by Robin Wells
We climbed three flights of stairs and knocked. My tante Margaux opened the door, her eyes red-rimmed, the bags beneath them more creased and puffy than the last time I’d seen her. She wore an apron over a black dress that accentuated her gaunt frame.
“You are too late.” She folded her arms across her chest.
Maman and Papa looked as bewildered as I felt. “Too late for what?” Papa asked.
“The funerals. We buried them yesterday.”
“What?” Maman gasped.
My father’s face went white. “Who?”
“Roland and your father.” Margaux frowned with irritation, her tone terse. “Didn’t you get the telegram?”
Papa staggered backward.
Mama dropped her bag and put her arm around him to steady him. “This is the first we’ve heard of this,” she said. “He needs to sit down.”
Margaux stepped aside to allow us into the parlor. Maman and I helped Papa to a sofa.
Papa’s face was pale and waxy-looking, his voice was a low croak. “My father. My brother. Both . . . gone?”
“If you did not know, why are you here?”
Maman answered for him. “Everyone is fleeing Paris ahead of the Wehrmacht.”
“What happened?” Papa asked.
“Roland was taking your father to the barber. Your father fell in the street—no one knows why. Perhaps it was his heart, perhaps he stumbled. Roland bent down to help him, and a truck hit them both.”
“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!” Papa’s face was white. He suddenly looked very frail and ill. It rattled me to my core, seeing my strong papa in such a state.
“The doctor said death was instantaneous for them both,” Margaux said.
“So there was no pain,” Maman stroked Papa’s arm. “They did not suffer.”
I went into the kitchen and found a decanter of brandy and a glass. I carried both to the living room and poured Papa a drink. His hand was shaking, so Maman helped him tilt the glass to his mouth. Tante Margaux moved to take the decanter away from me. In my first act of open rebellion against an adult, I refused to let her. Instead I refilled the glass and handed it to Maman, who took a tiny sip herself, then helped Papa down the rest. Margaux frowned at me. I cast her a mutinous look and refilled the glass yet again.
“If you came to stay here, I am afraid I have no room,” Tante Margaux said. “My parents, my sister and her family, our daughter and her children are here. My two sons’ wives and children are staying in your father’s apartment.”
“I—I see.” Papa rubbed his eyes.
“You cannot throw us on the street, Margaux.” Maman’s voice was like sharpened steel. “We spent two nights sleeping in a church in Lyon, and Marseilles seems just as crowded. You have just dealt Alphonse a terrible shock.”
“Yes, but I only have limited beds, and . . .”
“We will sleep on the floor tonight and tomorrow.” Maman spoke as if it were already settled. “That will give us time to make other arrangements. I am sure Alphonse’s father and brother would not want you to turn us away at such a time.”
“No! No, of course not.” She gave an insincere smile. “You are welcome here.”
—
We did not feel welcome. We slept on pallets in the kitchen. I listened to my father and mother talk softly. I heard Papa’s muffled sobs. I cannot tell you what that did to my heart, to hear my father cry.
I was too young to fully comprehend the depth of despair he must have been feeling—to have lost his last living parent and only sibling, to have fled his home against his wife’s objections, to not be welcome at the place of refuge he’d counted on. I was also, blessedly, too young to understand the direness of our situation.
I remember thinking, How can an old man fall in the street when the Nazis are invading? How can everyday tragedies still happen, while our country is under attack? The very least God could do, it seemed, was to grant a reprieve on non-war disasters.
8
AMÉLIE
1940
The next day, we bought flowers and went to the church graveyard. I did not have a close relationship with either my uncle or grandfather—I hadn’t seen them in several years—but Papa’s grief was a noose around my heart.
After talking with the priest, Papa wanted to visit the graves alone. Maman and I stayed in the church and said prayers for their souls and the safety of Thomas and Pierre. I prayed for Joshua, as well—as well as for comfort for Papa.
Maman encouraged Papa to call a professor he knew at the university at Aix-en-Provence, about thirty miles away. There was no work for Papa, but the professor arranged for us to stay in a dormitory.
Once there, I thought I would go crazy; I was living quite literally on top of my parents in a bunk bed. There was no kitchen; we ate fruit and vegetables we purchased in town, and had one meal a day at a pension for the elderly. It was hot, it was miserable, and I thought things couldn’t get any worse.
In about a week, they did. On June 10, as Maman and I were coming out of a patisserie, we heard planes overhead. A few minutes later, we heard several distant blasts.
A crowd gathered on the street to stare at the sky. Several separate plumes of smoke were spiraling upward from the direction of Marseilles.
“What is happening?” Maman asked.
“It looks like Marseilles has been bombed,” responded a woman in a blue and white dress.
“It’s further east,” said a man in a stylish suit. “Looks like Hyères.”
We hurried back to the dorm and waited for Papa to come home from the library. Maman grabbed him the moment he entered the room. “The Germans are bombing us!”
“No.” Papa sank heavily on the bed. Fatigue and grief were etched on his face. He looked, I realized with alarm, like an old man. “The Italians are.”
—
Maman and I gaped like a couple of fishes.
“That makes no sense,” Maman said.
Papa heaved a sigh. “Mussolini has been waiting to attack a weakened country. Everyone thought it would be Yugoslavia, but he is an opportunist, and . . . well, France is about to fall.”
“Has the whole world gone mad?” Mama wailed.
“So it seems.”
“I told you we should have stayed in Paris!”
“Alas, Marie—the Wehrmacht are advancing on the city even faster than anyone feared.”
“Well, we can’t remain here. We must join the Chaussants in the country. We were invited, and they have plenty of room.”
Papa nodded. I don’t know if he really agreed or just conceded. This was the first time I had seen grief up close. On Papa, it looked like a serious illness.
And so we began another long and arduous train journey, this time toward Dijon. Since we were now heading north, the crowding was not as bad.
As the train rattled down the track, we learned from the gentleman seated next to us that the French government had fled Paris for Tours.
The government had fled? I could scarcely take it in. All of my life, I had believed that my country was an immutable force—one of those things that was absolute, that could not fail, that was the bedrock of existence. God and country—the words went together. And now . . . the government, the very heart of my country, was running? I felt as if the sky were falling.
We were bone-tired when we pulled into the station at Dijon. M. Chaussant’s farm was several miles beyond the city, near the small town of Arcy-sur-Cure. Papa found a taxi driver who had just relocated from Paris to give us a ride. On the drive, he told us about l’exode.
“You were fortunate to travel out of Paris by train,” he said. “The roads were virtually impassable. Not only Parisians, but refugees from northern France and Belgium, people with terrible stories of bombed-out homes—many on foot, others in trucks or cars or on bicycles, or carts pulled by h
orses and mules and even oxen. People ran out of gas and just abandoned their vehicles. My taxi, fortunately, has two gasoline tanks.
“The first day, it took fifteen hours to travel five kilometers. A regiment of French troops was trying to move north, and we couldn’t even clear the road to let them pass.”
“Mon Dieu,” Maman murmured.
“Many of the travelers were French soldiers heading home, some wounded, others full of despair. Oh, the tales they told!” He lifted his hands from the steering wheel and clasped his cheeks until I feared he was about to veer off the road. “It was enough to raise the hairs on your head.”
Maman leaned forward, her eyes anxious. “What did they say?”
“They said that the Germans are fighting with weapons that we’re not prepared to defend against. Their tanks are unassailable. And the airplanes . . . the German Luftwaffe flies very high, then suddenly swoops low, many planes darkening the sky all at once. They are bombing the roads without regard for civilians. C’est terrible. C’est vraiment terrible!”
Maman kept wadding up the fabric on her dress, leaving big blotches of wrinkles. It was so unlike her that I feared she was losing her mind.
—
It was dusk when we pulled up to the farm. Yvette was working in the garden when the taxi squealed to a stop. I jumped out of the vehicle and flew toward her. She shaded her eyes, then started running toward me. We fairly crashed into each other’s arms.
“Is Pierre with you?” she asked when we pulled apart.
“Non.” The question hurt my feelings—or maybe it was the way her face fell at my answer that crushed my heart. It was probably both. I feared that she would have preferred to see Pierre instead of me.
“We haven’t heard from him,” I said. “Have you?”
“Non. But then, the mail is not getting through very well.”
Neither were telegrams. Nothing seemed to work as it was supposed to. So many people had fled their homes, leaving their jobs unattended.
I tried to push aside my dismay about Yvette’s greeting. I did not want to let Yvette’s infatuation with my brother ruin our reunion. “Pierre will know to look here for us,” I said.
We linked arms and walked toward the farmhouse.
At dinner, the war was all anyone could talk about. “The BBC says Paris has been declared an open city,” Yvette’s father said.
“What does that mean?” Yvette asked.
“It means that an enemy can just walk in and no one will lift a finger in defense.” Papa’s voice was bitter.
Yvette’s father took a gentler tone. “It is saying to the Germans, ‘Don’t bomb us. We won’t fight you.’”
Yvette and I looked at each other. “So now France will be part of Germany?”
“Never!” Her grandfather’s eyes blazed out of his weathered, sunken face. “France will never cease to be France.”
“But . . . what does this mean? Will the soldiers still fight?”
“Not in Paris,” Yvette’s father said.
“Elsewhere?”
There was a long silence. “We do not know,” M. Chaussant said softly.
“So . . . if the army stops fighting, will Pierre and Thomas come home?” Yvette asked.
“How can they?” Maman asked. “They can’t go to Paris if it’s occupied.”
“If Paris falls, all of France falls,” Papa announced.
“Is that true?” Yvette asked.
She was looking at her father, but Grand-père’s hand banged hard on the wooden table. “France will fight. We always have, we always will.” His tone was stern, the kind of tone that said, Do not dispute my word.
No one did.
—
The next morning, a family—a large blond man, his dark-haired wife, and their two sweet-faced daughters, aged seven and nine—stopped and asked for water. They introduced themselves as the Morans. They had owned a boulangerie in the seventh arrondissement, and they had fled Paris just two days before. They were traveling the back roads when their car had broken down. They were now afoot, trying to get to a family member’s home in Dijon.
Maman and Mme Chaussant insisted that they join us for lunch. As they ate, M. Moran told us what had been happening in Paris.
“We could hear bombings as early as June third—Orly, Bourget, and even some buildings in the fifteenth and sixteenth arrondissements. The newspapers and French radio said we should stay and wait, that if an evacuation was necessary, we would be told to leave. I believed them.” His voice trembled. “I figured, the girls’ public school was still in session. Surely the government would not still hold school if it were unsafe.” He shook his head, his mouth tight, his eyes bitter. “I was such a fool.”
His wife covered his hand with her own. “You only did what you thought was right.”
“I was a fool! On June eighth, with no notice, the schools closed. That evening, the BBC said the Germans were just 122 kilometers north of Paris. The Boches were at our very door, yet French radio said everything was fine! On June tenth, we learned that the government had fled the day before.”
Grand-père uttered a low oath.
M. Moran’s eyes blazed with outrage. “When I learned that the government had run away like cowards in the night, I felt so betrayed!”
“You were,” Grand-père said bluntly. “We were all betrayed.”
The roads were so congested that it had taken the Morans two days to travel a distance that normally would have taken two hours. To conserve gasoline, M. Moran turned off the engine whenever traffic hit a standstill. He had prudently brought extra gas cans and they might have made it to their destination, but the engine had stalled and would not restart.
After lunch—and after offering them an opportunity to clean up and change clothes—Grand-père gave them a ride in his old truck into Arcy-sur-Cure, where they could telephone their relatives for a ride into Dijon.
That night, French radio announced that all men aged eighteen to fifty should leave Paris immediately to keep from being forced to labor for the Germans. I wondered, of course, about Joshua. At every turn, I wondered about him.
9
AMÉLIE
1940
On June 14, the radio announced that Paris had been occupied by German troops. What had been inconceivable a few short weeks ago had come to pass.
The reaction of our parents was, to Yvette and I, more terrifying than the actual news. Both of our fathers shed tears. Even steely, bristly Grand-père wiped his face with a handkerchief, then harrumphed and muttered about catching a cold. Maman bawled like a baby. Even Yvette’s mother, the calmest, most stoic woman I had ever known, cried.
We remained glued to the radio, eager for details, although we could hardly bear to hear them. The next day, the BBC aired a Parisian’s firsthand report. It went something like this:
Early yesterday morning, I was awakened by a German-accented voice on a loudspeaker. It said that the Wehrmacht were moving in and occupying Paris, and announced an eight o’clock curfew for the evening. Most of the stores were boarded up and closed. The streets were largely deserted. The Wehrmacht marched in, in formation—a frightening sight. We’d been told that the German soldiers were skinny and scrawny and malnourished, but that wasn’t true.
They were well fed, both taller and brawnier than our French troops. Nothing about them appeared to be weak or sickly. They had sturdy boots, and they were all clean-shaven. They marched in to the music of a Nazi band. We heard they had stopped their advance outside the city to shave and shine their boots before entering Paris.
Next came the tanks and trucks and cannons—big and ominous, thundering on the pavement. The Nazis hung a flag with a swastika from the Arc de Triomphe. Throughout Paris, swastikas replaced French flags—on government buildings, on monuments, in front of the large hotels. Signs were posted throughout t
he city saying that Paris was now under the “protection” of the German army.
“Protection!” Papa scoffed.
We have heard that the French government relocated first to Tours, then to Bordeaux, then to Clermont-Ferrand, and is now at Vichy. All is quiet now in Paris, although reportedly fighting continues south of Paris.
On June 17, we learned that Prime Minister Paul Reynaud had resigned, and that Marshal Philippe Pétain, a French hero from the Great War, had taken his place. Petain immediately made an announcement that was carried over and over on all radio channels. “It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that you must stop fighting,” he said. “The French government calls on the German government for an armistice.”
“What is an armistice? What does this mean?” I asked.
Maman looked at Papa. “Is an armistice the same as a surrender?”
“Yes,” Grand-père answered bitterly. “It is the word ‘surrender’ wearing lipstick and high heels.”
—
We soon learned that France had, indeed, completely surrendered. We heard that Hitler had demanded that the armistice be signed in the same railroad car where Germany was forced to surrender at the end of the Great War.
On June 18, we gathered around the radio for the BBC broadcast. General Charles De Gaulle addressed France from London.
As he began speaking, my skin tingled and my very bones vibrated. I knew in my heart that this was something to capture, to remember. I grabbed a piece of paper and, in my fastest shorthand, jotted down the key parts in his exact words, which I then committed to memory.
It is true we were, we are, overwhelmed by the mechanical, ground, and air forces of the enemy. Infinitely more than their number, it is the tanks, the aeroplanes, the tactics of the Germans which are causing us to retreat. It was the tanks, the aeroplanes, the tactics of the Germans that surprised our leaders to the point of bringing them to where they are today.
But has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!