Michael at the Invasion of France, 1943

by Laurie Calkhoven

  I moved next to Jacques, facing my teacher, and raised my right hand in the French salute. I waited for yelling. I waited for us to get thrown out of class. A few of our classmates joined us.

  Our new teacher slammed his hand on his desk and started toward us. His face was mottled with rage. My hand shook, but I kept it in place.

  The teacher had just reached Jacques when the door to our classroom opened. The head of the school stood there, quietly watching. His question was for the teacher. “Have you not started class?” he asked. “We have a strict schedule here.”

  “Of course.” The teacher turned on his heel and walked back to his desk. “Take your seats,” he barked. “Stop this nonsense and get to work.”

  I dropped into my seat and looked over at Jacques with a relieved smile. Our resisters club had just had a victory.

  We were never asked to salute the Nazis in school again. Over the next few weeks, we tried to find out what had happened to Monsieur Declos. Some said he had been sent to prison. Others that he had been shot by a firing squad. We never found out for sure. Jacques and I continued with our secret work. We tore down German posters when we could, wrote Vive la France and Vive General de Gaulle on walls, and refused to speak to the Germans. We kept the flame alive.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Long Live France!

  July 1941

  One Saturday, about a year into the occupation, Jacques and I planned our first big mission. We wrote messages like “Resist the Nazis” and “Long live France” on a hundred small pieces of paper. We cut and folded them into V’s for victory, filled our pockets, and set out for the Colisée, one of Paris’s biggest movie houses.

  We got to the Champs-Élysées exactly at noon, right in time for the daily Nazi parade. An officer on a horse was leading a fancy unit down Paris’s most famous street to the Arc de Triomphe. They goose-stepped in perfect unison.

  “Don’t look at them,” Jacques said.

  I turned my back and so did he. Nearly everyone on the street showed the Nazis their backsides, and shopkeepers closed their metal shutters with a clang. It was a small thing, but it made us feel better.

  After they passed by, Jacques and I crossed the street to the theater, handed over our money, and made our way to the first row of the balcony. We heckled the German newsreels.

  “Propaganda!” I yelled.

  “German lies,” Jacques added.

  The Gestapo hung around public places in civilian clothes spying on people. I studied the moviegoers around me. Was that man in the black coat Gestapo? I wondered. What about the woman in the gray suit? I didn’t want to be too close to a Nazi when I carried out my mission. Getting caught in an “act of sabotage” would mean severe punishment, maybe even prison.

  An hour into the film, Jacques leaned over and whispered, “Ready?”

  I nodded and reached into my bulging pockets. I filled both hands with my paper V’s. All my muscles tensed. “Ready,” I answered.

  I whistled the Morse code signal for the letter V—three short toots and then one long whistle. We jumped to our feet and ran, flinging our papers off the balcony to the people in the seats below.

  “Long live France!” I yelled.

  “Long live General de Gaulle!” Jacques added.

  Some people began to clap but there was also shouting and then a German voice from somewhere behind us. “Halt!” it yelled. “Halt!”

  We kept running, throwing our paper V’s until our pockets were empty. We ran down the stairs, through the lobby, and out the cinema’s front doors. We raced all the way to the corner before a stitch in my side made me stop.

  No one seemed to be following us. I leaned over, clutched my stomach, and tried to slow my huffing and puffing. Jacques was laughing so hard he could hardly breathe. He had to hold on to my shoulder just to stand.

  I started laughing too. I imitated the Nazi who had yelled at us. “Halt!” I said. “Halt!”

  Jacques laughed even harder. Tears ran down his face.

  Two Nazi soldiers passed us, smiling at the fun we were having. Suddenly I remembered I could go to prison for shouting the words Vive la France. I was done laughing.

  Jacques straightened and waited for them to pass. He reached out to shake my hand. “The flame of resistance,” he said.

  I gripped his hand firmly. “Will not be extinguished,” I added.

  We had done it. We had reminded everyone in that movie theater that there was still hope for France. I couldn’t wait to see Papa after the war and tell him all about it.

  Jacques and I wanted to do more and more, but it was hard to plan resistance missions when we were hungry and cold. The first winter of the Occupation was the coldest and snowiest Paris had ever seen. The second began just the same. The Nazis sent all the fuel to Germany. We only had enough coal to heat the kitchen for a couple of hours a day. Gas for cooking was scarce, and the electricity went off without warning. We wore everything we owned, stuffed newspapers into our clothes, and still shivered. The only warm places in Paris were Nazi offices and apartments.

  On the coldest nights, Maman, Charlotte, and I went to the métro to sleep in the underground passages where it was a bit warmer. We could feel the temperature change as we walked down the stairs into the subway tunnels. People piled blankets on the floors. The ones who got there first set up camp against the white tile walls. The rest of us would pick our way through the families, looking for an empty spot on the floor. It was so dark that there was a danger of slipping off the side of the platform and onto the train tracks if one got too close to the edge. The trains no longer ran at night, but it was still dangerous.

  We huddled for warmth in the dark, trying to ignore the noises and the smells of the people around us and sleep as best we could.

  In the beginning people spoke openly against the Nazis, but then the boches caught on. Soldiers showed up. If someone was too loud, or spoke of something verboten, the soldiers turned a bright flashlight on them. Maman, Charlotte, and I would lie on the hard floor, wrapped in blankets, and try to sleep.

  In the afternoons after school, I sometimes brought Charlotte to another warm spot—the monkey house at the zoo. One of the monkeys began to recognize Charlotte. It would jump up and down in front of us, screeching and making comical faces. Charlotte would imitate it, giggling like crazy. Eventually, they would both quiet down and take a nap. The monkey curled up in a tree, and Charlotte curled up in my lap.

  Paris had become a cage and the Nazis our zookeepers. Did the monkeys hate me the way I hated the Nazis? Did they dream of escaping too?

  The Nazis grew meaner and meaner. We never knew when one of them would turn on us for the smallest offense.

  One day Jacques and I were walking down the street when two soldiers came up behind us. “Make way,” one of them yelled.

  I didn’t move fast enough for him. He gave me a kick, knocking me into the street. A German truck almost hit me, and then the same Nazi yelled at me for blocking traffic!

  “Dirty boches,” Jacques muttered.

  The one who had kicked me turned on his heel and slapped Jacques across the face. My friend fell to his knees, clutching his cheek. Blood collected at the corner of his mouth.

  The soldiers continued on their way, laughing.

  Jacques got to his feet with tears in his eyes. Both hands were in fists. “Dirty boches,” he yelled. “Nazi pigs!” This time, the soldiers paid him no mind.

  • • •

  Food was an even bigger problem than the cold and Nazi anger. Shortly after they arrived, the Nazis made us line up on playgrounds to get ration cards according to our age. Maman needed pink, yellow, and orange coupons to buy potatoes, bread, cheese, vegetables, and meat. Food prices doubled and then tripled. Maman stood on lines for hours, and half the time the food ran out before she go
t into the store. We were always hungry.

  After she spent nearly every penny we had in the bank, Maman sold jewelry and other luxuries in order to buy food. A black market sprang up, which was even more expensive than the shops.

  The public gardens, once filled with spring and summer flowers, were plowed and planted with beans and cabbages, and in the spring we made a small garden on the roof. Of course, the Germans took everything they wanted and ate it themselves or shipped it to their precious “fatherland.”

  One day, seeing rabbit on a menu posted outside a restaurant, I got an idea for a business that could see us through the hungry times. Papa always said a man took care of his family, and now I had thought of a way to do that. My uncle Henri and aunt Jeanne had a farm to the west of Paris. They kept rabbits. I talked Maman into going to visit them with the idea of trading something for a few of their rabbits.

  “Where are you going to keep rabbits in the middle of Paris?” Maman asked.

  “In the bathtub,” I said.

  She didn’t like the idea.

  “We don’t use it to bathe anymore,” I said. It was true. Soap was one of the first things to disappear from the stores, and we didn’t have enough fuel to heat hot water for baths.

  “A good female rabbit can have ten babies every three or four months,” I said. “We can sell or trade them for whatever we need.”

  “Do you even know how to take care of rabbits?” she asked.

  “Uncle Henri will teach me,” I said.

  It took some convincing, but finally she agreed. The rumblings in our stomachs helped to convince her.

  One Saturday we took the train to the country. Uncle Henri and Aunt Jeanne were happy to see us. They were even happier to get a stash of prewar coffee and the black-market sugar Maman had hidden under the false bottom of her shopping bag.

  My uncle roared with laughter when I told him what I wanted. He had hated the Germans ever since the last war, and now that both of his sons were being held captive in Germany, he hated them even more. “Rabbits in the bathtub,” he said. “That’s a new one. But it’ll work!” His eyes lit up as he chose the best rabbits for me—two females and one male. One of the females was almost ready to give birth. Uncle Henri told me everything I needed to do to take care of them.

  “You’ll have more rabbits than you know what to do with,” he said.

  Maman wrinkled her nose at the smell around the rabbit hutches, but rabbit stew would keep us alive.

  I took my new business seriously. Every morning I slipped out to a nearby park to clip grass for their feed. They ate old cabbage leaves too, and whatever vegetables we could spare. I nearly lost everything when I fed them potato peelings. Potato peelings are not good for rabbits.

  When the rabbits were big enough, Maman and I traded them for food, clothing, and even coal. What we didn’t sell or trade, we ate. I was always careful to make sure to have at least two females and one male.

  I felt I had done one more thing to make Papa proud. It was like I was building a ladder, rung by rung. How many rungs would I have to climb before I made up for what I’d done to Georges?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Pearl Harbor

  December 1941

  From the beginning, people spoke in whispers about America entering the war and beating the Germans. We all hoped for it, but not in the way that it happened. In December 1941, the Japanese bombed an American navy base. The United States declared war on Japan. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The whole world was at war.

  Maman was immediately worried about her family who lived on Long Island in New York. The base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was far from the United States mainland. Still, we knew that many of our cousins and uncles would find themselves in uniform like Papa and Georges.

  German-controlled Radio Paris said that the entire American fleet was destroyed, and America was defeated. But then we heard parts of President Roosevelt’s speech on the BBC. He vowed to fight, and to win.

  The Germans congratulated each other as if they were the ones who had dropped the bombs. I wanted to drop a bomb on them, especially when they said the Americans had already been beaten.

  One day I was walking past a German-only outdoor café with Jacques. The sun was shining and it was almost warm. A boche stood with a swastika flag draped around him and his arm up in the air. I didn’t realize what he was doing until he spoke.

  I only understood the words “Lady Liberty.”

  He was pretending to be the Statue of Liberty—France’s gift to the United States. A symbol of freedom. The idea of the statue draped in the swastika made me want to rip the flag from his shoulders and strangle him with it. Instead I could only glare at him. I was as helpless as one of my rabbits. I blinked back tears of rage.

  Jacques pulled me away. “There’s nothing you can do now,” he said. “The Americans will come. Just wait.”

  I wiped tears from my cheeks, feeling weak and embarrassed. “This is it for the Nazis!” I told Jacques. “This is the beginning of the end. The Americans will defeat the Germans, even if they have to kill every last one of them. They never lose.”

  “The beginning of the end,” Jacques agreed.

  It was one of the rare conversations I had with Jacques that winter. He was always too busy to spend time with me. He made excuses instead of plans for resistance missions. Without Jacques, I lacked the courage to plan anything big. He was just as busy in the spring. One day in April I walked home from school alone—again—because Jacques had to run an errand for his mother.

  I offered to go with him, as I had many times before. He said no.

  “I have to rush to get there before they close, and you can’t run fast in your sabots,” he said.

  That part was true. On my twelfth birthday in February, Maman and I had tried to find a new pair of shoes with my ration coupon. All we could find was a pair of wooden sabots. Nearly everyone wore them now—all the leather was sent to Germany—but they were clumsy and hard to run in. Even so, I knew that my shoes weren’t the reason Jacques didn’t want me with him. Was he afraid to be seen with me because I was half American?

  We worried the Nazis would arrest Maman when the United States entered the war, but so far they continued to concentrate their hatred on the Jews. They blamed the Jews for everything that was wrong in France.

  The Young Guards organized demonstrations and stood at the entrances of Jewish stores to scare business away. Stefan bragged about it in school and was rewarded with a treat by our teacher. One day the Guards went up and down the Champs-Élysées smashing the windows of Jewish-owned stores, breaking doors, and overturning counters. The French police did nothing to stop them.

  That same evening I saw Pierre on the métro train with Stefan and a group of Young Guards. My old friend was wearing the black shirt, along with a beret and the badge. Their voices could be heard from one end of the subway car to the other.

  “Did you see the look on that old Jew’s face?” Stefan asked with a laugh.

  Another boy crooked his finger over his nose—the anti-Jewish posters always showed them with big, hooked noses—and said in a shaky, old-man voice, “Boys! Boys! Stop that. I’ll call the gendarmes.”

  “We are the police, Jew,” Stefan said, putting a fist in the other boy’s face. “And we’ll do what we like.”

  “Pow!” Pierre yelled, punching the air.

  They burst out laughing. The look of pride and excitement on my friend’s face was unmistakable. I must have gasped because Pierre turned and his expression became one of cold stone. Then he nudged Stefan and whispered.

  Stefan eyed me and spoke quietly to the entire group. They walked toward my end of the subway car and surrounded me in harsh silence. I pretended not to notice their clenched fists, but I could feel their eyes drilling into me like bul
lets. I focused on their feet. They all wore black leather boots.

  I couldn’t bear to sit there, but I didn’t want them to see how frightened I was either. At the next stop I jumped to my feet and pushed past them with my head down. One of them tripped me in my clumsy wooden shoes and I heard them laughing as I stumbled through the doors. As the subway pulled out of the station, Pierre raised his arm in the Nazi salute and gave me a big smile. I sat down on a bench, stunned and scared. What had happened to my friend?

  The Germans tried to make it seem that the anti-Jewish restrictions had come from the French and not the Germans, but I knew better. Still, more and more Frenchmen openly discriminated against the Jews. Eventually, Jewish businesses were placed under non-Jewish management. Then Jewish homes were taken from their owners and given to Nazis and their collaborators. Last month, only six months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the Germans announced that all Jews over the age of six had to wear a yellow star, stamped with the word juif.

  But even with all of the mistreatment and all of the rumors, I was not prepared for the French police to begin arresting Jews. But they were, right on my street and in my apartment building. Then, suddenly, Jacques was knocking on my kitchen window, holding Sophie Grossman’s hand, and Maman had lied to the police. The little girl was hiding in my closet, and now I needed to know what to do next.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Good-bye, Sophie

  July 16, 1942

  As soon as the police left our street, I climbed the fire escape to Jacques’s kitchen window. Jacques sat at the table with his sixteen-year-old brother, François. I gave the window a light tap and they both jumped. Jacques opened the window and I climbed in.

  “Ça va?” Jacques asked.

  “Ça va,” I answered. “All is well. Do you have Ernst?”