not even dangerous!”
“Is that all you know?” Papa’s voice was like steel.
“It’s legal! The kids are released, they’ve got permission from the authorities, they’ve got papers, they’ve got everything!” I blinked hard and fast. The tears stayed back. Mama was looking at me, her eyes huge and very black in her dr
ained face.
“And how long does Paquerette expect this situation to continue?” He gave me a long pause to answer that. Since he knew I couldn’t. “Do you have any idea what she and the CIMADE are up against, Magali? Does she?”
I shut up. I looked at him and did not move.
“They are up against the Vichy government. Which is bending over backward to give the Nazis every concession they can. Many of the people in those camps are Jews, Magali. How long do you think the Nazis are going to condone the official release of Jewish children? Yes, the CIMADE’s work is legal. For now.” He gave the last two words a weight like a boulder. “But do not tell me it isn’t dangerous. When you walk unarmed into a lion’s den to take his prey, do not tell me that it is not dangerous, permission or no permission.”
Into a lion’s den. A sudden image flashed through my mind—Paquerette, tall and straight, walking slowly into a high dark cave. To take his prey. “That’s why we have to get them out, Papa. They’re in danger. Don’t you see?”
“Magali, you are fifteen years old. Yes, those children desperately need help, but you are not the only person in the world capable of helping—”
“She asked me,” I said with my head down. I was raised to respect my elders. But right now I was dangerously close to the edge.
“Yes, well, we may need to speak to her about that.” He glanced at Mama. “Quite honestly, my first instinct is that this is work for adults and adults only.”
So that was it? They’d go tell her off for even asking me? And that would be the end, the end—
“You need to focus on your studies. Your exams …”
I cracked. “My exams are more important than kids’ lives?”
Papa’s voice was steel again. “Do not make assumptions, young lady.” The anger in his eyes was like a physical force, pushing me back against my chair. My eyes flew up to the books behind him: Greece, Rome, Charlemagne, all dead and dried between pages—this he thought was important. Living children, on the other hand—