The French Promise

by Fiona McIntosh

  ‘Your trembling is enough, Jew. Commander, perhaps this afternoon we could visit the records office,’ he said, seemingly no longer intrigued by her.

  ‘Of course,’ she’d heard Hoss reply.

  It was three days later and Rachel had not been called back to the house. She knew everything had suddenly changed because of von Schleigel. She’d not spotted him since, though. He’d been like a ghost; he’d breezed into her life, terrified her, and then disappeared.

  Rachel now strained to catch a glimpse of Sarah coming home from work. The workers had staggered past and almost all of them were within the compound but she could not pick out her sister. The last of the stragglers lurched in and the gates were closed. A snarling yell went up. There was nothing unusual about the sound of orders in German but she recognised it as the most fearful of all.

  Selection.

  It happened randomly, most often at morning roll call. Those too weak to be considered useful any longer were packed off in trucks. The hierarchy liked to call sudden selection raids, as a warning against complacency. Did the Germans really believe that any one of them took their life as a given? Rachel had long ago realised that the only defiance possible in this hell was to keep living. By living, the Jews, the gypsies, the political prisoners, the homosexuals or anyone else who challenged Hitler’s warped sense of perfection defied their persecutors simply by breathing. Every roll call, every new trainload, every person who recovered from their previous night’s weaknesses, all who ignored their hunger or fought back their sense of helplessness, effectively laughed in the face of the Nazi regime.

  That’s why they had to keep breathing, had to continue rising each day to face the hell that was Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  A flash of grey uniform caught Rachel’s attention. Her grip tightened around her violin. He was back. It was him. Kriminaldirektor von Schleigel was moving towards them with his odd small-strided walk and she knew in her heart she would not see out this day.

  Her first and surprising thought was that she’d wished now she’d eaten the apricot, or taken food from the Hoss household, stolen from Canada, or asked Albert for more privileges. But even as she thought it, she knew it lowered herself to where these criminals wanted them.

  Rachel watched von Schleigel move towards her. Beneath his heartless gaze workers were picked out as being too scrawny, too weak, too useless for tomorrow’s shift. They were loaded onto a waiting truck. Each person selected knew the horrible silence was their death knell and still they walked meekly to await help into the back of the lorry from those who were already aboard.

  Von Schleigel had said nothing but pointed at each victim. After thirty were selected, the officer in charge told the remaining women to make their way with their guards to their camp, and for the men to go to their accommodations, which were little more than sheds and former stables. Rachel was safe for another day.

  But a finger was raised, a calm voice interrupted the murmurs, and she met his eyes, not at all surprised.

  ‘Rachel Bonet,’ von Schleigel called out, and then turned to the officer. ‘Add this woman to the list,’ he said, pointing at her.

  She had no choice. There were gasps amongst the orchestra. Rachel barely looked at the musicians or their sad glances of farewell. She nodded, resigned, and handed her instrument to her neighbour.

  ‘Tell the next person it has been loved,’ was all she said, and then walked with her head held high – now sporting a dark, defiant thatch – to the waiting vehicle.

  Von Schleigel approached her and spoke softly in French. ‘Bonsoir, Rachel. I thought you’d rather like to join your sister. Sarah is waiting for you.’

  She felt the spittle gathering in her mouth. But she resisted the short triumph it might deliver, preferring instead to see Sarah one more time rather than take a bullet here. Instead, she looked deep into his small, washed-out blue eyes, and uttered for his hearing only: ‘Always look over your shoulder. One day Luc Bonet will find you and slit your throat before he guts you like the wild pigs he killed in the forests.’ It was a lie but she’d never felt more satisfaction in her life than she did at that moment to see the amusement in von Schleigel’s eyes falter at the threat.

  ‘Take them away,’ he spat, his monocle twisting awkwardly in his eye socket as he blinked, embarrassed.

  The journey took just minutes. She never did find Sarah at its end and regretted that von Schleigel enjoyed the final cold laugh at her expense, uniting her through death with a sister already murdered. Von Schleigel had probably had Sarah taken away earlier that day. It’s why he’d wanted to be shown the records – he’d hunted down the last of the Bonets.

  Not being able to hug or to hold the hand of her sister and face this final dark hurdle together was more painful to Rachel than the knowledge that she was about to die. Death was her release and not uttering a farewell of love to gentle Sarah was indeed cruel, so she cast a prayer to her brother, wherever he was and if he still lived, that he find Horst von Schleigel and, in the name of his murdered sisters, kill him.

  Rachel knew she had but moments now as she undressed with all the other women, ignoring the shouted orders, laying out her prison garb neatly with her red scarf on top. She had no jewellery and she’d given away her violin. She had nothing more to give but her life and von Schleigel was demanding just that price. She wondered absently about his connection to Luc, remembered how Luc’s name had rattled the Gestapo man. Good. So she’d put the fear into at least one German before she joined her parents, grandmother and sisters.

  ‘I’m Agnes. What’s your name?’ asked a nervous young woman, breaking into her thoughts. She was barely out of her teens.

  She hoped her attempt at a smile gave comfort for she needed none of it for herself. Rachel wanted to die angry, not soothed or cowed. ‘I’m Rachel. When did you arrive?’ Agnes looked healthier than most, although she was still very thin.

  ‘Yesterday. My parents were separated from each other and from me. I haven’t yet seen them again. I have chronic asthma … without my mother I just don’t know how—’ Her voice warbled, gathering in high intensity.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Rachel cut across her words, certain that Agnes would not have to care about her ailment soon enough.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Agnes asked of a passing guard.

  The kapo smiled and Rachel saw no mirth. ‘You’re going for a shower,’ he said, glancing up at the ironic sign on a pillar next to them, one of so many mocking words of encouragement around the camp. In German it stated, ‘Clean is good.’

  Rachel put her arm around Agnes. One more kindness was still within her. She would be brave enough for both of them.

  ‘Raus!’ came the guttural voice, urging them out of the changing rooms, herding the women towards a new door, and another sign: Desinfizierte Wasche.

  ‘It’s the disinfecting room, Agnes,’ she translated. ‘They like to delouse us regularly,’ she lied.

  Agnes stepped into the bare, cold, grey concrete room alongside Rachel and the many dozens of other women in front and behind them, their skins touching, her body shaking with chill and fear.

  Rachel hugged her closer. ‘It will be over soon,’ she whispered. ‘And then we will be free.’

  PART ONE

  1951

  CHAPTER ONE

  Eastbourne, April 1951

  Luc liked this time of the day – when only the fishermen were up – and especially this spot on the South Downs, leading onto Beachy Head, the highest cliff in Britain. He shifted his gaze from the uninterrupted view of the town’s sprawl and its long shingle beach to where he could see one of the fishing boats heading in. Behind it, like a welcoming party, was a flock of gulls, their wings beating furiously as they wheeled, dipped and powered forward, depending on where the next treat of fish cast-offs would be flung as the men busily gutted their catch.

  Luc could smell the fresh haul now; the years had not blunted his almost freakish ability to pick out individual aromas. Even now
he could separate the salty, mineral notes of the fish from the ancient, earthy smell of coal fires burning in hearths of the houses below him. If he concentrated hard enough, he fancied he could even pick up a whiff of the darting rabbit in the distance that shared this dawn with him, stirring the grasses and kicking up dust.

  The cries of the excited birds were carried on the chilled wind that chased through Luc’s still-bright hair, ruffling it from his forehead and then instantly blowing it back again. He pushed away the yellowy-gold hank that had fallen across his face and then gave up fighting it. He had given up fighting altogether, unless he counted the rows with his wife. Lisette deserved so much better. How had she come to terms so quickly with her losses, her life’s changes, while he yearned for the past? There were moments when he felt there was nothing to fight for any more, and on those bleak occasions he had taken to digging his nails into a scar he carried on his wrist. Its memory of the wound he’d sustained at Mont Mouchet reminded him that he’d survived not only his injuries but the hail of bullets and storm of bombs, when so many other brave souls had not. He remembered the young father who’d taken his last breath speaking of the family he loved as Luc had held his hand so he wouldn’t die alone. Luc couldn’t remember his name, didn’t want to; it only added to his self-loathing that he’d somehow slunk away from France’s suffering to let others bear her pain.

  France had prevailed, however. The Nazis – those that the Allies could round up – had been put on trial, the leaders and abusers executed. In the meantime soldiers had been repatriated, families reunited, and life postwar was beginning to form a more solid shape across Europe.

  But Luc had still not shaken his guilt.

  It had been nearly seven years since the liberation of Paris and they’d sailed away from France in a fishing boat that landed them on the shoreline of Hastings on Britain’s south coast. He desperately hadn’t wanted to leave his country but he couldn’t admit that to anyone, and in 1944 with the decimated German army retreating, the wounded animal was still dangerous and all he could think of was getting Lisette away to the relative safety of England. Her superiors had demanded it, reminding him that this British spy’s clandestine missions were behind her.

  They were both injured emotionally but as Lisette had often reminded him, ‘Show me someone in this war who isn’t.’ It was her way of countering her pain – all of it connected with the loss of Markus Kilian – a Nazi colonel who had been her mission, become her lover and at some point taken part of her heart too. He was still struggling to come to terms with what had happened. In fact, both of them found it easier not to mention Kilian at all.

  And as the weeks had stretched into months until the German surrender, the loneliness of the Scottish Isles where they’d retreated to help Lisette finally bounce back from her wartime experiences, but Luc had never stopped pining for his homeland.

  In summer the Luberon of Provence was hot and arid, carrying on its breeze the scent of lavender and thyme. In the cooler months, its villages would pulse to a different perfume of olives giving up their precious oil and the yeasty smell of grapes being crushed. Around his own village he would wake daily to the smell of fresh baguettes baking and in spring the blossom from the expansive orchards surrounding Saignon would litter the ground.

  He was a man of the Alps, of unforgiving terrain, with its white winters and multicoloured summers and farms dotted here and there. But he was trying so hard, for his new family’s sake, to become a man of the coast … of pebbly beaches with drifts of seaweed, and of tall, elegant houses, standing in a line on the seafront. Provence was a motley of brightly painted houses, where shutters of blue and yellow punctuated walls of ochre or pink. But in Britain’s south it was a monotone palette; the large terraced homes favoured walls the colour of clotted cream and were framed by shiny black doors and iron railings. He couldn’t deny the quiet formality of Eastbourne where they now lived; it didn’t shout anything … it simply whispered a weary sort of elegance. He missed the loud colour and even louder voices of the French.

  It was only up here – on the desolate cliff tops, far away from real life – that Luc felt at home. He could never hide that truth from Lisette: she knew that from up here on a clear day he could look out across the English Channel and see France.

  Luc wrinkled his nose at the sour smell that was reaching him from the boat and blinked at the sunrise just breaking over Eastbourne pier. Shadows of clouds stretched across the lightening sky, while a finger of orange across the horizon pointed firmly at France.

  Here is where you should be, it baited.

  But he couldn’t return to France. Not yet. His wounds still felt too fresh. He thought of the friends who’d given up their lives to bombs, bullets and the collaborator’s accusing nod. He thought of the villages destroyed all over France and the generations it would take to restore them. But mostly he thought of the family he had lost: parents, sisters … his beloved grandmother, whom he’d cradled in death and whose talisman he now wore. Her pouch of lavender seeds was a constant reminder of all that had been taken from him – people, lifestyle, livelihood. The few lavender heads inside had long since withered but if he closed his eyes and inhaled, there was still a faint perfume of Saignon.

  One day he would return.

  He’d written to the International Tracing Agency in Germany a few years back. He’d been thrilled to learn that the ITA had been set up by the Red Cross in 1946 to help people find their missing families, and expressly for the purpose of helping the Jewish people with answers and news of those who had suffered genocide at the hands of the Nazis. There had been two exchanges of letters with the ITA to date. It was more than a year since he’d heard back. But the silence was curiously comforting; as long as the organisation kept him waiting, there was hope.

  He forced himself not to dwell too long or too often about his lost family because the darkness of it was toxic. It was his burden, not Lisette’s. His challenge was to build a normal life for Lisette and Harry, now three. Luc hoped he’d teach him French as he grew – it would be so easy for them to speak it at home. Right now, though, the echoes of war were still ringing in everyone’s ears so to be speaking in any language other than English was madness. He’d worked hard to become fluent. Lisette was a chameleon; she could override the lilt of her French accent with a southern English manner of speaking and was quickly losing her Frenchness in favour of fitting in completely. He’d never shake his accent, but no one bar Lisette and a couple of people at the defunct War Office would ever know the truth behind the brave French Resister who’d aided the Allied war effort.

  It had been the new Defence Ministry’s idea, at the debriefing, to change his true surname. Luc had to agree that with a name as German as Ravensburg, their new life would never work. But Bonet, the adopted Jewish surname he’d accepted as his own for a quarter of a century, was no longer his name either. He couldn’t pinpoint when during the war he’d emotionally left it behind but he knew why. It was always a borrowed name, bestowed with love by the Jewish family that had given him a life and a home. To take Lisette’s name didn’t feel right either. It was Lisette who’d suggested shortening his real name to Ravens. It had the right ring of truth to his proper name but would not attract negative attention.

  Lisette had refused to hide or justify her role as a British spy in France, getting beneath the German command using the oldest cunning known to man – the honey trap. Instead she had agreed to hole up in a lonely cottage on a remote island in the Orkneys for sixteen months, seeing out the war, until her once-shaved hair reached chin length again and she returned to Sussex to marry Luc in her grandparents’ local church. Once married, Lisette didn’t want to leave southern England, but there was no way Luc could agree to life in London or even a large, busy town. She’d tried a new tack, suggesting positions on the south coast.

  ‘I’m a farmer … a specialist grower,’ he’d argued, when she’d told him about a job as a postman in Worthing or a carpenter’s h
and in Rye. He’d lost track of the number of suggestions he refused. Her patience with him only darkened his mood because each time he shook his head meant another few months of living off her savings. She never complained. Lisette was not without means but that was not the point. Luc wanted to support his family, yet every time she gave him the opportunity he turned away from it. It was a vicious cycle that stole his sense of worth and independence.

  Eventually a job as a lighthouse keeper at Beachy Head bubbled to the surface. Luc remembered that day well; it was the first time in years that he’d felt a weight lifting from his shoulders. Here at last was the loneliest of jobs in the most remote location. Luc had leapt at it and loved the smile it had returned to Lisette, knowing their future was being secured in Eastbourne where her parents had hoped to live.

  Lighthouse families were provided accommodation but the cottages were based on the Isle of Wight and Lisette was having none of that. While she was prepared to live alone for two months at a time, she had refused to be separated, with him on the mainland, her on an island again and Harry not seeing his father for such long periods. Instead she had dipped into her inheritance and rented them a small cottage in the Meads – sitting atop Eastbourne proper.

  ‘Luc, if you squint a bit, you could trick yourself that it’s hilly Provence, couldn’t you?’ she’d said excitedly one warm afternoon as they’d strolled across Beachy Head, Harry suspended between them, holding a hand of each parent and lifing his legs from the grass, giggling his pleasure.

  He should have said yes. Should have given her a hug and thanked her. Instead honesty had prevailed and did nothing but damage, especially as he had muttered his wounded retort in French. ‘Place is about emotion; one loves somewhere not just because of how it looks but because of the way their heart reacts to it.’