Children of the Stars

by Mario Escobar

  “Okay, I get it. If it’s the best solution after all, we’ll take you to the camp at Drancy, wherever that is, but you could also just stay with our aunt.”

  “What makes you think she isn’t locked up somewhere too?” Joseph asked.

  “My aunt wasn’t registered as a Jew. I already told you, they captured us because the doorwoman started hollering.”

  “But you’re wearing the yellow star,” Joseph objected.

  “Yes, to be able to go to school and in case they stop us on the street, but we’re registered at a different address. That’s why I think our aunt is probably still free,” Jacob explained.

  The three boys sat quietly. Then they heard Moses’s stomach growl, and all burst out laughing.

  “What we really need is more food,” Jacob joked, trying to change the subject.

  They crept up from the basement as carefully as they had entered and closed the door silently. Night had fallen in the velodrome. They picked their way around the tents. At this hour they saw just a couple police agents smoking off to one side of the stadium, and the boys took advantage of the moment to creep into one of the tents. There they found stacks and stacks of half-opened boxes of food: canned goods, loaves of bread, crates of fruit.

  Moses was incensed. “If there’s so much food here, why are they making everybody go hungry?”

  “I bet they don’t know how long we’ll be here, so first they want people to eat up whatever they brought with them,” Joseph said.

  “Well, we didn’t bring anything. So we’d better stock up,” Jacob said. The boys filled their pockets with food, then crept out of the tent and back to their hideout.

  Jacob pulled out the knife he used for whittling and making figurines. He opened a can of green beans, and they ate with their fingers. The momentary fun kept them giggling.

  They slept after their makeshift supper, but Jacob woke after a few hours and decided to explore the basement tunnels. The dim lighting spooked him, but he needed to know if the bowels of the velodrome held a way out. The light bulbs reached only so far down the long hallways of various pipes and tubing. Eventually the darkness made further exploration impossible. He retraced his steps back to the entryway and carefully opened a door that led to a small room. He turned on the light. Hanging on the wall and inside a carpenter’s desk he found several tools and an oil lamp. He searched the little drawers of the desk until they revealed a half-full box of matches. Nervously, he struck the match and watched the flame slowly rise from the center of the lamp. The intensity of light from the short wick surprised him. It reminded him of hope: almost insignificant, but enough to guide a person’s way.

  Jacob left the closet silently, but before he reached the tunnels, he heard his brother’s voice. “Where are you going?” Moses asked, starting to panic. Separation from the one person he had left was the worst fate the boy could imagine.

  Jacob motioned for Moses to join him. He could still remember when Moses was born, all pink skin and chubby cheeks. But he had cried all the time. When he learned to walk, Moses followed Jacob everywhere and copied his every move. There in the basement, Moses was Jacob’s shadow.

  Jacob found it difficult and even awkward to be “an example,” as his mother had always called him, but he also felt proud. He knew he was no one worth imitating or admiring, but for Moses he was a veritable hero.

  The two brothers walked timidly down the gallery. Any little noise startled them. Two or three times they surprised rats that dashed off or cockroaches that fled down the pipes. Typically, the boys were not afraid of such creatures. In their aunt’s apartment building, they had made a game of stomping on bugs in dark corners of the courtyard at night and hunting rats with their slingshot. But being surrounded by them in the dark was another matter altogether.

  Minutes later, Moses jerked with a panicked question. “Do you know how to get back? We’ve taken so many turns I don’t know where we are.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve been keeping track of the turns. We’re closer than you think,” Jacob reassured him, though he had his own doubts.

  They kept walking, not knowing exactly what they were looking for. Half an hour later, they were back at the entrance to the basement. Joseph was sitting up, hands covering his sobbing face.

  “What’s wrong, Joseph?” Jacob asked.

  The boy lifted his head just above his hands. The redness of his eyes and the expression of utter sadness threatened to swallow them all in grief. “I thought you’d left me. I was afraid . . . alone again.”

  Jacob knelt down and reached for Joseph. Through the hug, he could feel his friend’s body, both cold and sweaty, and hear the sobs right next to his ear. Something like tenderness flooded him. He had always received care from others. His parents were supposed to take care of him, encourage him, embrace him; but now he was starting to see what it meant to care for others, to be the one who offered comfort.

  In the months since their parents had left, Jacob had taken care of his brother but had not known how to express what he felt. Perhaps he was too busy trying to hide his feelings, not wanting to break down in front of Moses. He had to be the strong one. He had presumed his brother needed security more than affection.

  “We’re never going to leave you. I promise. We’re alone too. But now we have each other. Nothing’s going to stop us. I’m not afraid of those Boche or of the gendarmes. We’ll see our families again. I swear we will.”

  Moses joined the hug and the boys fell asleep again, dreaming of their previous life, the days of drifting off curled up next to their parents as life passed by in its merry little stream.

  Chapter 4

  Paris

  July 17, 1942

  The sound of footfalls overhead woke them. Jacob’s neck was stiff with the strain of having been sleeping at an odd angle for hours. Moses had to go to the bathroom badly, and Joseph was ravenous.

  “Go back there to pee. It’s cleaner than going in those rancid bathrooms upstairs,” his older brother told him.

  Moses moved to where the light turned into the darkness and sighed with relief as his bladder emptied.

  The three boys crept back upstairs to the stadium and were surprised to find that the crowd from the day before had grown. The velodrome was a beehive being shaken by the beekeeper. The stands crawled with people, and the echo of voices was a resounding buzz.

  A young man in a white uniform approached the boys and stuck out his arm to stop them. “Where are you going? Are you alone?”

  The three boys looked up. A young, dark-skinned man with shiny, gelled hair and a carefully trimmed mustache frowned down at them. “Yes, sir,” they answered.

  “Call me Dr. Michelle. Aren’t your parents with you?” he asked again.

  “No, Dr. Michelle.”

  “Unbelievable. These people are animals. What a disgrace. Where have human rights, basic human decency gone? That senile, fanatical marshal is the worst thing that could have happened to France.”

  The boys were dumbfounded. No one talked like that about Marshal Pétain, the country’s savior and chief of state in unoccupied France.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be fine,” Joseph said, drawing away from the man.

  “There’s a section for lost children. I’ll take you there.” The doctor took Moses’s hand.

  “It’s okay. We can find it on our own,” Jacob answered, his mind calculating how to escape as soon as they were out of the man’s sight. No one had documented their arrival yet, and they might still have a chance of slipping away unnoticed.

  Just then, the French police officer who had taken them to the government official’s table the day before passed by.

  “Gendarme,” called Dr. Michelle, “take these boys to the section for lost children.”

  The officer recognized the boys, and Jacob saw the fury in his eyes. The man smiled, his enormous double chin stretching up to reveal the golden buttons of his combat jacket underneath. “Of course, Doctor. I’ll leave them in good ha
nds.”

  The gendarme grabbed the two older boys by the collars of their shirts, and Moses followed, terrified.

  “There’s no call to escort them like that. They aren’t criminals,” the doctor said, frowning again.

  “Well, we don’t want them getting lost in the crowd now, do we?” the gendarme retorted.

  Jacob thought about calling out to the doctor but feared it would be even worse if the man knew the boys had not even been registered.

  The officer dragged them up the main stairway to the first level of stands but, before heading for the section for lost children, shoved them into the locker rooms where only police were allowed. “Now you can all pay me back at the same time,” he snarled.

  The boys were petrified. Jacob knew they had to do something to get away from the man. No one would care what happened to three abandoned children. The people in the stadium were concerned with their own problems already.

  “We’re really sorry for what happened yesterday. We were really scared. Really, we’re sorry,” Moses stammered.

  The gendarme locked the door and loosened his grip on the boys, who fled to the opposite corner of the room. They instinctively bunched up together through some distant hope of safety in numbers. The officer drew out his nightstick and a switchblade. “We happen to have an overabundance of Jewish refuse at the moment. No one will notice if a couple brats go missing.” He smiled as he spoke.

  “Sir, do whatever you want to me, but the others are innocent,” Jacob pleaded, taking a step forward.

  “You think I’m in the mood to bargain? When you three leave here it’ll be for the hospital or for the cemetery for Jewish pigs.”

  Jacob remembered his own knife and checked his pants pocket. He took it out and waved it at the policeman, who guffawed. “What do you think you’re going to do with that little toothpick? You don’t think I’ve taken down tougher guys than you?”

  “Yeah, you’re real brave, attacking a few helpless children,” Jacob said. On the ground he spotted a police jacket, which he snatched up and wrapped around his left hand for protection.

  “Pests must be eliminated,” the gendarme replied, taking a step forward.

  The nightstick came down hard but only brushed Jacob’s hand. Then the boy managed to wedge his knife into the policeman’s sleeve. The gendarme roared and lunged, but Jacob ducked and scampered to the door. He tried to force it open, but it would not yield.

  The officer reached for Moses and grabbed him with his knife-wielding hand. Moses whimpered in terror as more tears fell.

  “You’d better give up, buddy, if you don’t want your little prig brother to have a bad time,” the policeman called to Jacob, breathing hard.

  “Let my brother go, you pig!” Jacob screamed in fury.

  Moses seized the moment to bite the policeman’s hand as hard as he could, and the gendarme pulled his hand back with a howl. Joseph jumped on the man’s back, but the gendarme whirled around like a madman with the child clinging to his neck. Moses kicked him hard in the groin, bringing him to his knees with another howl. Jacob sent his knee firmly into the man’s face, and the other boys pummeled him with all their strength.

  Before long the policeman had collapsed on the floor. Jacob searched him for the key to the door, opened it, and the boys flew out of the room. They did not stop running until they were as far as possible from the gendarme. They climbed to the top tier of stands and mixed in with a group of children playing games led by a few women trying to make their confinement a little less unbearable.

  “What are we going to do?” Joseph whispered to his friends.

  “We’ve got to be more careful, stay out of sight, figure something out at night. We’ve just . . . We’ve got to get out of here,” Jacob said.

  Moses was still white as a sheet. “I’m scared,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Jacob consoled him. “I won’t let them do anything to you.” Then he quirked an eyebrow. “Hey, did you see his face when you kicked him in the crotch? You’re a real hero!”

  The three boys grinned. At least they had escaped uninjured. When they had fully calmed down, they snuck back to their hideout in the basement of the velodrome.

  Once night had fallen and the buzz of voices had quieted, they reemerged from their hiding place. They hoped the gendarme would not be out at those hours of the night, much less after the beating the man had endured. But they needed to stock up on food for their escape before the police searched the entire stadium to find the boys who had beaten an officer.

  Jacob crept to the food tent, taking care that he was not being watched, and slipped in as the other two boys stood guard. On the left, Joseph watched the main entrance and the stands. Any sign of alarm would complicate things. Moses kept his eyes on the lower entryway and the guards who made their rounds.

  All around they heard the background noise of the whining, crying, and coughing of thousands of prisoners crammed together inside the stadium. The main stadium lights were off, but the emergency lights and some from the main track remained lit.

  It left Joseph in a stupor to see the masses of people spent by hunger, heat, and fear. He wondered if they could at least find refuge for a few hours in dreams, clinging like shipwreck victims to the vanishing remains of life. He imagined his parents and siblings in a place like the velodrome, then tried to get the picture out of his mind.

  Moses heard a wail and saw a dirty, naked little girl crying and moving all around her mother. Her eyes were swollen and tears made a mess of her face, the part not covered by matted blond hair. The mother looked to be asleep, but when the child knelt and shook her, Moses understood the woman was dead. All around them slept an indifferent crowd. The dehumanizing objectives of the cruel French police and the Germans for the terrified, humiliated masses were being met.

  A chill ran up Moses’s entire body. Then he felt a hand dig into his shoulder. He did not want to look around, but the dark uniform left no room for doubt. “I knew the rats would come out sooner or later,” a voice growled. Fat, sweaty fingers grasped Moses’s clothes, and the boy felt something slice through his thin shirt. He screamed, and two more policemen approached. Joseph turned at the noise and saw his friend’s face, his eyes bulging in terror. There was nothing Joseph could do. He fled to the stands to hide in the shadows.

  Jacob’s heart skipped several beats when he heard his brother’s scream. He hesitated. If he ran to help him, he would surely be caught—but he could not leave Moses alone. He peered through a hole in the tent’s fabric and watched policemen running toward the scene. To his horror, the gendarme they had encountered was dragging his brother away. He crouched behind the boxes of food a few moments before slipping out of the tent. Everything was still, no gendarmes in sight. Jacob’s chest closed in on him. He recalled his promise to his parents to never leave Moses and to keep him safe. Jacob crumpled to the floor and started to weep.

  Footsteps approached, and a figure knelt beside him, waiting for Jacob to lift his head. “What’s going on?”

  It was the voice of the doctor from earlier in the day. His brow was furrowed, and his glasses seemed attached to his long, curved nose.

  Jacob spluttered between sobs. “They . . . took . . . him . . .”

  “Who?”

  “My brother.” He buried his head again.

  “The policemen gather up all the abandoned children. We can’t have you wandering around out of control. This is a dangerous place.” Michelle’s tone was so calming that Jacob’s breathing began to normalize.

  “That man, the gendarme, he brought us to the velodrome. We escaped, and he’s been looking for us. This morning he tried to kill us, but we managed to get away. Now I don’t know what he’ll do to my brother.”

  “The gendarmes are just pawns. The government sent them to do the dirty work, but a lot of them detest what they’ve been forced to do.” The doctor touched the boy’s chin to raise it.

  “You’re only saying that because you’re not a
Jew. They hate us. The French hate us.”

  The doctor pulled back the flap of his white jacket and revealed a yellow Star of David. The child dissolved into tears again and threw himself onto the man. Michelle fought off the knot in his own throat. He was a French Jew but had volunteered his services in the velodrome to aid the unfortunate prisoners.

  “My family has been in this country since the sixteenth century,” he explained, supporting Jacob in his arms. “I’m more French than most of the people who spit at me as I walk down the street. They kicked us out of Spain centuries ago, as though we were the plague, but France welcomed us. It wasn’t easy at first, but my family settled in Paris and ran drugstores and pharmacies, up until my grandfather, who became a doctor. We’ve fought and died for the Republic. We believe in her eternal values, and we know this dark hour will pass. Hard times show what people are really made of. This trial won’t destroy us. It’ll make us a better, stronger country. I may never get to see it, nor any of these people”—he gestured to the stands—“but France will shake off this barbaric, evil yoke and begin again.”

  Tears streamed down the doctor’s face, deepening his thin wrinkles and making him look older in Jacob’s eyes. Two strangers had achieved a rare moment of connection, and it demanded silence.

  Michelle took a deep breath and made to stand, recovering the energy that drove him to serve in that wasteland. “I’ll help you find your brother,” he said.

  Joseph appeared beside them all of a sudden, a worried, hesitant look on his face. At first he thought the doctor had captured Jacob and was preparing to hand him over to the police, but the tears on the man’s face gave him the confidence to approach.