Sister Helene whispered, “It’s terrible, what’s happened. Not only to her, but to all the displaced children. At the very least we should try to—”
“All right,” she snapped. “I’ll allow it. Just this once.”
* * *
• • •
This morning, as was the case every morning, Sister Helene found Lucie sleeping at the very edge of her cot, nearly falling off, her sheets twisted and tossed about. Even in sleep, the most natural of states, Lucie preferred disorder. Sister Helene placed a hand on Lucie’s sweaty forehead and bent down, giving her a dry cool kiss.
* * *
• • •
It took two days to get a train. Each morning, Sister Helene and Lucie waited on the drafty platform of Gare Saint-Jean to see if there was space, but all the train cars were packed full, the station swirling with people. Finally Sister Helene begged the stationmaster to find them a seat on the night train.
It was a long journey with many stops and starts. Lucie couldn’t sleep, worried that they would not find her parents, and then Sister Helene would leave her in Paris, a place she barely remembered. She anxiously wondered how much longer it would take, with all the stops and the tired dirty passengers who stared at them blankly, some of them so thin she could see their veins through their skin.
* * *
• • •
When they arrived at Gare d’Austerlitz, Sister Helene hesitated in her cumbersome black habit, unsure which way to go, glancing down at Lucie, as if she should know. She clutched Lucie’s hand, her palm overly sweaty, and muttered that the station was so big, and there was no one to help them. Finally, she asked a passerby the way to Hotel Lutetia, which was where the newspaper had stated all the refugees were congregating, and he explained impatiently how to reach the location via the metro. But Sister Helene did not catch his last few words and was flummoxed, an immovable black figure frozen in the middle of the bustling train station. It was vast and noisy, full of harsh echoing sounds and close loud chatter. Sister Helene’s eyes kept darting around, peering up at the steel dome and then down again, and this made Lucie even more uncertain. She suddenly missed the convent with its cool stones, the pointed cypresses bordering the property, the weight of Camille’s head on her shoulder, the day portioned out into exact, predictable intervals.
“I think we should go outside,” Lucie offered.
“Outside?” Sister Helene repeated.
Lucie nodded and led Sister Helene, by her wide black sleeve, toward the exit. They emerged from the station into harsh daylight, with honking cars and trucks rearing into reverse. Miraculously, Sister Helene spied a church tower a few blocks away, as if God had outstretched His very hand to guide them.
* * *
• • •
For a long time, Sister Helene conferred in low anxious tones with the priest, while Lucie waited in the pew, fiddling with the one possession she’d been allowed to keep: the chain with a small gold heart dangling from it. She felt sleepy, lulled by the sound of their hushed voices, and by the incense-laden air, which carried a bluish tint. The priest instructed Sister Helene to inquire with city hall about the girl’s parents, or try Hotel Lutetia on Boulevard Raspail, and Sister Helene, eager to show she knew this much, said they were already planning on going there first, but they had lost their way.
“Oh,” the priest said, thrusting his chin forward. “They have everything one could possibly want there. Foie gras, meats and wines, cognacs, while the French starve after having fought this war for the Israelites.” When he said “Israelites,” he gestured to Lucie, who stared down at the dusty marbled floor, blood filling her cheeks.
* * *
• • •
They made a few mistakes, retracing their steps, squinting up at street signs. Sister Helene kept touching her rosary beads with the little white cross hanging from it. On the way there, they passed the Lycée Victor-Duruy. Schoolgirls chattered and yelled to one another gleefully. They were going home for lunch, and their fashionable mothers waited for them outside the school gates. When they saw their daughters, the mothers smiled discreetly, some of them coming over to correct a crooked collar or fasten back a lock of hair that had escaped, but overall, a rush of tender warmth emanated from the waiting mothers, as if they knew how lucky they were to have daughters. Watching them, Lucie felt ashamed in her bedraggled navy uniform and unruly hair, her bitten-down fingernails and dusty socks sticking out of her sandals. Anyone could tell that she was with Sister Helene, who carried a heavy black briefcase with such provincial formality that it was obvious they came from somewhere else.
They walked up Rue de Sèvres and turned onto Boulevard Raspail, and stopped before a crowd gathered in front of the hotel’s entrance. Sister Helene crossed herself. Some of the people wore dark threadbare clothing, holding up signs with names on them. Sometimes they let the signs drop to the ground and didn’t bother to pick them up. Others slept on the sidewalk, wrapped in thick overcoats even though it was warm.
Sister Helene hesitated before crossing the street, as if mingling with those people would contaminate her in some way. Lucie didn’t want to go near them either. But then Sister Helene crossed herself again and grabbed Lucie’s hand, pulling her across the street. She began inquiring about where to locate the repatriated, but people stared at her with hollow, uncomprehending eyes, as if the question were absurd. The crowd jumped to life when two Red Cross buses pulled up in front of the hotel. In an animated frenzy, they held up their signs with renewed vigor. Children scrambled to their feet and balanced atop abandoned crates to see who would emerge from those magical white buses. Red Cross volunteers started carrying out stretchers from the buses, weaving through the pressing crowd, and Lucie wondered what was beneath the thin sheets.
Her heart jumped into her throat when people began screaming out names: “Markus Zebelowski!” “Estelle Gobnick!” “Gerard Markowitz!” A woman threw herself at the feet of one of the men carrying a stretcher, blocking his progress toward the hotel. “My husband,” she yelled, “Adrien Epstein; he was picked up in Belleville in June 1941 . . . Do you know him? Have you seen him? Is there any news??”
Lucie thought they should look inside the hotel. From the outside, it appeared grand and ornate, with marbled columns and a red-carpeted staircase leading up to revolving glass doors. She pulled Sister Helene along, following the throng of people streaming inside.
A uniformed nurse sitting next to the door sprayed them, and the strong smell of disinfectant clouded the rooms. They both gagged from the spray’s pungent smell, their eyes watering as they struggled to regain their sight, and when they did, they found a luxurious lobby. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, faded yellow silk padding the walls, and Lucie stared up at an onyx statue of a maiden in flight, her flowing hair suspended by an imaginary wind. Sister Helene clung to her black briefcase as if it were an anchor, and gestured to the makeshift offices subdividing the lobby. In each office, a bureaucrat interviewed people who were presumably here for the same reason they were.
Lucie paused before a long wall covered in photographs: men in suits, little girls in school uniforms, mothers propping up babies arrayed in lace gowns for a family portrait, a whole elementary school class lined up in a row. Underneath each photograph a caption stated: Have you seen this person? Picked up in Paris, Marseilles, Lille, in ’40, ’41, ’43 . . . Last seen in Pithiviers, Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande . . . Left on convoy number 58, 14, 26 . . . for Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz . . . Large reward if you know the whereabouts of . . . Forever grateful, huge thanks.
Absorbed by all the faces, some plaintive, some dignified, Lucie at first didn’t hear Sister Helene’s suggestion that they talk to one of the women in the gray suits behind the desks because her parents could have passed through here, or might even be here.
“Lucie,” she repeated, gesturing to one of the partitions, “come with me.”
&
nbsp; She leapt back, staring at Sister Helene, the very suggestion incomprehensible. “My parents aren’t here,” she blurted out. “They’re not like these people.” The threadbare rug and moth-eaten coats and overwhelming smell of unwashed bodies nauseated her. Lucie failed to notice other people’s bitter looks when she shouted over Sister Helene’s desperate shushing. Her breath grew ragged and shallow as she continued to explain that this wasn’t the kind of place her parents would like; they would never come here. “We should leave. We should leave,” she kept repeating.
Finally, Sister Helene managed to speak to a woman behind one of the desks while Lucie stood a few feet away from the partition, refusing to be interviewed, her arms crossed over her chest. She turned her back to them, watching the hotel lobby fill up with all these sad people, as thin as rails, some of them half naked, some of them barely able to stand, blinking at the faded luxury. She watched them while straining to listen.
The woman asked for the child’s identification papers. She then inquired if Lucie remembered any other family members, aside from her parents.
Sister Helene touched her rosary beads. “She used to talk about her parents a great deal, and her governess, who brought her to us. We were instructed to burn her real papers, in fear of a raid on the convent, in addition to giving her a new last name. Ladoux. Unfortunately, everything else was destroyed . . .” She hesitated. “In the fire, at Oradour-sur-Glane.”
Lucie made a slight half turn, watching them out of the corner of her eye.
“I see,” the woman said.
“Aren’t the Jews, or most of them, being held in Poland? In camps?”
The woman’s eyes flickered over Lucie, who was now clearly listening.
Sister Helene leaned in closer. “You don’t think there’s any chance?”
The woman straightened some papers on her desk. “There’s the Central Tracing Agency. And the OSE. You could try there.”
“The OSE?” Sister Helene asked faintly.
“The Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants. It’s a Jewish organization that rescued many refugee children during the war and put them into orphanages and homes.” Sensing Sister Helene’s hesitation, the woman added, “But at least put up a picture of the child on the wall over there, in case anyone is looking for her. Relatives, or a friend, might know what happened to the parents.”
Then she motioned for the couple at the front of the line to step forward.
* * *
• • •
On their way out, Sister Helene froze before the wall of photographs.
Lucie pulled at her sleeve. “If they’d been here, they would have put up my photograph, to find me.”
Sister Helene crossed herself before the photographs, unable to tear herself away from the faces staring back at her.
“Please, let’s go,” Lucie whispered, panicked. “The people. They don’t look like people. They look like . . .” She tried to take a breath, but breath escaped her, and then she reached out for Sister Helene. A cold sweat peppered her chest, the edges of the room dimming, and she sensed Sister Helene holding her tightly while shapes swam before her eyes, deep blue and black blotches, as amorphous as clouds.
Chapter 42
VERA
Mid-June 1945, Paris, France
In the cab, Vera stared impassively out at Rue de Sèvres, at the slender linden trees full of green life and the American flags rippling in the wind. Jacquard’s golden curls, Madame Allard’s regret, and all of those abandoned objects in her old apartment carried a menacing quality, as though she shouldn’t have witnessed these things. She cranked down the window to smoke. A couple pushed a pram. Next to the cab, American GIs clogged the boulevard in their high green jeeps. She inhaled deeply. We’re all to blame, she thought. Just as much as Madame Allard; just as much as Etienne’s parents, who hoarded my silver and probably many other tenants’ possessions as well. Just as much as anyone. But I’m worse. I left my own daughter.
Smoke escaped her lungs. It was an argument she often had with herself, an argument that Max had refused to listen to anymore. “We had to leave,” she heard him say. “Would you have rather died in the camps?”
“Instead we sacrificed Lucie to save ourselves,” she shot back. His eyes went dark, and he turned away.
After this, she never said it again, even though she thought it, over and over.
* * *
• • •
The driver turned onto Boulevard Raspail, and she caught her breath at the sight of the Hotel Lutetia swarmed by refugees, clusters of them camped in front of the marble steps and then many more circling around the block. Poor and dirty in dark overcoats, they perched on their suitcases with dazed expressions, as though the crisp blue sky were too bright, the sun too strong. She focused on the children, with their translucent skin and curved stick legs. They had nowhere to go.
The driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “There are many, many, many.” He slowed, as if to show her how bad it was. “You want to go here, yes?”
Vera pressed her hand to the glass. “Yes.”
* * *
• • •
She pushed her way through the crowd, trying not to look too closely at the emaciated women in garish lipstick and tilted hats, their fragile frames engulfed by ill-fitting dresses, the men in those terrible striped pajamas. Vera paused before the revolving door, indicating for a woman carrying a small child to go first. “Please, after you,” Vera said, but the woman stared back at her.
She glanced down at the woman’s tattered shoes, held together by string and tape, feeling the tension of the crowd pressing behind them. She met her gaze again. “Won’t you go first?”
The woman shook her head. The child woke up and started screaming.
Vera pushed through the revolving door, assailed by the colorless spray of DDT that bathed her face and hair. An official waved her through, releasing her into the lobby’s swirling cacophony. She gripped her purse to her chest, her legs unsteady, the black-and-white parquet floor dizzying. Unsure what to do, she desperately looked at the other people. Some well-dressed men waited in lines, which had formed in front of different desks, and each desk advertised a number, but the numbers weren’t in order. Behind each desk sat a uniformed bureaucrat, dutifully typing up some kind of report, or making telephone calls, or speaking to someone sitting on the other side of the desk in a low urgent tone. Numerous chandeliers bathed the chaos in golden luxury, softening the sight of some male deportees at a nearby table drinking champagne and grinning, their faces weather-beaten, their bony fingers clutching crystal tumblers as the waitress brought them bread. One of them fingered the fresh wildflowers in the center of the table with childish pleasure. In a leather armchair by the window, a man sat in a long dress shirt, his naked brittle legs splayed out while a nurse tended to him. Having suffered such extreme starvation, he had become ageless, sexless, a remnant of a human.
Vera forced herself to stop staring, but when she let her gaze wander, the disorderly lobby echoing with clacking typewriters and ringing telephones and streams of multiple conversations made her slightly nauseated. She gripped a marble column only to discover it was an ebony figurine of Persephone, her head tossed back and arms outstretched, fleeing from Hades. Her hair was suspended in the air, as if a strong wind blew against her.
* * *
• • •
Copying the others, Vera stood at the back of a line, hoping to talk to one of the officials behind a desk. In front of her, a heavyset man in an overcoat scrutinized the stained burgundy carpet. The other lines barely moved, the people in them resigned to waiting hours, even days, for the slimmest piece of information. As she tried to suppress a rising panic, a sprawling collage on the far wall caught her eye. The wall was covered with fluttering pieces of paper, a photograph attached to each piece. Dates, names, and places tumbled over her as she hungrily scanned the boar
d. She gasped before the image of a young girl echoing Lucie’s likeness: two dark braids and a starched lace collar, the girl sat in a chair, a book open in her lap, her eyes restless. Colette Magineaux, age 6, last seen in Lyon on June 10th, 1943.
Next to Vera, a teenage boy balanced on crutches, the bandages on his foot beginning to unravel. He chewed on a piece of bread, his jaw working the hard crust. Nearby a woman in a black feathered hat cried on the shoulder of an older man in horn-rimmed glasses who twisted the buttons on his striped pajamas. He gazed unflinchingly at the board. Perhaps they too are looking for their children, Vera thought. She almost wanted to ask them if they had looked elsewhere, or knew more about this process than she did, but she knew not to. The woman continued to cry, as though she and her husband were the only two people in the room.
* * *
• • •
After waiting in line for another three hours, she finally spoke to a man behind a desk. When she told him the last place Lucie had been seen was Oradour-sur-Glane, he shook his head, and said what she already knew: there were only a handful of survivors; she could go there and possibly talk to people in nearby villages, who might know more. But his words sounded stale and tired; he barely made an effort to finish his sentence, indicating what a futile suggestion he thought this was.
* * *
• • •
Before she left, Vera pinned up Lucie’s school photograph. It was the clearest one she could find, and Katja had advised her to bring it since paperwork or other documents proving Lucie’s identity had probably been lost or purposely burned during the war. Thanks to Robert’s involvement with the underground, Katja knew that all children received new identities and papers once they were taken into hiding. It was routine, she had explained in her last letter, but please, do not get alarmed by this. A photograph is much more effective than relying on names, dates, birthplaces, which are no longer relevant.
Those Who Are Saved Page 30