by Jan Rehner
The next morning, Miron registered their names and their identity cards were stamped with the word Juif.
Sabine knew she wouldn’t be able to travel with such a stamp. She asked a number of discreet questions of her friends at OSE, and was directed to a shady character in an even shadier boarding house. Several days later, she had a new set of identity papers in the name of Jeanne Verdavoire.
That same night she placed them on the kitchen table in front of Miron.
“What’s this?”
Sabine didn’t speak. He would work out the answer himself quickly enough.
“Where did you get them? Never mind, I don’t want to know.”
“I had to have papers that would allow me to travel. The OSE has learned that Vichy is moving hundreds of Jews from Agde to Rivesaltes. I hope you understand.”
“I can’t say I’m happy about this, but I understand.” The flatness in his voice didn’t make his assurance sound convincing. “How much did you have to pay for this?”
“A hundred and fifty francs.”
“Did OSE pay? We don’t have that kind of money.”
Sabine tried, but failed to hold his gaze. A wave of guilt rippled through her.
“Sabine?”
“I’m sorry, Miron. But we both know I wasn’t ever going to wear that necklace your parents gave me. I should’ve asked you first.”
“No need. It was yours to do with as you pleased.”
The disappointment in his eyes belied his words.
“The pity is,” he continued, “the necklace was worth at least ten times that amount.”
Sabine hung her head. When finally she looked up at him, he simply shook his head, the movement barely perceptible. No more talking, then. The best thing she could do was to give him time to forgive her.
When she woke up the next morning, Miron was already outside doing chores. She waved to him from the yard, and she was relieved that he waved back. She wanted to talk to him, but the Red Cross truck was already screeching to a stop on the other side of the road. She thought it was a small miracle that Marius was able to keep it running at all.
She climbed in and said good morning.
“Not so good.” Marius mumbled.
He was a stout man of few words, with almost no hair on his head, but a finely trimmed handlebar moustache of which he was exceedingly proud. Except for that moustache, he reminded her of a boxer because of the bluntness of his nose and the heaviness of his brow.
“What’s wrong?”
“We’re going to Rivesaltes today.”
“So soon?”
He nodded. “Guards shipped several hundred two days ago. On cattle cars.”
Sabine gasped, but Marius talked over her shock.
“It’s about fifty kilometres, near Perpignan and the Pyrénées.”
“So we’re leaving the Hérault? Do we have authority?”
“We’re going, aren’t we?” He took the list of names from his shirt pocket and handed it to her without saying another word.
Sabine stared glumly out the window, barely noticing the landscape—the distinctive stripes of planted vines, glorious fields of sunflowers, and then the arid plains leading to the foothills of the mountains. The low clouds that obscured the higher peaks matched their dark mood.
When Marius parked the truck outside the gates, neither he nor Sabine moved.
Rivesaltes was Agde multiplied, as bleak and desolate a place as they could ever have imagined. Rivesaltes was overcrowding, exposure to the elements, inadequate food and medicine, stench, filth, disease, and squalor behind barbed wire in a vast space. Rivesaltes was fifteen hundred acres of wind and the sorrow of thousands. It hurt the very soul to enter it.
“My god,” Sabine whispered, and her voice wavered.
“No.” Marius barked. “No tears. Get in, get out, we save as many as we can.”
The guards here were different from those at Agde. Some of them smiled when Sabine held out her list in trembling hands. They enjoyed her fear. She turned away from them and approached the guards who had a vacancy to their expressions, as if all emotions had been scrubbed out of them. They barely looked at Sabine’s list and they didn’t count heads. That first day, she and Marius walked fourteen children through the gates of the camp, and smuggled a baby girl out by hiding her under a blanket.
Over the next few months, random deportations began from Rivesaltes to Drancy to camps in Poland, Austria, and Germany. There were whispers of starvation, of ghettos, of Jews shot in forests or worked to death in factories and salt mines. The fear and tension of those locked inside only worsened conditions. Listlessness and despair spread like another kind of infection.
Sabine’s heart broke a hundred times a day in that place and was only put together piece by piece when she saw Marius giving a child a ride on his shoulders, or heard Léa singing to a group of bedraggled youngsters, or when she was finally home again with Miron who put his arms around her shoulders and hugged her to him and listened to every word.
MAURICE GERENSTEIN, THIRTEEN YEARS OLD
I REMEMBER THE PARLOUR in my Zayde’s home. There was a long, polished table and tall wooden chairs with carved backs that looked like thrones. If my sister Liliane and I were good, he gave us sweets from a crystal candy dish.
Then one day, without warning, my Zayde fell ill. He was simply too weak to rise from his bed. My mother said his skin was so hot she was afraid the bed would start to smoke. When he died, my mother covered all the mirrors and hung black cloth over the windows. But it was a long time before she told me how he died.
My mother had a purple silk dress and a black cape with a fur collar and, for nights at the opera, gloves that reached to her elbow and closed with two pearl buttons. She had a pale blue embroidered shawl that smelled like her perfume.
When she had finally lost all of that, she pulled me aside and told me that Zayde had been attacked in the street by a gang of Nazis. They gave him a brush and told him to scrub the pavement. After several hours on his hands and knees under a hot sun, he’d asked for a drink of water and they made him drink the dirty soapy water from the pail, filled with grit and bird shit and shards of glass from smashed windows. Then they beat him and kicked him and left him for dead. He’d managed to crawl home, but never again got up from his bed.
“We are entirely alone and can trust no one now. This won’t be an easy lesson to learn,” mother warned me, “but probably Rivesaltes will pound it into your head.”
When she was deported, she kissed me and told me to take care of Liliane.
Here, in Rivesaltes, Liliane wraps herself in mother’s pale blue shawl every night, but it is ragged now, no longer beautiful, and we can no longer smell mother’s perfume.
JACQUES, RICHARD, AND JEAN-CLAUDE BENGUIGUI, TWELVE, SEVEN, AND FIVE YEARS OLD
THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF MY FAMILY used to sit on the piano in our drawing room. I didn’t like practising, so while I plunked away at the keys I was all the time staring at my favourite picture.
There is my father in a pinstriped suit too hot for the weather, sitting at a café table with a stylish woman, my mother, in a white dress and a straw summer hat. A carafe of wine stands on the table, together with the remains of a late afternoon meal. Sunlight streams down upon them through the branches of trees in full leaf, and the warmth of the season and the affection between my parents makes the image glow.
That photo was taken when my parents were engaged and before any of us children came along. My mother used to say: That’s a portrait of Marseilles at peace.
She was born in Algeria, and always smelled of spices and tangerines. She swore she fell in love with my father at first sight, but all it got her was a perfect afternoon in Marseilles and four children. She was teasing, I think.
In the other photos, my brothers and I appear only gradually. I came fir
st, just a baby with fat cheeks in what looks embarrassingly like a dress, sitting on my mother’s lap. When I appear again I’m a head taller than my younger brother, Richard, whose head is always full of mischief, and Jean-Claude occupies the baby’s position on my mother’s lap. Last of all came Yvette, the only girl, as light and fragile as a baby bird, so little she still wears a lace bonnet.
I often thought about those photographs when my brothers and I were at Rivesaltes and I thought of them in words borrowed from my mother: Those were portraits of a family at peace. I remember them with ease, like someone who could play a piano without looking at the keyboard, picking out a tune last heard long ago.
MINA HALAUNBRENNER, EIGHT YEARS OLD
I AM WALKING WITH PAPA to the old Jewish cemetery. We go to be paying respects to my grandmother. He is telling me lots of stories about her. She baked best apple strudel in Austria. She was milking goats and she skis down mountains. But I’m little when she dies. I only remember her warm shawl. Is smelling like peppermint.
My mother was taking me to the synagogue for praying. A big wooden cabinet is home of Torah, the scrolls of our law, she told me. “What are scrolls, Mama?
“You’ll see.”
They are big sheets of paper on a wooden roll, like rolling pin for baking strudel. There are words on the paper and Mama says they’re holy. She is liking to say that at night when the candles lit up the ceiling, it glows like heaven.
The day after the Nazis was burning the synagogue to the ground we are leaving for France. Mama says the resting place of Torah is nesting place for birds now.
Mama says if something bad happens or if some men are taking her away, I am not to be trying to follow her. That would make it more bad for both of us. Instead, I am to be staying close to my sister, Claudine. We can wait for her, but if she isn’t coming we tell adult with kindest face we are orphans. Never to tell we are Jewish.
None of that happened. We are all sent together to Rivesaltes. The wind is never stopping here. Blows all the time and is cold. I see my papa sometimes behind fence. He is living in long shed. He shouts come close and I hear teeth chattering. His or mine?
At night, Mama, Claudine, and me sleep in same bed for keeping warm. Mama gives us her blanket but in few days she is coughing all the time. Sometimes, Claudine pees in bed. She hates latrine. It makes her gagging, but soon straw bed smells bad too.
I was taught never ask God for things. Only be grateful for blessings. But I am praying to leave this place. I am praying my fate passes over me like angel of death at Passover.
LÉON REIFMAN, COUNSELLOR AT PALAVAS-LES-FLOTS
I REMEMBER WHEN SABINE AND MARIUS started bringing the kids from Rivesaltes to Palavas. I had been a medical student, but when my studies couldn’t continue I volunteered to help the OSE and had been at Palavas with Léa Feldblum for about four months. All I could think was the poor kids. Their faces, huge eyes, and lips tinted blue from cold and hunger, could tear a person in two. They had nothing, only the clothes they stood in which were so filthy we didn’t even try to wash them, just tossed them into the trash. One little girl, her name was Claudine, and she was four or five, a small, solemn creature with her hair in pigtails, had what might once have been a stuffed rabbit. She cried when we tried to take it away so Léa promised her she would try to “give it a bath” while the children were sleeping, but when she put it in the sink, a flotilla of bugs came streaming out of it, skittering over the surface of the water.
We talked in hushed tones above their heads, but these kids were already adept at reading the meaning of adults’ whispers, tuts of the tongue, knit brows, sidelong glances, and hands over the mouth. We couldn’t protect them from what they’d already experienced. When we sat them down for their first meal—small portions so they wouldn’t get sick—we noticed more than one child slipped a piece of bread into their pockets. You couldn’t blame them. For so long, they’d never known where their next meal was coming from.
Their first night at Palavas was always the most difficult. Some of the children had forgotten how to sleep in real beds, some were afraid of the dark, some were afraid to close their eyes in case, when they opened them again, they’d be back in Rivesaltes. Léa was so wonderful with them, so loving and comforting. I think she knew every lullaby ever written, in three or four different languages.
The resiliency of those children amazed me. Before too long, they’d be playing games, or putting their toes in the Mediterranean with squeals of delight, but those who had a brother or sister with them were always careful to keep each other in sight. Those who still had parents would ask to write letters to them.
Inspired by their bravery, I decided to approach the archbishop of Chambéry to explore the possibility of scattering some of the children among Christian institutions where they might be hidden from Vichy police. I met with a young priest who was very welcoming and I put my case forward as eloquently as I could. The priest responded with compassion and enthusiasm. He was sure that the Monsignor would agree to my request.
Just then, a large black car pulled into the courtyard: the Monsignor Costa de Beauregard himself had arrived. I repeated my request, careful to explain in detail the dangers faced by innocent children. I will never forget his response, or the cool superiority of its tone.
“But sir, how could you possibly expect us to mix Catholic children with Jewish children in our institutions?”
I begged him to consider the urgency of the times, and he grudgingly agreed to think over the matter and write me in a few days.
But I already knew his answer from the look of shame on the young priest’s face. The look we traded was full of pity, his for the children and mine for him.
“That’s it?” Léa said when I told her what had happened. “A Monsignor is going to turn his back on little children with no explanation?”
“I’m sure he sees no need to explain to us,” was my response. “Perhaps one day, he’ll be asked to explain himself to his god.”
GILLES SADOWSKI, EIGHT YEARS OLD
I REMEMBER SITTING at the top of the stairs at night listening to the adults talking below me. My parents and my grandparents. I would scoot my bottom into the corner behind the stair rail and no one could see me. I liked the sound of their voices and laughter rising up. Like music.
I never thought I was being nosy. It was mostly boring stuff:
“That butcher is a cheat.”
“The Rabbi’s wife’s having another baby.”
“Gilles needs a new pair of shoes.”
Stuff like that.
But then the voices changed. They were soft, like whispers, only urgent. I strained to hear. I could make out only words and sighs and bits of sentences. No one seemed to laugh any more.
“…Shouldn’t stay.”
“But where…?”
“I heard they…”
“Surely not … just rumours.”
“…And children, too.”
I didn’t know all that was going on between my parents, but I kept an eye on them. They frowned a lot and my mother’s eyes were often red and puffy.
You’d have to be pretty stupid not to know something bad was happening. My father wanted us all to leave Paris, but my mother just kept saying, Where? Where can we go?
One night my father came into my room and woke me. He looked worried, but he tried to sound cheerful and said we were going on a trip to the South.
“Look,” he said, “I’ve packed you a little suitcase.”
But I knew this was all wrong. Nobody leaves on a trip in the middle of the night. “Where’s Mama?” I asked.
He just shook his head. “Mama won’t come, but you must come. You must be brave.” I didn’t want to be brave and I didn’t want to go, but he was my father and I loved him as much as I loved Mama. So I carried that cardboard suitcase for two days and three nights until we ca
me to a place by the sea called Palavas-les-Flots and met a tall man with sandy hair.
“My name is Léon,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”
My father crouched down and hugged me. “I’m going back to Paris. There was a raid and many Jews were taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver. I’m going to try to find your Mama. Do as Léon says, and God willing, I’ll be back for you.”
Many weeks passed, but Papa never came. I kept my suitcase packed, just in case.
MONTPELLIER, 1943
THE LAST TWO MONTHS of 1942 were as bleak as any Sabine could remember. Clouds and lightning raced across the sky from the sea almost every day. The sky was grey, and the ground was grey with the uniforms of the German soldiers who had swept south to occupy all of France, but for eight départements to the east of the Rhône. The newspapers printed pictures of troops crossing the now defunct Demarcation Line. Miron’s parents were deported from Paris and Sabine had heard nothing from her family in months. The badlands of Rivesaltes were black with mud.
To add to the general gloominess, Sabine sensed that a remoteness had crept between her and Miron over the past few months. They had spent too much time apart. Even though she felt as if the events of her day were not real until she’d told him about them, he was still only an audience, not a participant in her daily life. She spent more time with Marius in his truck than she did with her own husband. Miron had withdrawn when he heard the news of his parents, not turned to her as he usually did for comfort. There were long lulls in their conversation and disagreements that flared into spurts of anger. Sabine felt like she’d failed him in some fundamental way, that she had become a different person without telling him.
At Landas, she and Miron had done so much together, scraped a farm from the dirt and planned a future. Perhaps the loneliness she often felt now was just the loss of that future and not the diminishment of love. That morning, despite the rain, Miron had left her to eat breakfast alone while he went outside to mend a fence. She waited at the window, watching him, sure that if he would only look back at her, her thoughts would be as transparent as the glass she stood behind, and they might begin together a different kind of mending. But Miron did not look up, and Sabine could not wait for him.