by Jan Rehner
Sabine shivered in her thin coat and walked slowly through the narrow and hilly streets of Belley, looking for the mairie and the office of the subpréfet, Monsieur Wiltzer. It was March, but spring would come late in a mountain village. She could hear the rush of streams filled to the rim of their banks with melting mountain snow. The trees were still bare, black limbs etched across a fresh blue sky. The people she passed still wore winter coats and scarves, but she noticed they were unhurried, stopping to chat with neighbours, nodding their heads at strangers, something she hadn’t seen in Montpellier for a long time. If there were Italian soldiers about, she didn’t see them and no one asked to see her papers.
The mairie was at 11 Boulevard de Verdun, a pale yellow block of a building set among a series of white and grey façades with reddish-brown roofs. Sabine had telephoned and arranged an appointment once she and Léa had settled the children in Chambéry. She took a deep breath and entered the building, was directed to a hallway on the first floor, and knocked at a door left slightly ajar.
“Entrez!” a voice called out.
The first thing Sabine saw was the omnipresent portrait of Pétain whose influence extended even to this remote village and her spirits wilted a little. Then she turned and met the mischievous smile of a very pretty woman in her late twenties, with a sweep of blonde hair and wide-set green eyes.
“The portrait is de rigueur. Looks like a sour puss, I think. I’m Mademoiselle Cojean, Monsieur Wiltzer’s assistant. You must be Madame Zlatin?” She had a slightly hoarse voice, laughter lurking in its undertones as if she couldn’t wait to release it.
Sabine nodded.
“He’s waiting for you. Go right in.”
Monsieur Wiltzer rose from behind his desk and walked forward to shake hands. He was tall, in uniform, very official looking, but his handshake was warm. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, with a broad face and a rounded chin, dark eyes and hair, and a wide mouth. Not an especially handsome face, but a strong and appealing one. He seemed to be studying her as much as she was studying him.
“Please, sit,” he invited, pulling out a chair. “Marie-Antoinette will bring us coffee. It tastes terrible but will be very hot on this chilly day. You’ve had a pleasant journey?”
“An uneventful journey is always pleasant these days. Thank you for agreeing to see me.” Sabine could not help but stare at the unsettling Vichy uniform. “Monsieur Fridrici advised me to come. He said you might help.” She paused, not sure how to go on, or how much to tell.
“Let me be very clear Madame Zlatin. I am in the employ of the Vichy regime, but I am a Frenchman first. My conscience is clear. How many children are there?”
“I have forty with me, and there are others, perhaps, in Chambéry.”
The door opened and Mademoiselle Cojean entered with a tray. “Forty children,” she echoed. “Are they all orphans?”
“Most of them. Some have been entrusted to OSE by their parents in the hope that they’ll be saved from deportation. Now that the Germans have moved south we decided the Italian zone might be safer. Are the Vichy police active here?”
“Very,” Monsieur Wiltzer replied. “Mostly running down false leads given to them by the Italians. Foiling Vichy is about the most fun the Italian soldiers have.”
“But forty children,” Mademoiselle Cojean spoke as if shocked by the number and Sabine didn’t have the heart to tell her about the hundreds left behind.
“Well, then. We’ll need a very large house. Drink up your coffee and please bring the car around, Marie-Antoinette. There are a couple of places I’d like Madame Zlatin to see.”
“Now?” Sabine asked, surprised and excited at the same time.
“Immediately,” Monsieur Wiltzer said, reaching for his official Vichy hat.
PAUL NIEDERMANN, FIFTEEN YEARS OLD
MIRON ZLATIN TAUGHT THÉO REIS and me the fine art of moving without being noticed: fluid, unhurried, nothing jerky or out of pace with the crowd, nothing to catch the eye. He had a friend, an old farmer with a noisy pig, who kept the guards distracted all the way from Montpellier to Lyon on the local train that stopped at almost every crossroad. Théo joked that we could have walked to Lyon faster, but taking the market train meant that livestock—mostly chickens, roosters, and geese—were permitted. We were dressed as farmers, too, in work pants and rubber boots, berets pulled low across our foreheads. I was glad that pig stank to high heaven because as long as we stayed behind it, no one was interested in coming any closer.
The station in Lyon was noisy, grimy, and crowded. Trains seethed at the platforms, venting steam and the stink of carbon and sulphur into the air.
Just as Miron had planned, that pig got loose. It started charging across the platform, people leaping out of its way, soldiers bellowing at it, and in all the commotion, we slipped onto the train headed for Chambéry and sat in the end car as if we belonged there. Passengers crowded at the windows to cheer for the pig until it was finally corralled.
“Will they shoot it?” Théo wondered.
“No,” Miron assured him. “Pigs are too valuable.”
Doors banged and whistles blew. Slowly, like the hands of a clock moving, the train began to slide away.
No one spoke, not even Théo who liked to chatter. We knew without being told that we were entering the most dangerous part of the journey and we wouldn’t be safe until we reached the Italian zone. We passed through an alley of factories and warehouses and then a string of houses with peeling paint and broken windows. The scruffiest part of any town always seems to cluster around the tracks, but once in a while we saw a curtain or a burst of gardenias in a window box. Soon enough we reached open fields and patches of forest.
A half-hour or so somewhere east of Lyon, Miron opened his bag and passed out bread and cheese and one boiled egg to each of us. We were eating, the tension just easing from our shoulders, when the train came to a grinding halt at an unnamed station. The food I was chewing turned to sawdust in my mouth and I could barely swallow.
“Soldiers. Germans,” Théo cried, looking out the window. “What should we do?”
Miron was up in an instant. “Follow my lead. Remember, don’t run.”
“Everyone out!” an officer shouted. “Line up! Get in line!”
People pushed and shoved along the corridor, some with bags, some without.
Queues formed, awkward shifting lines, and Miron made sure we were at the back.
Slowly, soldiers began moving down the line, snapping their fingers and calling for papers. My eyes were fastened on their boots. I couldn’t seem to look anywhere else. The only things to see were those boots.
Miron touched my shoulder, and I forced myself to look at him and follow his gaze. He was watching a man ahead of us in the line. There was something unsteady about him that I couldn’t put my finger on. I thought he was ill or maybe even drunk, but then, in a flash, I recognized the danger. Hunted. He was being hunted.
The officers drew closer to him, their words drowned out by the thunder of an approaching train on a parallel track.
As if in obedience to some unseen signal, the man suddenly lunged away from the line, raced diagonally across the platform and launched his body into the face of the oncoming locomotive. There was a silent flurry of limbs, a splash of red, and he was gone.
Time seemed to stop. All motion on the platform stilled.
Except for us.
We edged backwards to the side of the station house, slipped around to the back, and melted into the forest of pine trees. We lay on our stomachs and watched the locomotive continue to thunder by, a long line of rattling flat cars.
“Their loads are headed for the East,” Miron whispered.
Théo and I knew what that meant—bound for the East and other, less sudden, encounters with death.
We didn’t move. We listened to our own ragged breathing and
the soldiers’ voices that came and went in echoes until the night mercifully fell, turning the platform, the station and the forest pitch black.
IZIEU, MARCH 1943
SABINE COULD SEE THAT Monsieur Wiltzer was a good driver, obviously practiced on the twisting, mostly uphill roads in and around Belley. He was quiet, but smiled occasionally as Marie-Antoinette, leaning forward from the back seat of the car, pointed out the few highlights of the town: the fountain in the main square, the cathedral where Monsieur Wiltzer had married the prettiest girl in town, the house where the famous gastronome, Jean Brillat-Savarin, had once lived, and the fromagerie that sold the best cheese in the district. Sabine nodded politely in the appropriate pauses, but scarcely heard a word. She couldn’t wait to see the kind of place Monsieur Wiltzer might find for the children.
On the outskirts of town, he stopped the car in front of a large but dismal building, a dull arrangement of grey rocks and arched windows, so darkened by soot as to be almost black.
“This used to be an abbey house,” he said. “What do you think?”
Gazing up at it, Sabine felt like a prisoner might while being led toward a cold glowering tower. Despite the building’s size, it had a cramped, confined feeling and no grounds that she could see. She had hoped for a bit of space where the children might play. She bit her lip, stalling for time to find the right words and not seem ungrateful.
“Ugh. It would be like living in a quarry,” Marie-Antoinette pronounced. “Whatever are you thinking, Pierre?”
Monsieur Wiltzer laughed. “I assume you agree with this condemnation, Madame Zlatin?”
“I’m afraid I do. Please, call me Sabine.”
“And I am Pierre-Marcel, though my secretary accords me only half of that name while insisting on both Marie and Antoinette.”
“Next house, please.” Marie-Antoinette urged. “And this time I hope you have a house in mind and not a mausoleum.”
They drove deep into the countryside, past lakes and waterfalls, into valleys tucked between steep rock cliffs and dense forest. As the road began to twist uphill toward the sky, outside the hamlet of Izieu, Sabine could feel her spirits lift with it.
Pierre-Marcel stopped the car at the end of a green tunnel of trees, on a small grassy hillock. “The road continues down and around to the side of the house, but I think this is the best vantage point. Ladies, please.”
Sabine stood up and gazed across a wide expanse of green lawn that led to an old stucco mansion with a stone foundation, with moss growing up along the stones, and pale blue shutters at the tall windows. The white façade shimmered in the sun. She saw the long terrace and the fountain in the courtyard, the large barn and the granary. As she turned in a slow circle, the foothills of the Jura mountains folded in ribbons all around her. The sweep of the river was silver, the surface catching the light and fracturing it in a dozen different directions, bouncing it off the steep escarpments that scraped the sky. The air was crisp and clean. She could even smell the ice-cold river.
Sabine stood still and marvelled at the house of Izieu. Isolated. Peaceful. Protected. The sensation of space, of all things being possible, set her heart singing. This was the place.
“It was used during the summers as a kind of camp by a Catholic boarding school,” Pierre-Marcel was saying. “I’m afraid there’s no heating or running water.”
“There is the river and the fountain. With a couple of stoves and some blankets we can always manage to stay warm.” Sabine couldn’t stop smiling.
“Izieu is very tiny, only six hundred people. You’d have to travel about fifteen kilometres to Belley for supplies, on twisting roads as you saw. Other than that there’s only a winding path through the forest leading to the hamlet of Lélinaz. Across the river is the village of Brégnier-Cordon. You’d be pretty isolated,” Pierre-Marcel warned.
“Oh, I know. Isn’t it wonderful?” Sabine replied.
“Let’s look inside,” Marie-Antoinette suggested.
As they walked across the sloping lawn, the secretary slipped her arm through Sabine’s and leaned toward her. “It’s perfect,” she whispered. “I knew Pierre wouldn’t let you down. Don’t let the uniform fool you. He’s never taken the oath of allegiance to Vichy. He faked the flu for the formal ceremony, and when they sent officials to do it privately, he left the building ten minutes before they arrived. They still haven’t caught up with him.”
Pierre-Marcel climbed the front steps, fiddled with a set of keys, and after several tries released the padlock.
Sabine stepped inside, expecting the still air to be musty, and instead breathed in the scent of dried apples. She stood in a hallway that led to a flight of stairs in front of her and two large rooms on either side.
“Look at this,” Marie-Antoinette called.
Sabine followed her voice and saw a large classroom fitted with several school desks with hinged tops. Sunlight slanting through the windows lit up motes of dust that floated through the air like a thousand tiny specks of gold. Through the dancing light, she could already see rows of children with their heads bent over books. She would have to find a teacher and more desks.
Everywhere she turned she found surprises: a massive wood stove in the kitchen, long wooden tables where the children could eat meals in a room next to the front windows, a space large enough for a dormitory upstairs, an attic where beds could be placed for the older boys, even a room that might be used as an infirmary or an office, and next to it, a small bedroom for Léa. By the time she finished her tour, a cobweb had caught in her hair and her fingers were smudged with dust, but her eyes were shining.
Behind her, Pierre-Marcel cleared his throat and she looked around at him, her face full of anticipation.
He looked solemn. “I’m sorry, Sabine. But I’ve looked at the barn and it’s a shamble. The roof sags, many of the stalls are broken. And the granary is just as bad. This place was built at the end of the nineteenth century. What kind of shape is the roof in? Who knows what kind of shape the electricity’s in?”
“Surely all of that can be fixed. Just give me a month. My husband’s a farmer. He can fix anything. Forgive me, Pierre-Marcel, but you haven’t seen the internment camps. This place is a palace. We can plant a garden just over there,” she added, pointing over his shoulder. “There are apple trees behind the house and wild berry bushes. And Miron, that’s my husband, can set up a room in the barn as our bedroom. And best of all the children can play. Can’t you just see them running across the lawn on real grass, and climbing the trees and gathering on the terrace in the evenings for stories?”
“I can,” Marie-Antoinette answered. “I can see it.”
Pierre-Marcel held up his hands, conceding defeat. “All right, Madame. It’s yours.”
“We’ll call it the House of Izieu,” Sabine smiled.
“We’ll call it The Settlement for Refugee Children from the Hérault,” Pierre-Marcel cautioned.
There was a shaking of hands, warm and two-fisted with Pierre-Marcel, and kisses on both cheeks from Marie-Antoinette, and the deal was done.
As the three walked toward to the car, Sabine looked back just as the clouds shifted, slanting the sunlight directly onto the front of the house. It shone in a warm, amber glow, inviting, beckoning. The land rolled away beyond the house and barn, fields and woods in rich and dark textures. The vision was so complete, so whole, she felt something inside her expand. Home. If a house could talk, that’s what it would whisper, Sabine thought.
THÉO REIS, FIFTEEN YEARS OLD
AS SOON AS THE COAST WAS CLEAR, Monsieur Zlatin, he asked us to call him Miron, led us deeper into the forest. I say “led,” but really we blundered. We couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces, it was that dark. Still, he’d gotten us off that platform, so I would have followed him anywhere. After an hour or so of stumbling around, we stopped to rest. I sat on the cold ground and leaned
against a tree, but whenever I closed my eyes I saw that train thundering by and that man leaping straight into it. I couldn’t help wondering if I’d have the same kind of courage if I were caught.
The night magnified the sounds of night-creatures: foxes and owls and bats, maybe even wolves, all scurrying or scrounging or swooping for prey. It was unnerving. Nerves tightened and stretched and jumped at the merest and nearest sound. I don’t think any of us slept. We were all listening for footsteps or dogs barking, sounds of the night-creatures that might be hunting us.
Finally the night grew paler and we could see well enough to walk steadily.
We must have gone about two or three kilometres before Paul asked Miron if he knew where we were going.
“To Chambéry,” he answered.
“You know the way?” Paul sounded skeptical.
“I have a map in my head,” Miron assured us.
“Well,” Paul sighed. “Your map has taken us by this tree once before. I caught my sweater on it and you can still see the scrap of wool.”
For some reason, beyond logic, we found this hilarious and we couldn’t help laughing. There was nothing at all funny about being lost, but we laughed so hard we had to cover our mouths not to be too loud and Paul was doubled over, holding his ribs. Maybe it was the aftermath of what we’d been through or just our amazement at our luck.
“I wonder what happened to that pig,” I said and that set us off again.
We sank to the ground right where we stood. Miron snorted, trying not to laugh too loudly, and that made us think he was imitating the pig. Pretty soon I had tears streaming down my face.
Miron sobered up first. “Look,” he said. “I’ve no idea where we are, but I figure that unscheduled train stop must have been some kind of border between the German and Italian zones. We can’t be more than ten kilometres or so from Chambéry. I did see it on a map once and I know it’s southeast, so now that we can see, we can let the sun guide us. Chambéry is in a valley, so we’ll likely have some climbing to do before we get there.”