He had wanted to ask her when Maya came out of the attic on Yacov’s arm, but her face was pale and strained. She shook her head as if to forestall any conversation and then wiped away the tears on her cheeks. In the car, she took a small tube of some cream from her bag and wiped away the smudged eye make-up. She looked much older, and when they returned to Pamela’s house she asked for another scotch and this time downed it in a single gulp and then took a refill. Pamela led her to the bathroom and the two women had remained there for some minutes while Yacov and Bruno talked and opened the wine.
The questions continued to nag at him over dinner, at the back of his mind even as he told Maya and Yacov what he knew about Sami as a boy, about Momu and Dillah, and of his sadness at Sami’s likely fate. Maya looked herself again, her make-up refreshed, making polite compliments to Pamela about the food. She took a sliver of cheese and just enough of the tarte au citron to be polite. When the plates had been cleared away, she said, ‘Let’s stay on around the table. I always prefer talking that way and you ought to know what happened to us. But bear in mind, these are the memories of a little girl of eight, backed up by what David remembered, but he was just eleven when we left the farm.’
The attic had been the worst time, she said. She and her brother had been whisked away from Paris in the summer of 1942, just after the massive round-up of 13,000 Jews and their detention in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the indoor cycling stadium just down the Left Bank from the Eiffel Tower. Neither she nor David knew why her parents were not arrested at the time, perhaps because her father was a doctor. Through the Jewish Boy Scouts, they had been assigned to a group of eight children who were taken first to a campsite near Blois in the Loire valley. Once there, they had photos taken and after a few days were issued with new papers that identified them as Protestant Scouts and Girl Guides to get them through the controls at Vierzon, the border crossing between Nazi-occupied France and that part still nominally ruled by the Vichy government.
They had then gone by train to Brive, and then a bus took them to a Protestant campsite. They stayed there in tents for the summer while Robert Gamzon tried to find somewhere more permanent, but the first of the round-ups of Jews in the so-called free zone of Vichy began that August. They were still at the campsite in November when German troops invaded the Vichy zone to occupy France’s Mediterranean coast after the Allies had landed in Morocco and Algeria. Somehow Gamzon persuaded several Protestant pastors to find various places of refuge for the children.
‘So it was November, cold and dark, on the morning when David and I left the campsite,’ Maya recalled. ‘A big blonde woman, very pretty, told us to call her Tante Simone. David later found out that it was Simone Mairesse, one of the people who organized homes for hundreds of Jewish children around the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon. But apparently there had been a panic after some raids and we had to be taken elsewhere.’
Maya said she remembered a train journey, and watching through the window as their train stopped and another train full of German troops went by. David later tried to track down their route but he was never sure. Then they walked along country lanes for a long time and then waited in some woods outside a small town until it was dark. Tante Simone had some stale bread for them to eat. Then she took them over a bridge into a town with very few lights. It was St Denis. She led the children to a house and up some stairs to an attic, where an old woman was waiting.
‘She spoke hardly any French and I thought she was a witch. I was very scared,’ Maya said. ‘She was bent over as if she had a hunchback and she smelled, but she gave us some soup and tried to be kind to us. Tante Simone said we were not allowed to go out of the attic until market day, when there would be a cart to take us to a farm. It was a donkey cart, the first I ever saw. And then Tante Simone left, telling us we had to leave before dark on market day and go back to the place in the woods where we had waited together. A man with a white mask on his face who would come about midday.’
‘He was a gueule cassée, from the First War,’ Bruno prompted. ‘That was how I tracked down the farm of Michel and Sylvie Desbordes. The old woman in the attic was her mother, all of them Protestants.’
‘Michel and Sylvie, that sounds right. She told us to call her Tante Sylvie and we were to say we were her cousin’s children if anybody ever came. But I don’t remember anyone ever visiting except for the old woman from the attic once or twice. Monsieur hardly ever spoke, and when he did his voice was just grunts. His wife was very kind. I think she’d always wanted children.’
The children stayed there through the winter and all through the year of 1943 and the first half of 1944, knowing nothing of the world outside the farm. Sylvie taught them their sums, read to them from the Bible and sometimes brought back battered copies of Dumas, Victor Hugo and Jules Verne. But they only had candles to read by because they couldn’t always afford the oil for the lamp, even when there was lamp oil to be had. There was no gas, no electricity and all their water came from the well. At least the wood stove kept the kitchen warm. On Sundays, the children were left alone as the Desbordes took the donkey cart to the Protestant chapel in St Denis.
They lived on the eggs and milk the farm produced, made bread from chestnuts and in the vegetable garden they grew verveine and camomile to make tea. Occasionally there would be a poule au pot when one of the chickens grew too old to lay. The Desbordes sold eggs and chickens in the market, vegetables in summer, and in the winter Michel knew a place where he could find truffles and would sell them, when he could find a buyer. Few people had the money except for occasional visitors looking to supply the black market, but dealing with them was a risk the Desbordes thought it wiser not to take. Ironically, as a result foie gras from the ducks was a regular part of the diet on the farm. With so few buyers the Desbordes made it for themselves.
‘Apart from the foie gras, it sounds like living in the Middle Ages,’ said Yacov, shaking his head.
‘I suppose it was. In winter, we all slept in the same big bed for warmth, me and Madame Desbordes at one end, David and Monsieur at the other. We had to work, too,’ Maya said.
Every day the children were in the woods, getting kindling for the stove, or looking for mushrooms for Tante Sylvie to sell. In the summer they took their turns with the scythe, getting the hay for the donkey. Maya had to watch the chickens when they were out in the yard and she and David both helped Sylvie in the garden. Maya was taught to sew and knit, because their clothes were falling apart. And although there was no sugar, she recalled a kind of jam from berries.
‘Looking back, it was probably a very healthy way to grow up, and we loved Dou-Dou, the little dog. It was he who taught us how to swim, a sort of dog paddle that we copied from him. It was a lovely place to be, in spring and summer …’ Her voice trailed away.
‘You had no news of your family, nothing from the woman who brought you to St Denis, Tante Simone?’ Pamela asked.
‘Not a word. We had no radio, never saw a newspaper nor even a postman.’
The facteur would leave any letters at the Mairie and Monsieur would look in on his way to market. He had a small pension for his wounds and once a month something would come in the post and he could go to the post office and get the money. And he got ration books, Maya said, because she remembered him applying for two tobacco rations for him and Tante Sylvie so he could sell them in the market to buy needles and thread. There was no wool, except from unravelling old sweaters.
‘Then came the Sunday, June the eleventh, I’ll never forget it because they came back from chapel and said the war was going to be over because the British and Americans had landed in Normandy and we could go home to Paris. They would take us to the big Protestant church in Bergerac where someone could get in contact with Tante Simone. There was such excitement!’
She laughed at the memory and helped herself to more wine. ‘We were sure we’d soon be in Paris, back with Maman and Papa. But of course we had to wait until after market day because there were egg
s and chickens to sell. Then we had to wait another day because his ration books hadn’t arrived at the Mairie and he thought he might need something for a bribe if we ran into the Milice.’
Bruno winced a little at what the black-clad Vichy police had done to sully the name of his profession. The term was still used. Anytime there was a claim of police brutality in the papers somebody would be sure to say, ‘They were as bad as the Milice.’
So they had set off in the donkey cart in the moonlight, David and Maya in the back with Dou-Dou, the Desbordes up front with two fat chickens, their beaks and legs tied together, under Tante Sylvie’s ample skirts in case an extra bribe was needed. Just before dawn they crossed the river Vézère at Limeuil and took the old road to Trémolat, planning to cross the Dordogne at Lalinde.
But there were armed men, Frenchmen, in the streets of Lalinde and the bridge was blocked by a barrier of heavy stones, as tall as a man. The bell was tolling and a priest told the Desbordes they were expecting German troops to come by the main road from Bergerac and they should turn back. But with his gueule cassée the Résistants let their cart through the chicane in the barrier on the bridge. Once over the river, Desbordes took the dirt track up the hill that went through the woods to Couze and Mouleydier and got to Bergerac that way.
Bruno now knew what was coming. The SS Panzer Division Das Reich, which had been based further south near Toulouse, was battling its way north through Resistance ambushes to join the German defences against the Allied landings in Normandy. An SS Panzer division was twice the size of the usual Wehrmacht armoured divisions. It had been equipped with new Panther tanks and 20-millimetre flak cannon designed for use against aircraft but which could chew up a house in a few rounds. The orders from London had been blunt: slow the Panzers at all costs. The longer the Das Reich division took to reach Normandy the greater the chance that the invasion could succeed. Bridges had been blown, towns destroyed, Resistance prisoners gunned down in ditches as the ill-armed civilians tried to slow the armoured columns. And two children and two simple peasants who knew little of the war save that Allied troops had landed were heading innocently into a battle zone.
‘I see you have some idea what happened to us at Mouleydier, Bruno,’ Maya broke off. He tried to recall the details he’d read in the history books.
‘You got there in time for the first battle, when the Resistance held the bridge for a whole day,’ Bruno said. ‘I know the Soleil group was there and some of the Cérisier company. There’s an old man still alive in St Denis who took part.’
‘I suppose you could say we took part in it, too. At least, we were casualties. I had no idea what was happening, but we were coming along the road from Varennes and I remember watching the little planes in the sky. I didn’t know they were spotting for artillery. Just as we got to the crossroads where you’d turn right to cross the Mouleydier bridge, mortar bombs erupted all around us. David pulled me off the back of the cart and into the ditch. I was furious with him because it got me all dirty and I wanted to look nice for Maman.’
The donkey had been killed, and both of the Desbordes were wounded, him seriously in the leg and the stomach, Tante Sylvie in the arm but still able to walk. Some Résistants took them to a makeshift dressing station in a house on what was supposed to be the safe side of the river. Dou-Dou the dog had disappeared. Maya remembered being put into the cellar with David and some other children, where they would be sheltered from the mortars.
The Résistants had machine guns, rifles, plenty of grenades and some bazookas that had been dropped from British aircraft by parachute. They fought off two probing attacks on the bridge and then the battle erupted in the river just behind the house where the children were sheltering. The Germans had brought up a barge to take the Résistants in the flank, but the barge was sunk by a bazooka. The battle ended when the Royal Air Force launched a long-planned bombing raid on the powder-works, an ammunitions factory just outside Bergerac. Fearing that the Résistants had called in air support, the Germans withdrew.
‘Monsieur Desbordes died two days later and we were left with Madame Desbordes, whose wounded arm and shoulder had been treated by a doctor with the Resistance,’ Maya went on. ‘She kept asking what had happened to her chickens and to the money her husband had in his pockets. My little brown paper parcel with my change of clothes had disappeared, like a lot of things. I remember the man with the tabac sitting on his threshold and crying because the Résistants had cleaned out his stock.’
Many of the people in the town had fled. A schoolteacher came and found Maya and David and they were taken to the church with the rest of the children, where at least they had food and water. David went with some of the other boys to hunt for souvenirs of the fighting and came back with some empty cartridge cases. Tante Sylvie told the teacher they had come from St Denis and were going to stay with cousins in Bergerac. Maya and David knew enough to say nothing.
The next day Monsieur Desbordes was buried in a short ceremony, the one civilian who died as a result of the battle of the fifteenth of June. When Tante Sylvie said he was a Protestant, the priest had not wanted to bury him in the church cemetery. The schoolteacher said Desbordes was obviously a veteran of the First War, a gueule cassée, so the priest relented. The Résistants took their own dead with them, to give the bodies to their families. Most of them had come from the area around Belvès, the priest explained.
‘Tante Sylvie fell ill with fever. I think her wound was infected,’ Maya said, her voice very flat. ‘She became delirious, shouting at the priest, anybody she could find, demanding someone take us all back to St Denis. I was terrified she was going to start shouting that we were Jews from Paris but she didn’t.’
She stopped, sipped some water and then drank off her glass of wine. Bruno, scanning Pamela’s bookshelves for a volume he knew was there, was counting the days in his head. He knew there had been a second battle of Mouleydier, the town’s day of tragedy. Had Maya gone through that, as well?
‘And then the war came again,’ said Maya. ‘It was the twenty-first. We were still living in the church, but all the other children had gone. They had people to look after them. We just had the madwoman, which is what Tante Sylvie had become. I was terrified of her but David kept trying to take care of her, persuade her to go back to the dressing station. Finally he succeeded, but it was deserted and we couldn’t find a doctor. We raided vegetable gardens for food, I remember eating a lot of strawberries and raw courgettes.
‘This time the Germans came with tanks, at least David said they were tanks but now I think perhaps they were those armoured cars you see in newsreels with wheels at the front and tracks behind. It began with a lot of shooting and then a Frenchman with a loudspeaker called on the Résistants to surrender. They answered him with gunfire and then the Germans came in firing cannon and the Résistants were defending. Suddenly the firing stopped. The Germans seemed to withdraw and people came out from their cellars. Tante Sylvie left the church and was walking up the main street. I was going to follow but David held me back, and that was when the bombardment started. Mortars, artillery, heavy guns, I don’t know exactly. But within an hour Mouleydier was in ruins.’
Bruno rose and went across to the bookshelves and took down a book he had lent to Pamela. He leafed through to the page he wanted and read aloud:
‘Of two hundred houses, a hundred and sixty-four were destroyed in the barrage and the fires. Twenty-two people were killed, three civilians including a nine-year-old boy, and nineteen Résistants, most of them shot after being captured.’
‘I knew the boy,’ said Maya. ‘He was called Jean.’
‘Jean Bouysset,’ said Bruno, reading from the book. ‘Then the armoured column went on to Pressignac and burned that, too.’
‘You cannot imagine how Mouleydier looked, burning, smoke everywhere, houses collapsed, streets full of rubble,’ said Maya.
There was no water, of course, and most of the wells had been blocked with rubble and charred beam
s from the houses. The schoolteacher was dead but the priest fed them. The Germans retreated into Bergerac and the Résistants took over the countryside and took David and Maya to a school where they stayed with some other children until the Germans left Bergerac in August. One of the schoolmistresses took them to the Protestant church there in a gazogène, one of the cars that had been modified to drive on charcoal gas that was kept in a large bag attached to the roof. The Protestant pastor somehow got in touch with Tante Simone. They stayed with a Protestant family until Simone could come and take them back to Chambon where she lived.
‘In September, after the liberation of Paris, we learned that our parents were no longer in the city. They had been taken to Germany,’ Maya said, her voice empty of emotion as though she had said this so many times before that she had no more tears to shed. ‘We didn’t learn until after the war that they had died in the camps. So we were orphans, living in a Jewish orphanage set up in a school near Chambon, and stayed there for three years until 1948 when we went to Israel.’
There was silence around the table until Maya said, ‘There you have it, my story of two children of war, adrift in a battle and knowing that if people learned we were Jews we’d be dead. Now perhaps you understand why we never came back. There was nothing we wanted to return to, no Desbordes, no Dou-Dou, not even the donkey. But I feel there are debts to be paid, to the Scouts and the Protestants and to the people here, and just like David I want to pay them. And now I want to go to bed.’
23
Florence and her pupils had done the town proud, Bruno thought, as he followed Maya, Yacov and the Mayor into the classroom. There was a blown-up photograph of the terrace that housed Maya’s attic as it now looked, and beside it an accomplished sketch on a large sheet of white paper showing how they could appear after the proposed transformation. The sketch was based loosely on Bruno’s idea of turning the ground floor of the buildings into a kind of arcade. He’d been assuming some simple pillars, but the sketch showed a series of stone arches that led into a covered space, large enough for thirty or forty people to gather, that housed the entrance to the museum and the museum shop. Another shop had been sketched in and listed as an art gallery. Above the museum entrance a sign had been inked in, reading Musée Halévy de St Denis.
Children of War Page 22