The House of Izieu

by Jan Rehner

  But the light swung back, and he was standing in front of her, solid and immovable.

  “There’s no record. There’s nothing I can do.” His voice was without inflection, a droning sound, emotionless.

  Sabine stared at him, incredulous. She brushed the sweaty trails of hair from her forehead with the back of her sleeve, and tried again.

  “But there must be something you can do, someone you can call. They’re only children.”

  “Madame. There is nothing I can do. It wasn’t a Vichy arrest, but a German one. If you persist, you know what will happen to you?”

  Sabine knew this was a question laced with poison.

  “You know what will happen to them if no one intercedes, don’t you? You know, and still you’ll do nothing.”

  His eyes seemed to darken, to turn the colour of muddy earth.

  “Get out,” he flared. “Get out or be arrested.”

  Sabine lifted her chin and held his gaze long enough for him to know exactly what she thought of him, and then she walked away and found the first train she could to Paris.

  The city was not as she remembered it. This Paris was scowling and gloomy under leaden skies, which perfectly suited Sabine’s mood. She went immediately to the head office of the Red Cross where she met with the director and begged her help.

  “Certainly, Madame. We will do whatever we can, but we must be quick. When was the sanctuary raided?”

  “The morning of April sixth.”

  “A moment, please.” The director left her office, but returned less than ten minutes later, her face grave.

  “I’m so sorry, Madame, but I must tell you that the children arrived in Drancy on the eighth of April.”

  Drancy. Sabine closed her eyes and wished she didn’t know what was whispered about Drancy, but she did. Drancy, filthy, and crowded, existed to feed the trains travelling east to certain sunrise and probable death. She shook her head, as if she could shake off such bad news. She would not think about the children on those trains, or the prayers that fluttered in that cramped space, their wings beating the stale air.

  “I must go to them,” she murmured, and rose unsteadily from her chair.

  “No. You must not. I’m calling Dr. Abrami right now. He’s the head of Broca Hospital. Let him try to intercede.”

  So Sabine waited while Dr. Abrami confirmed that the children, Miron, Léa, Suzanne and her parents were all confined in Drancy. Both the doctor and the director were working furiously to have at least the youngest moved to the hospital.

  “We have some time,” the doctor assured her. “It’s routine for internees to be held for about two weeks before deportation.”

  But only a few days later, the director informed Sabine that thirty three of the Izieu children and four of the adult supervisors had been sent on rail convoy seventy-one to Auschwitz, and the rest were soon to follow. The haste was never explained.

  Dr. Abrami left Drancy empty-handed, but for a single letter written in crayon, addressed to Sabine.

  My dearest Sabine,

  We are heading for the unknown. Morale is good. The children, parents, Coco and I are all together. Going through Lyon, Drancy, and finally to Metz, I think. See you soon, my dear friend. Hugs and kisses from the little ones and the grown-ups.

  Suzanne.

  Sadness gathered within her and she could feel it like a cloud in her lungs. The pit of her stomach ached. The hollowness in her chest grew so large it scarcely left room for breath. She hadn’t known that emptiness could weigh so much the earth seemed to be pulling at her, dragging her into darkness.

  She became terribly ill.

  If Sabine had locked herself away from the world for the rest of her life, those who knew her would have understood. But this was not her way. She would not let those innocents vanish, their space in the world simply closing over like water in the fountain at Izieu when she lifted out her hands.

  Sabine fought on and fought back, because the story wasn’t over yet.

  PARIS

  MAY 1944

  SABINE STAYED ON IN PARIS. There was no place left where she belonged in any case. Her mind was a blank. She had no strategies for surviving the end of the world.

  With Berthe’s help, she rented a room in a shabby hotel near Place Maubert. The room was spartan—no rugs on the floor or pictures on the wall, just a single bed, a dresser with drawers that stuck, and a scattering of desiccated insects on the windowsill. Down the gloomy hall she found a pungent toilet and a cracked sink for washing up. The hot water boiler in the building wheezed and the pipes knocked and hissed.

  During the days, Sabine walked. Though she tried to keep her head down, she kept finding Miron. He was standing in the lobby of a hotel on the Île Saint-Louis reading a newspaper. He was just emerging from a Metro station or walking a dog in Luxembourg Gardens or buying potatoes at the market in Maubert. Her yearning for him was so strong each false sighting rocked her. She often felt dizzy and disoriented. Already she had lost the exact look in his eyes when he said goodbye to her that last morning. Soon there would be nothing left of him but for what she could remember and what she could dream, and she feared the two Mirons would soon be indistinguishable.

  Nor did she understand this wounded version of Paris, full of bicycles, queues, sober eyes, and the silence of missing birds. The language was filled with cautionary euphemisms and codes because the enemy was just around the corner. Even the Parisians’ sense of humour had changed, their wittiness weighed down by crude references to various parts of German anatomy. Above all there was a watchful atmosphere, the soldiers’ eyes darting everywhere, the citizens’ eyes straight ahead, seeing everything and pretending to see nothing. The air smelled of the sweat of both exhaustion and nervous anticipation.

  When Sabine could walk no longer, she returned to her hotel. Loneliness leaked through the pores of her skin and curled into the corners of her room and across the ceiling like dark smoke. There was a metallic taste in her mouth and an ache behind her breastbone. The days were losing their shape. Time was fraying, a thread at the cuff. If she pulled it, her memories would unravel.

  She looked into the darkness, and saw the House of Izieu, its fragrant spaces and the light it held like wine in a glass. She saw little girls in grass-stained summer dresses, and sisters hand-in-hand, playing tag and climbing trees. She saw little boys and tall boys in wool sweaters coming home from mountain hikes with scraped knees and pine needles in their hair. Perhaps it was summer there already. Perhaps it was always summer there, and gentle, an enchanted place lost in time.

  Sabine lay still for a long time, with her eyes closed. She was often awake for thirty hours or more at a stretch before she hit a wall of exhaustion and a sleep so deep it resembled a state of unconsciousness that would descend upon her and protect her from the cruelty of dreams.

  Sabine contacted an old friend named Georges Gordon and asked to do something useful. Her instructions were to look for a woman in a yellow dress, sitting on a bench in the Tuileries. On Tuesdays, the woman would be there at noon, carrying a blue umbrella.

  The formal French gardens of the Tuileries Palace, which was burnt down during the Commune in 1871, were as carefully laid out as a carpet design with patches of emerald green between straight paths of white gravel, not a pebble out of place. It smelled like grass and freshly spaded earth. Sabine strolled a bit, and then sat down on the bench beside the woman in the yellow dress.

  For a few minutes, the two women pretended not to take notice of each other in the manner that was currently fashionable in Paris. Say nothing, see nothing. Eventually, the woman glanced at Sabine. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Jeanne Verdavoire.”

  “Is that your real name?”

  “It’s the name on my identification papers.”

  “I see. You can call me Dorine. That’s not my r
eal name either. Who sent you?”

  “Georges Gordon. He was a friend of my husband when we lived in Nancy.”

  “What happened to your husband?”

  “What makes you think anything happened to him?”

  “You look wrung out.”

  Sabine sighed. “I’ve been ill this past month. That’s all.”

  Her lie fell to the ground, heavy as lead, but Dorine didn’t dare kick it for fear of what terrible truth might spring out at her. The war spun too many frightening tales. She turned her head and studied Sabine openly. She was unreadable, a cipher. Her hands were folded still in her lap. She hadn’t tripped on any of her words, but something dark burned inside her. “You seem unlucky to me,” she finally pronounced.

  Sabine almost laughed. “There’s not a thing left that bad luck can do to me.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Do you have any particular skills?”

  “I’m a nurse, and I—I can draw.”

  Dorine noticed the hesitation, Sabine’s first. She wondered why. Had she been about to say something else, or was drawing something she had almost forgotten about, or maybe something associated with a painful memory?

  “As a nurse, you can get a job anywhere. Why have you come to us?”

  How could she explain? Sabine had gone from numerous and enormous responsibilities to none, almost overnight. Where she had once lived in a place so crowded she’d slept in a barn, she was now so alone she was like a moth in a jar. She felt a kinship with all the other lonely people drifting through the streets of Paris. On the nights when she thought maybe it was better not to live in a world without Miron and Léa, her vow to the children saved her. Even though she hadn’t been smart or quick enough to protect them from being arrested, a failure she endured with savage self-recrimination, she would pledge her life to them. If she could do one single thing to end the war faster so she might discover their fate or lessen their suffering in the underworld called Auschwitz, she would do it.

  She lifted her head and looked at Dorine. “I just need something to do to help end the war,” she insisted. “I’m no good at waiting. If you can’t use me, say so, and I’ll move on.”

  “Oh, we can use you. You’ll be in danger, but you know that already. I hope you’re not going to be stupidly brave just because you don’t care whether you live or die. Because then I would feel responsible for selecting you, and miserable for not foreseeing any recklessness. More importantly, blind bravery is selfish and puts others at risk. So, please, give a damn.”

  “You can relax. I’m not brave.”

  Dorine smiled. Her new recruit was an effortless liar and that would be a boon to her in her work.

  Sabine smiled, too. It had been a long time since anyone had worried about her, and Dorine’s bluntness was just the tonic she needed to fill her lungs with pure air again. It came as a great surprise to her.

  “Are there any people in Paris you need to say goodbye to, anyone who might need an explanation if you are suddenly gone?”

  There was no one. The acknowledgement cut too deeply to speak aloud, so Sabine just shook her head.

  “Good. Meet me tomorrow morning at the Gare d’Austerlitz at seven. We’re travelling south.”

  It was May and the French countryside flashed through the windows of the train in a series of white blossoms and bursts of lilac. The changing scenery was the only sign Sabine had that the train was moving, so intent was she on Dorine’s words. They were travelling first class, and had a compartment to themselves.

  “Who is Jeanne Verdavoire?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  Dorine sighed, and held out her hand. “Give me your identity card.”

  Suspicious, Sabine reluctantly gave up her papers.

  “When is Jeanne Verdavoire’s birthday? Where were you born?

  Sabine had to strain to remember the details written on the card. “I think January 27, 1907. Born in Auchy-les-Orchies.”

  “You hesitated too long. And your birthday is January 28. You’d be arrested for such obvious blunders. What is your back story? You were born in the North, so why are you in the South? Your wedding ring has worn a groove around your finger so obviously you’ve been married a long time. Details, Sabine, will sell your story. If you can’t or won’t talk about your real husband, make one up. He should be missing because that’s harder to verify in the efficient German records. If he’s a prisoner of war, the records could be checked too easily. Stick as close to the truth as you can. Your card says you are without profession. We’ll have to get that altered. Are these your real fingerprints?

  “Yes.”

  “And what about the name? Are the Germans going to discover that Jeanne Verdavoire died in her infancy?”

  “No. I paid a lot for these papers.” Too much, according to Miron, Sabine remembered. “The OSE was careful.”

  “Ah, so you worked for the OSE. What did you do there? Filing, record keeping?”

  “No. No, um, I worked with children.”

  Dorine, who had a fine, chiselled face, with blue eyes and blonde hair, also had the gift of discerning other people’s sorrow, and the kindness to try to soothe it. She’d guessed almost immediately that Sabine was suffering from some unrelenting torment, almost certainly having to do with the children she could not bear to talk about. She decided not to push on the children.

  “Your card also says you have blue eyes and blonde hair. We can lighten your hair a bit, and hide it mostly under your uniform. We’ll be sending you into a prison as a Red Cross nurse.”

  “I am a Red Cross nurse.”

  “Yes, but when you’re working for us that will only be your cover. You won’t be official. I work for the social service section of Combat. Have you heard of it?”

  “Certainly,” Sabine had read issues of the clandestine newspaper that tried to counter German propaganda and delivered real news from the BBC and other, more mysterious sources. “But I’ve never heard of its having a social service section.”

  “We try to keep up morale and provide food to the families of resisters, and the men and women already arrested and in French prisons. We’re allowed to bring them food parcels, and occasionally we smuggle in news to them. You’ll have easier and less suspicious access as a nurse.”

  “So, I’m just to deliver parcels. What sort of news is in the messages?”

  “You don’t need to know, but you won’t want to be caught with one. Look, Jeanne, you’re a smart woman. The Allied invasion is imminent. Combat, along with other networks, is trying to unify the Resistance to assist when the invasion begins. Everyone knows it’s coming, especially the Germans. Just keep your head down and don’t ask any questions. If you’re captured the less you know, the less harm you can do. You will have contact with me and one other agent, that’s all. Be careful because my pretty neck is on the line.”

  “And why is Jeanne Verdavoire travelling south when she was born in the north?”

  “You’d better stop thinking of yourself in the third person. And we have one other task for you, one linked to your special talent in drawing.

  “When you enter the prison we’re sending you to, we want you to notice everything. Find out as much as you can about the layout. Where are the cells? Where are the windows and hallways? How many guards are there and where are they stationed? How many steps are there? Where are the offices? Where is the communications centre—the radios and the telephones? Be as observant as you can without being obvious and then when you return to your room, draw everything as you saw it. Can you do that?”

  “I can. I can also speak German. I learned when I was a teenager. It’s a bit rusty, but I’ll pick it up quickly again.”

  “Well, aren’t you a surprise? Good. Keep your ears open as well as your eyes. This is a French prison, bu
t the Gestapo are everywhere.”

  “You haven’t answered my question. Why am I travelling south?”

  “Because this is where your other contact lives. But tell the Germans you came after the demarcation line was lifted for the sea air.”

  South, much to Sabine’s shock, turned out to be Montpellier. It was as if fate kept guiding her back to this hilly city that had altered the course of her life.

  “Goodbye and good luck. Your other contact will find you,” Dorine said, before disappearing among the other passengers on the crowded platform.

  Sabine took a tentative step forward, as if she were testing black ice. She stood in line, waiting to have her papers checked, ready to answer questions, but she was waved through quickly. Outside the station, she halted. Where was she supposed to go? She had nowhere to stay, and only a little money left from Berthe. But now that she was part of a network, she couldn’t go to her friends for fear of placing them in danger.

  At last she spied a friendly face moving towards her. She remembered her old driver very well with his bald head and boxer’s build, but she had forgotten the little things, like how he had always ducked his head when he greeted her, and how his smile went all the way to the corners of his eyes.

  “Marius,” she cried.

  “Not anymore,” he smiled. “I’m Jean. Such a common name. So hard to check.”

  “Oh, Marius, it’s so good to see you. How are things in Montpellier?”

  “The food is terrible. The coffee is nonexistent. Cigarettes are scarce and the Germans plentiful. But the weather is good.”

  He reached for Sabine’s suitcase, which held little more than a change of underwear, a sweater, one summer dress, and a photo of Miron. They walked along leafy streets until they reached the city’s central square, Place de la Comédie, and found a table at one of the many sidewalk cafés.