A Pocket Full of Seeds (11 page)

“We will be on the lookout for them, and we will tell them where you are.”

“Why can’t I stay here?”

“It’s not safe.”

“I could stay in the little cellar room behind the closet. Nobody would ever think of looking there.”

“Impossible. You must do what we say now, Nicole. It is not safe for you to stay here.”

“Not safe for whom?” I asked, and then I was sorry I said it. Nobody answered me. A little later, when both of them were not looking, I left the house, got on my bicycle, and rode back to Aix-les-Bains.

There was a lock on our apartment door, and when I asked, Mme. Barras said the Germans had put it there, and she did not have the key. She asked me to go, and closed the door.

I went to the house of M. and Mme. Bernard, friends of my parents. It seemed to me there was a fluttering of the curtains when I knocked at the door but nobody answered.

There was no one at M. Henri’s house, and the baker who had a shop downstairs said he thought they had gone to visit their married daughter in Annecy.

Mme. Latour opened the door when I knocked but did not let me in. She said she was a sick woman, and M. Latour had a bad heart. She said I should go and ask the Henris to help me.

“But I have gone there, Madame, and they are not at home.”

“Try again later,” she said, and shut the door.

All day I rode my bike through the town but there was no place to go. I passed the Rostens’ house but did not stop. I did not know until weeks later that they had found their way safely to Switzerland. Then I was afraid of what I might see if I looked through their windows. The day was warm and clear but as night came the temperatures dropped. I saw children playing, men hurrying home from work, women with bundles in their arms. I rode all over town, and everything seemed as it had always seemed. Nothing had changed. Only I was no longer a part of it.

I had eaten nothing since breakfast. I had no money to buy food. I was tired, hungry, and so cold that I believed if I stopped bicycling I would freeze to death. There was a blank in my mind about where to go and what to do. I only knew that I would not go back to the Durands whatever happened. I would not leave town. I would not lose my parents like M. Bonnet’s children. I would look after myself until they returned to me.

As long as I could, I bicycled, past the baths, the park, the Arc de Campanus, along the Jake, the Palais de Savoie ... It seemed finally that nothing else moved that night except for me.

On the Rue de Sévigné, a half block from my school, I could go no farther. I dragged myself to the entrance and huddled against the door. I knew that the building was locked and empty at this hour, but there was no place else for me to go.

I woke and slept, woke and slept, woke and slept all through the night. There were warm and happy dreams that I awoke from with my teeth chattering and the tears still wet on my face. I drifted back and forth from cold to warm, from despair to joy. It was an endless night with dreams that finally became all beginnings and ends, and a cold that grew to be a part of myself.

Mlle. Legrand found me there in the morning and pulled me inside the building.

“My poor Nicole,” she said, embracing me, “my poor child, why didn’t you come to me at once?”

She helped me into her office and made me some tea on her hot plate. She told me I could stay at the school and sleep in the dormitory with the girls who came from the country. She would arrange for me to get a set of false papers.

“Nobody would help me,” I told her. “None of my father’s friends. Nobody.”

“They were afraid,” she said.

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But it is my duty to help you, and that is more important than being afraid. You are my student and have been under my care since you were small. You are also French, and so am I.”

Later some of the girls said she took me in because she knew the Germans were losing the war, and that she would be charged with collaborating. But if she could prove that she had hidden a Jewish child then perhaps she could ask for clemency.

I cannot tell. All I know is that she took me in when there was no other place for me to go.

December 1943

Three weeks after it happened, Mme. Sorel came looking for me at school. It was late in the afternoon, and I was working in the study hall, recopying a passage out of Pascal’s
Pensées.

“I want to talk to you,” she said. She looked cautiously at the other girls in the room and lowered her voice. “Alone,” she said. “Outside.”

She raised her eyebrows at me in a significant way, and I understood that she did not trust the other girls. It was hard not to smile. All of them knew what had happened to my family, and that I was hiding at school, using false papers.

Marie and Hélène were smiling at me, and Hélène blew out her cheeks, imitating Mme. Sorel, who was very fat. I came quickly around the table where I was working, took my jacket and followed Mme. Sorel out into the garden.

It had been raining that morning, and there was an icy bite in the air. The stone bench under the wild chestnut tree was too wet to sit on, so we walked around the small garden. As soon as we were outside, Mme. Sorel pulled her scarf tightly around her head, put on her gloves, and started crying. She made a lot of noise, and I was glad there was nobody else to see or hear her. It was just as well that we had come outside because the girls would surely have made funny faces and perhaps even made me laugh.

But here I did not laugh.

“Madame,” I said, putting my hand on her arm, “are you all right? Can I bring you some water?”

She shook her head but was still unable to speak. She held on to ray arm, and together we continued walking around the garden. I had not taken my hat and my ears began to feel cold. Also, my toes were numb so I stamped my feet several times to warm them up.

Finally she said, “I have a message for you. From your mother.”

I stopped walking. “Where is my mother?”

The tears on Mme. Sorel’s face seemed to stand still in the cold. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“But you said you had a message from her. Where did you see her?”

“In the Hotel de Paris. It’s where they took all of us. For four days
...
” She began crying again. “And then they took everybody away by train, but they let me go because my brother, Gabriel, came and told them I wasn’t Jewish.” She rubbed her gloved hand across her face, wiping the tears across her cheeks. Her face was red and chapped. I pulled a handkerchief out of my jacket and handed it to her.

“It wasn’t me,” she said, gasping and sobbing. “I would have gone with him, but my brother told them, and gave them money. But when this fish-faced German came and asked me was I Jewish, I told him no I wasn’t, and neither was Aristide. I told him Aristide converted, that we were married in the church, and that now he was more religious than I. I told him about the holy pictures in the house, and the crucifix over our bed, but he said, ‘‘Your husband is a Jew, and you are lucky we are letting you go."

Mme. Sorel wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she offered me the handkerchief back. But I didn’t want to take it since it was wet from her tears and her nose.

“So they took him away with the others, and they wouldn’t let me even see him or say good-bye, or bring him any clothes or food to take with him. You should see what they did to our house—like animals. When I got back I couldn’t believe it.”

“Yes,” I told her, “they did the same at our house.”

“They broke the furniture and stole all the silverware, and the radio. They even took the crucifix—it was a beautiful one, silver, that belonged to my grandmother. I should have come to you before, Nicole, because I promised your mother. But I haven’t been well, and it took me some time to find out that you were hiding here at school.”

“Where are they taking them?” I asked her.

“Who knows? There are prison camps all over France now. France is one big prison camp. To any one of them, I suppose. There is no way of finding out. My brother—he knows the mayor. Nobody knows. We must be patient, and pray that the war ends soon.”

“It will,” I said. “My father told me, just before it happened, that they were losing. He said the Germans would be driven out of France before the summertime.”

“Pray the Good Lord he is right,” she said, “and all of us are reunited with our loved ones.”

I nodded, and she took my hand and squeezed it.

But I could wait no longer. Not even until the summertime. I had resolved this morning that I would turn myself over to the Germans. I missed my family so much that prison camps no longer held any terrors for me. As long as I was with them, it would be better than it was now.

Day by day my loneliness had grown deeper and harder to bear. For the first few days when I returned to the school, there had been the excitement of being a fugitive, and still the hope that my parents would somehow escape. The hope had gone as the dismal, lonely days became longer. Today, I had resolved during morning class that I would give myself up. It was while Mlle. Reynaud was dictating Pascal’s passage that I made the decision.

“Nicole, your mind is wandering again,” she said, and added, after inspecting my paper, that my handwriting was even worse than usual, and that I would have to copy the entire passage over again for homework.

I had decided to give myself up. Perhaps today I would go, or tomorrow, or the next day. But I would go. And now, here was Mme. Sorel with a message from my mother. It seemed almost a sign.

“Your mother said,” Mme. Sorel was saying, “for you to behave.”

I looked down at the ground, and moved my foot back and forth a few times. This message was surely from my mother.

“She said you must eat as much good food as you can get, keep yourself as clean and warm as possible, and not be always talking back to grownups, and thinking that you know best.”

I was looking down at my foot, and thinking that it was a good thing I had not received her message before I went to the Durands. Maman would be ashamed of me.

Mme. Sorel was silent.

“Was there anything else ?” I asked.

She said nothing, so I looked up. She was crying again, this time silently. I had to wait a few more minutes before she continued.

“There is more,” she said. “Your mother said that she loves you very much and has faith that you will always do the right thing.”

“She said that?” I stopped looking at my feet.

“Yes, and there was one more thing.”

“What was it?”

“That you must not get caught.”

I looked down at my feet.

“She said that whatever suffering lies ahead for them, she and your father could bear up as long as they knew you were safe. She said knowing that you were safe would keep them going, and that they would come back to you as soon as they could.”

“And
...
   ?”

“That’s all. Maybe she would have said more but when they let me go everybody wanted me to take a message to somebody or other, and the Germans were all over
...
listening.”

She shuddered, and looked over her shoulder. “I feel as if they’re listening now. Everywhere I go, I feel as if they are listening.”

“And ... my father?” I asked.

“Your father?”

“Didn’t he send me a message too?”

Mme. Sorel blinked, and then put an arm on my shoulder. “But he was not with us. They separated the men and the women.”

“Not together?”

She held me in her arms, and offered me the handkerchief. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose. Not together!

After a while, she said, “How are they treating you here, Nicole?”

“Quite well, Madame.”

“You know,” she said, “I was astonished to hear that you were at the school. Everybody knows that Mlle. Legrand is pro-German. Your family had so many friends. Why did you take such a chance, and come here?”

“Because nobody else would take me.”

Mme. Sorel left very soon afterward. She said she would come back and bring me some cheese and maybe some apples and a pair of warm stockings. Her brother had many connections. I never saw her again. She left Aix-les-Bains, and nobody knew where she went.

So I will not give myself up to the Germans. I will wait here at school in Aix-les-Bains for the war to end and my parents to return.

I am sorry now that I gave Françoise my locket with the pictures of Maman and Papa in it. I would like to feel it around my neck, and think that their faces are with me all the time.

I have the picture album. It is the only thing I took from the apartment, and I think it was the best. All of those pictures are so happy. There is one I like more than any of the others. It was taken at the beach, in 1939, before the war started. Papa is seated on a blanket in the sand. There is a large picnic basket next to him. Jacqueline is sitting in his lap, eating a peach. I am kneeling on one side of him, laughing up into his face, and Maman, seated on the other side, is waving and smiling at the camera. I can see that picture even when I close my eyes. Even when I am in my bed at night. I like to think of that picture, and I tell them when they come to me that soon we will be together again. Soon there will be a day like that day when our family packs a huge picnic lunch in a basket and goes off together to the beach. I know that there will be a day like that, and sometimes, in the darkness here, I can feel the sunshine on my face.

WITH GRATITUDE to Fanny Krieger, who shared her story with me, and with admiration that her loving and generous spirit could not be stifled by the Nazi horror.

Copyright © 1973 by Marilyn Sachs

Originally published by Doubleday [0595338461]

Electronically published in 2012 by Belgrave House