Defy the Night

by Heather Munn

  When we heard la Galoche‘s whistle in the distance my mother smiled at me, that smile only a mother can do. And said, “Go.”

  I still don’t think I want to be exactly like her. But more than I used to, I guess.

  Nina was there at the station, leaning on her crutches, right in front of Monsieur Bernard. She gave me a wry smile when she saw me. When the children came she crouched down and spoke to them in German, right there. Six children with dry Rivesaltes skin, red running eyes full of fear and hope. Six more.

  I took the child Rosa carried, a six-year-old with a splinted ankle. Rosa looked so weary. I told her to go home and rest. I asked the child her name. “Claire,” she whispered. It was the name on the papers Madeleine handed to me, papers someone like Nina had made. I told Claire she was doing very well, and soon we would be home.

  We gathered the others around us, and began to walk.

  THE NEWS came through a few days ago that they’re making all the Jews in the occupied zone wear yellow stars. So they can find them more easily, I guess. I wonder what I’d do, if I still lived in Paris. What Benjamin would do.

  I can’t help but wonder, given what Pastor Alex heard about the camps in the north—I can’t help but wonder whether one day people will start disappearing from Rivesaltes on eastbound trains. Bound for what? I hope Benjamin’s wrong. I really hope so.

  But Nina is right. I know that. Things will get worse, and we will need everyone who can help.

  Rosa says there aren’t as many kids now at Rivesaltes. That it’s noticeably quieter. She says Marylise’s waiting list is very short now. Still. If I hadn’t gotten Paquerette arrested there might be no waiting list at all. I pray for them, in bed at night. I don’t know if we can do it. I have no idea how long we have.

  Mama and Papa want me to stay in Tanieux for now, they say, even though they were glad to see the letter I got from the CIMADE. It was Grandpa who explained it to me in a way that made sense. He said if Paquerette needed months to recover from being tortured, so did I. I opened my mouth to tell him I hadn’t been tortured and there was no comparison, realized there were tears streaming down my face, and shut up.

  So I wait.

  There’s some talk, though. On the quiet. Papa Thiély took me aside the other day and started telling me about Switzerland. They have an arrangement. You send them a list of people, and if they approve it, then if those people make it across the border somehow they won’t send them back. He says that for some of the kids it may be the only way to be safe. He says it may be doable—we do have some people who know mountains. He asked me questions about my experience traveling with kids. What did I think was the best way to keep them quiet, things like that. That wasn’t hard. If they’re old enough to know what’s going on, they’ll be quiet; if not, use food. I asked him which kids he had in mind. Whether Marek was one of them. He nodded.

  I agree with him. Marek should go.

  But I’ll sure miss him.

  AND I miss Paquerette. Those are the worst times, when I can’t sleep and I lie in bed wondering how she is. Where she is. How badly I really did hurt her.

  Papa Thiély’s going to go visit her in a couple of weeks. Claudine told me. I’m going to ask him to take her a letter. I’m almost afraid of writing it. There’s so much you can’t say, in a letter. And so much you can.

  When I finally got a letter back from Mademoiselle Barot saying I could still work with the CIMADE, there was a letter from Paquerette in it. The letter she’d written about me. I don’t know if Mademoiselle Barot put it in the envelope on purpose. I don’t know, maybe she did; I pretty much put my heart and blood into the letter I wrote her. I wanted her to know that I knew what I’d done. But it was in there, anyway, and it’s under my mattress now:

  Dear Madeleine,

  Thank you for your letter of the twelfth. It’s good to know that you all are thinking of me. I pray for you all regularly, and for the work.

  To answer your question truthfully, I am not entirely well. I think you were wise to advise me to come home. I think it may be some time before I am recovered. But I am in good hands.

  As to your question about Magali, I’ve considered it carefully. In truth, it would be foolish for anyone to suppose that a person’s character is fixed at the age of sixteen or seventeen. I do not think I would consider working with an adult who had taken such actions as Magali’s. But I saw the effect her actions had on her, and I believe it to have been permanent. Only three days later, she took initiative in a prudent and courageous way that, by all accounts, saved a child’s life. She is as competent and experienced in the work as a person her age can be. If and when her parents feel she is ready to do such work again—and certainly when she reaches her majority—I feel that I can recommend her to the CIMADE. Should the occasion arise, I personally would work with her again.

  Please accept my best regards,

  Paquerette

  I STILL cry every time I read it. It’s Paquerette all over. I am not entirely well.

  Oh, Paquerette.

  Maybe I’ll see her again someday. Maybe the occasion will arise. I lie in bed in the dark and remember her, try to call up all the things she said to me during the last days she was here. I remember her gray and tired; I remember her with fire in her eyes; I remember her laughing. But so seldom. I hope she laughs, sometimes, at home in her valley. I hope she doesn’t lie awake, like me, and remember things she never wanted to know. Things that are poison.

  Everything true matters, she told me. Everything true.

  I’ve read and read that letter. I think I know it by heart. The good things and the bad.

  I’ll keep that letter until the day I die.

  I WENT out to the river yesterday, to that place where the oak trees are. I found the spot where I lay down in the dry grass last fall. So long ago. Before the winter came.

  The grass is green there now, and ankle deep. I lay down in it again. I was so tired it only took a minute before I went to sleep.

  When I woke I had a strange feeling. The wind was blowing in the grass, in my hair, in the young red oak leaves overhead. I had a strange feeling like I didn’t exist. No, not quite. Have you ever forgotten you exist? That’s what it was like.

  It was a lot like being free.

  I held up a hand like there was something above me I could touch, and I wanted to. Like I could touch the wind. Like I could touch God. It seemed like someone was there. I think I’d been hoping he would be.

  It was like everything inside me moving, rearranging itself. All at the same time.

  I used to think there were only two kinds of people in the world. Can you imagine? I used to think I had that figured out. Who can figure out life? Zvi died. Marek lived. Léon made it to Brazil. Do you know why? I don’t. Who can figure out life?

  I got one of the bravest people in the world arrested and tortured. I saved a kid’s life. Am I a good person or a bad person? Answer me that.

  Everything true matters.

  I felt an ache in my chest, because I couldn’t touch, and I wanted to. But—I don’t know how to say it. It was there even so. I had felt it before, and I knew what it felt like. It was true.

  I didn’t have to be a good person. I didn’t have to be a hero. My fingers closed on nothing at all.

  But I wasn’t alone.

  I TOOK communion yesterday morning for the first time since I was confirmed. I ate the bread and drank the wine. If Papa asked me what it meant I’m not sure I could answer him really. I’m not good at stuff you can’t see. What I know is, I wanted to. They say, “This is my body, broken for you.” And that makes sense to me, that’s real. That’s what someone like that does, steps in between you and the evil. With their body. Someone like Paquerette. If God’s someone like Paquerette, I want to eat that bread. That’s all I know, really.

  I do know one more thing. And that’s this: I see people giving their bodies for each other every day now. Grandpa does it in his fields, Mama does it in her kitch
en. We do it for the kids, over and over. Madeleine changing a stinking diaper, Rosa feeding Trina, coaxing her to eat. Nina in her little room where no one sees. Me and Claudine, sitting in the les Chênes living room, listening to the kids shouting over each other about whatever happened today, listening.

  Rosa and Madeleine, walking one more time through the gates of Rivesaltes.

  I used to think saving someone’s life was something you did one time, and then you’d done it. It was over. You could chalk one up for yourself. But a fat lot of good it did saving Marek if he gets arrested next month. Next year. And there are no guarantees. I can’t promise him safety any more than my own mother can protect me. I’m not God. It’s starting to seem like saving lives is more like mopping the floor. Cooking a meal. You do it, and then the next day you have to do it again. You do it together or you do it alone. No one notices, for all you know. It’s not a hero’s business. It’s really better if no one knows at all.

  I do what I can, that’s all. I do what I can for them. And there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. Nothing at all.

  Historical Note

  by Heather Munn

  IN LE Chambon-sur-Lignon, the real town Tanieux is based on, there was no Paquerette. Many young women like her, employed by different aid agencies, brought groups of children to Le Chambon at various times, but there was no single courier designated to go regularly between Le Chambon and the camps. In this novel, Paquerette represents the many heroic young women who rescued children.

  There was also no l’Espoir in Le Chambon. Such homes existed elsewhere in France, however. They were run by aid agencies, and took in babies along with their mothers when aid workers managed to get them released together.

  There were convalescent German soldiers billeted in Le Chambon, but none ever denounced anyone nore threatened to—even though some lived so close to children’s homes full of Jewish children that it seems impossible that none of them knew.

  The rest of the book’s background—the camps, the aid agencies, the children’s homes—is real.

  The names of the children’s homes and their personnel in the novel are fictional, but we did base the descriptions of life at les Chênes very closely on stories from the real children’s homes in Le Chambon. Like les Chênes, many of these were sponsored and run by aid agencies from France, Switzerland, or the United States. Most of the children who spent time there during the war left with very fond memories; the workers seem to have done an amazing job of creating an atmosphere where kids with terribly uncertain lives could find a sense of warmth, belonging, and joy.

  The Camp Joffre internment camp at Rivesaltes was and is a real place; you can still visit its ruins today. The same is true of the Gurs internment camp. These two were the largest of the many internment camps run by the Vichy government.

  These two camps were originally used to house refugees from the Spanish Civil War, before World War II began. After the fall of France the new Vichy government began to treat them less as refugee camps and more as prison camps, using them to detain people they considered undesirable: Gypsies, illegal immigrants, and especially foreign Jews—men, women, and children.

  These were internment camps; they were not death camps and no one was deliberately murdered there. But people died all the same. The internees were people whose lives the Vichy government did not value, and there were already supply shortages. So they slept in unheated barracks, often with no blankets but what they brought themselves, were fed pathetic rations, and got just enough water to drink—not to stay clean. Disease was rampant, and people weakened by malnutrition died easily, especially children and the elderly.

  Our descriptions of conditions at Rivesaltes are drawn closely from firsthand accounts, especially the journal of a young woman working there for Swiss Aid, Friedel Reiter.

  The rescuers we’ve described were real as well: young women—mostly in their twenties—who worked for aid agencies. Some lived and worked in the camps like Marylise; others, like Paquerette, ferried newly released children to their new homes. Many of the children went to children’s homes like the ones in Le Chambon; many others were placed as boarders with families who were paid to take them in—and who often did not even know they were Jewish.

  If it seems surprising that aid workers were allowed into these camps, and that children were released, it’s important to remember that this happened in 1941 and early 1942—the “softer” period of the war, which we hear about less often, especially in the United States. In France, the authorities were still trying to appear (and sometimes to be) humane; and in Germany, Hitler’s “Final Solution” was only just taking shape—the Nazis did not begin their mass murder in the gas chambers until mid-1942. German occupation (in Western Europe at least) was less harsh than it later became, and so was Vichy. Paquerette’s treatment at the hands of the police reflects the times. In 1943 or 1944 it could have been much, much worse.

  The internees in the camps were the first for whom things got much worse. In mid-1942 Hitler began to demand that France deport a specific quota of Jews to the East each month. In response, Vichy emptied the camps, sending thousands of Jewish internees to Auschwitz and the other death camps, most of them never to return. From Vichy’s point of view, they were a sacrifice; by filling the quotas with foreign Jews they hoped that French Jews (whose lives they valued more) would be spared. Their betrayal was useless; as the war went on and Hitler demanded more and more, Rivesaltes and the other camps became transit stations through which France’s Jews, as well, passed on their way to the death camps.

  In 1941, none of these young women knew that they were saving children from the Holocaust; they were simply saving them from malnutrition, filth, disease, and despair. As the times grew worse and the stakes grew higher, their work became more dangerous; they moved from the legal, if risky, work portrayed in this book to underground, plainly illegal activities, in which they were risking their lives. Underground networks were set up into which children could “disappear”—their identities changed without leaving a trail. Elaborate safety rules made aid workers anonymous from one other, to minimize the danger if one was arrested. For they were sometimes arrested, and sometimes tortured as well. Some, near the end of the war, were even killed.

  These young women devoted their lives, in secrecy and weariness and terrible danger, to their one overwhelming passion: to save as many children as they could, by any means necessary. They quietly did what they had to do; they were not in the business of being heroes. Perhaps that is why they are.

  Heather Munn was born in Northern Ireland of American parents and grew up in the south of France. She decided to be a writer at the age of five when her mother read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books aloud, but worried that she couldn’t write about her childhood since she didn’t remember it. When she was young, her favorite time of day was after supper when the family would gather and her father would read a chapter from a novel. Heather went to French school until her teens, and grew up hearing the story of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, only an hour’s drive away. She now lives in rural Illinois with her husband, Paul, where they offer free spiritual retreats to people coming out of homelessness and addiction. She enjoys wandering in the woods, gardening, writing, and splitting wood.

  Lydia Munn was homeschooled for five years because there was no school where her family served as missionaries in the savannahs of northern Brazil. There was no public library either, but Lydia read every book she could get her hands on. This led naturally to her choice of an English major at Wheaton College. Her original plan to teach high school English gradually transitioned into a lifelong love of teaching the Bible to both adults and young people as a missionary in France. She and her husband, Jim, have two children: their son, Robin, and their daughter, Heather.