The morning after Jean-Paul’s family arrived, Gustave and Papa had dug up the metal box buried by the chicken coop. Its contents were now securely stowed away. The uncut jewels were sewn under the lining of two different suitcases so that no one could steal them. And Maman had taken apart her corset to make a hiding place for the American bills, pulling out all the whale bones. Working by lamplight, Gustave, Jean-Paul, and Papa had rolled the slippery American money tightly around the delicate bones, and then Maman sewed them securely back into the corset cover. When she had finished, she also sewed Monkey back together, repairing the holes that the Germans had torn in his belly. While they were all working together, Papa had made a promise. “After the war,” he had said, “I will come back to France and find the Landaus.”
No one had known how to thank Madame Robert for the risk she had taken, bringing Giselle across the demarcation line.
“I know you would have done the same for me,” she had said awkwardly to Maman and Aunt Geraldine. “Mothers have to help each other. Poor little girl.”
As Madame Robert was getting ready to leave, first heading for her mother’s house, where she would spend the night, and then planning to cross back at a different checkpoint, Gustave slipped the repaired Monkey into her hand.
“For Marguerite,” he said. “Since she doesn’t have any other toys.”
Madame Robert bent and kissed him. “Thank you, Gustave,” she had said quietly. “I know what he means to you. Thank you.”
Later, after Gustave went to bed, with Jean-Paul asleep on the floor next to him, sadness washed over him as he remembered the games that he and Jean-Paul and Marcel used to play with Monkey back when they lived in Paris. But it wasn’t Monkey that he needed; it was his friends. Marguerite loved Monkey, and toys should belong to small children, who would really appreciate them. In a way, Gustave felt as if he had left Monkey behind a long time ago, in the winter last year when the line had closed, with Monkey—and Jean-Paul and Marcel—on the other side.
Saying goodbye to Nicole had been hard too. Maman had said Gustave could give her their bicycle, since it was impossible to take it to America.
“No more bumpy front tire!” said Gustave, wheeling the bicycle into the Morins’ shed and propping it against the wall.
“Oh, it wasn’t really that bad,” said Nicole. “But I bet your mother’s bicycle will go really fast. I’ll see in a few weeks, when the doctor says I can use my arm again.”
“You’re not going to make another ramp, are you?” said Gustave.
“Maybe!” Nicole grinned, walking out with him into the road.
No one was around. Gustave reached out to shake hands. For a moment, with their hands clasped, they both hesitated. Then Nicole leaned forward, and Gustave felt her lips, warm and soft, against his face. They kissed each other quickly, once on each cheek, the way grown-ups did to say hello and goodbye. When Gustave lifted his eyes a moment later, Nicole’s face was pink and her eyes were bright.
“Why do you and your father do it, anyway, since you aren’t Jewish?” he asked her suddenly. “Help people escape, I mean? Work for the Resistance? It’s so dangerous.”
All at once Nicole’s sparkling eyes were intense and serious. “For freedom,” she said fiercely. “For France. Because it is the right thing to do.” Then a grin broke across her face again.
“Say hello to the Statue of Liberty for me when you get to America!” she said.
Gustave saw Nicole watching from the top of the hill as he walked away. Would she and her father be all right? When would he see her again?
Giselle had recovered from her fever within a week. She turned out to be an energetic toddler who was always getting into trouble of one kind or another—chasing after the chickens next door, rubbing food into her hair, taking everything out of Maman’s purse and trying to sit inside it. She made Gustave laugh, and even Jean-Paul too, sometimes.
Jean-Paul didn’t laugh as much as he used to or talk as much either. But he ate ravenously whenever he had a chance. In the last two days, especially, while they had been waiting on the ship in the Lisbon harbor for the final passengers to board, Gustave had noticed Jean-Paul tearing into his meals. The abundance of food in Lisbon was astonishing after all the things they had not had in France. On the days they had spent in Lisbon before boarding the ship, Gustave and Jean-Paul had taken long walks through the street markets, gazing at the mountains of white bread in loaves of many shapes, sampling the rich, soft cheeses, eyeing the fresh fish and the brightly colored fruit. On the ship too, while they had been waiting to set sail, the meals had been good and plentiful. But Jean-Paul usually slipped part of his piece of bread into his pocket, Gustave noticed, as if he never knew when he would taste food again.
That morning, as the two families got up from breakfast, Jean-Paul had looked up as he was sliding the bread into his pocket and noticed Gustave watching him.
“You don’t know what it was like in Paris,” he said, blushing slightly. “Some days we had almost nothing to eat. Jews couldn’t shop until late in the day, when nearly all the food had been sold. At night, Giselle would cry for hours because she was so hungry.”
Gustave nodded. Of course Jean-Paul was afraid of going hungry. Thanks to Papa’s skill in bargaining with the shoes and the cloth, Gustave and Maman and Papa had usually had enough of something to eat, even if it was often only potatoes or rutabaga soup. And there was more food in the country than in Paris. Jean-Paul was so thin that it almost looked as if his elbows would poke through his skin.
Now Gustave and Jean-Paul stood silently together, looking out at the light sparkling on the blue water. A few people on the deck below them were scanning the harbor. One man had binoculars. Gustave knew that he was looking for air tubes that indicated the presence of German U-boats, submarines that launched deadly attacks on ships. But the surface of the water was smooth and uninterrupted.
“Do you think my father will ever come find us in America?” Jean-Paul asked suddenly.
“Of course he’ll find us,” said Gustave. “After the war, when he comes home. Nicole’s father promised to get him the address of Papa’s cousin in America. And anyway, Papa swore that somehow he’ll get back to France when the war is over. To find Marcel and Madame Landau.” His voice quavered when he came to those last words. It was difficult to say their names.
But when would the end of the war come? Gustave looked out again at the serene, deep blue-green of the water, at the glimmering white buildings of Lisbon, at the cold, paler blue of the sky overhead. Looking out over all that beauty, it was hard to believe that danger could ever erupt from under the ocean or come roaring down from what had once been a peaceful sky. But it could. He knew that it could.
Gustave felt the deck begin to rumble under his feet. “We’re moving!” he called out, excited in spite of everything. “The ship is leaving!”
People were beginning to gather at the railing of the deck one level down to catch a final sight of land. The upper deck, where Jean-Paul and Gustave were standing, was narrower than the lower one. The two boys looked down onto the tops of people’s heads, onto men’s dark hats and women’s bright scarves, fluttering in the ocean breeze. Gustave caught sight of Maman’s flowered skirt, and then he saw them all, his family—Maman, Papa, Aunt Geraldine, and little Giselle—squashed into a corner by the railing, looking back toward Portugal. Giselle held up a small, red-mittened hand and waved at the shore.
All of a sudden, Jean-Paul tapped Gustave on the shoulder and grinned. It wasn’t quite the same grin that Gustave remembered, but it was good to see him more like his old self again.
“I know what Marcel would do if he were here!” Jean-Paul announced. He pulled the chunk of bread that he had saved from breakfast out of his pocket, looked at it for a moment, then tore it in half. He held one piece out to Gustave. Gustave took it and watched Jean-Paul crumble the bread between his hands, reach out over the railing, and scatter the pieces onto the people on the deck bel
ow. So Jean-Paul remembered that day with the hazelnuts in the synagogue too.
The crumbs fluttered down, landing on one man’s hat, on another man’s shoulder, drifting slowly through the air. A young woman with brown hair coiled elegantly at the nape of her neck looked up, confused.
“Snow?” they heard her say in French to her companion. “Even though it’s January, it doesn’t seem cold enough.”
Jean-Paul laughed and looked at Gustave. Gustave smiled, tears prickling in his eyes. Jean-Paul nudged Gustave. “You do it too.”
Gustave crumbled the bread in his fist and tossed it into the air. “For Marcel,” he said hoarsely. The crumbs floated and drifted down, white specks against all that blue. The boys watched as the bits of bread settled softly on the unsuspecting passengers below. A gull swooped down from above, squawking, and caught a large crumb out of the air, the sunlight dazzling white on its wings.
Gustave caught Jean-Paul’s eye, and despite the ache in his throat, he started to laugh.
“Snow!” said Jean-Paul, mockingly. “Anyone want to build a snowman?”
He nudged Gustave again, grinning, and started toward the staircase. Gustave took a last long look at Europe before turning to gaze the other way, over the vast emptiness of the ocean, toward America. Then he and Jean-Paul darted down the winding steps and through the excited crowd to join their family on the deck below, squinting, as they ran, against the almost painful brilliance of the morning.
Author’s Note
Like Gustave in Black Radishes, my father was born in France in 1929. It was not an auspicious year to be born a Jewish child in Europe. Anne Frank was also born that year. But my father was one of the lucky few. He and his mother and sister escaped from France and survived the Holocaust.
Gustave and his parents follow the route taken by my father’s family. They moved first from Paris to Saint-Georges-sur-Cher. They lived there for several years as the situation for Jews in France steadily worsened, before they were finally able to obtain all the right papers and begin their voyage to America. They traveled through Spain and Portugal, since both were officially neutral countries, and then set sail from Lisbon for the United States.
My father’s family was fortunate in several ways that allowed them to escape and survive. Because my father, his sister, and his parents were all French-born, they were not among the first Jewish victims in France. The government of Vichy France, under Maréchal Pétain, first allowed the Nazis to take foreign-born Jews and only later handed over those who had been born in France.
Also, the village of Saint-Georges, where my father’s family settled, happened to be just south of the demarcation line, so it fell into the safer unoccupied zone. At the time that my father’s extended family traveled to Saint-Georges, no one knew that the Germans would occupy part of France in 1940. And certainly no one imagined the demarcation line between the two zones of France or knew where it would go. It was simply a matter of chance that their house was on the south side of the Cher, the river that divided the two zones in that part of France. In fact, just one month after my father and his mother and sister left France, in November of 1942, the Allies landed in North Africa, and the Nazis occupied the former unoccupied zone.
My father’s family was also lucky because they had an American relative, an aunt in New Orleans. The United States government refused to give most European Jewish refugees permission to enter the country. Those who wanted to come to live in the United States had to obtain an affidavit from someone already living in America. This was a sworn statement promising to provide money to the new arrivals if they needed it. Most of the desperate European Jews trying to survive the war did not know anyone in the United States who could make them such a promise. My father says that conversations among adult Jews in France during the war years almost always involved the word “affidavit.” “Have you got an affidavit yet?” “Can you get an affidavit?” they would ask one another. Other countries where Jews tried to find refuge also imposed difficult restrictions on immigrants. Many Jews were unable to flee to safety because of these restrictions.
During the war, the Nazis deported many Jews from France. More than seventy-seven thousand died in Nazi camps. Approximately eleven thousand of them were children under the age of eighteen. But despite the ready cooperation of the Vichy government with the Nazis, and despite the anti-Semitism of many French citizens, Jews living in France had an unusually high survival rate compared with Jews living in other European countries. Nearly three-quarters of the Jews in France survived. This was partly because of the actions of French people like Nicole and her father in the novel, some of them in the French Resistance but many with no Resistance ties, who helped Jews hide and escape.
Black Radishes is fiction: it is not my father’s story. But some events from his life are woven into the novel. Like Gustave and his family and a large part of the French population, my father’s family panicked during the German invasion and took to the roads, trying, fruitlessly, to escape into Spain. Later, while my relatives were living in Saint-Georges, they were denounced to the police for supposedly signaling to British planes from the attic—but, as in Black Radishes, they were able to show that there was no entrance to the attic from their part of the house. Like Gustave’s parents, the adults in my father’s family buried their valuables in the yard behind their house and instructed the children to remember where the valuables were. They did this out of fear that the children would be left alone to fend for themselves if the parents were arrested and put in concentration camps. This did happen to Jews in the unoccupied zone, even before the Nazis occupied the area.
And one of my father’s cousins had a Swiss passport. He used that passport to cross the demarcation line. Using his fluent German and his charm to befriend the German soldiers, he discovered that they loved black radishes. He smuggled food and people across the demarcation line by having black radishes on hand as a distraction.
Near Saint-Georges is the famous château of Chenonceau. The Meniers really were chocolate manufacturers who owned this beautiful, historic castle spanning the Cher. Part of the château is in what was the occupied zone and part is in what was the unoccupied zone of France. If you visit Chenonceau, you will hear the tour guides tell you about the way the château was used to help people cross from one zone to the other during World War II. And you can still buy Menier and Poulain chocolate bars in France!
While writing Black Radishes, I spoke with people who lived during this time, and I am deeply grateful to them for sharing their stories. I also read many memoirs and works of history. Anecdotes about people who painted dogs’ tails in the forbidden colors of the French flag—blue, white, and red—appear in several places. The basic story about the boy who was forced to march and shout, “This is a German, not a Boche!” is true as well, although I imagined lots of additional details. It is also true that French people helped Jews and others cross the Cher in hidden, illegal boats. One brave family owned a mill with a stone ford under the water and helped people across by leading them over it. These events are mentioned in Robert Gildea’s Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation, 2003; Limore Yagil’s Chrétiens et Juifs sous Vichy, 1940–1944, 2005; and Georgette Guéguen-Dreyfus’s Résistance Indre et vallée du Cher, 1970. Among the many works of history I consulted, I also relied particularly on Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944, 1972; Renée Poznanski’s Jews in France During World War II, translated by Nathan Bracher, 2001; Eric Alary’s La ligne de démarcation, 1940–1944, 2003; Hanna Diamond’s Fleeing Hitler: France 1940, 2007; and Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt’s Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946, 2009.
Acknowledgments
My father, Jean-Pierre Meyer, and my aunt, Eliane Norman, shared with me many memories, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, of their childhood in France during the war years. I am more grateful to them than I can say for telling me stories that were at times painf
ul for them to remember. My particular thanks also go to Marie-Hélène Gold, Paul Fameau, Eliane Fameau, Irène Epstein, and Odile Donis for their memories of wartime and postwar France. Patricia Barry told me about the trees at Chenonceau, and Annette Moser, vice-consul at the consulate general of Switzerland, provided me with important details about laws regarding Swiss citizenship in the 1930s. My Wellesley colleagues, Venita Datta, Nicolas de Warren, Andrew Shennan, Vernon Shetley, Catherine Masson, Michèle Respaut, and Jens Kruse, generously shared references, books, and information about subjects as diverse as French chocolate, camouflage paint, high and low German, newsreels, Catholic traditions, and the sandbags around the monuments of Paris.
I am grateful to my agent, Erin Murphy, for encouraging me to rework the novel’s opening. Susan Lubner, Patricia Bovie, Jacqueline Davies, Jacqueline Dembar Greene, Ginny Sands, and Beth Glass read drafts (and, in some instances, draft after draft) of Black Radishes. Their comments, advice, and encouragement were invaluable to me as I shaped the manuscript into its final form. The judges for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ Work-in-Progress Grant, and particularly Arthur A. Levine, gave me confidence at a crucial moment through their interest in my work. A suggestion from George Nicholson about Gustave’s reading material made its way into the novel. And Rebecca Short and Françoise Bui, with their patient and tireless editing, helped me to rethink crucial aspects of the book and shaped it and improved it in innumerable ways.
I am thankful to Wellesley College and to the Susan and Donald Newhouse Center for the Humanities for supporting leave time that enabled me to complete this novel. Jo Rodgers knows how deeply grateful I am to her. And, as always, I am more thankful than I can say to Ken Winkler and Hannah Meyer-Winkler for their daily love and companionship. Ken told me to put everything else aside and write this book. And Hannah reminds me every day, by her wonderful example, what actual children are really like.
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