Children of War (7 page)

‘If I were you I’d start by asking the Shoah Foundation in Paris; they keep a lot of records. You might also try Yad Vashem, the big research centre in Israel for Holocaust studies,’ Weiss added. ‘That’s probably the biggest database and they’re on the Internet. It would be quite something if St Denis were to join
Les Justes
, the Righteous among Nations; that’s the list of people and places honoured for risking their lives to save Jews.’

‘Indeed it would. Let me know if the rabbi comes up with anything.’

Bruno hung up and looked through his notes. He did another Google search to get an address and phone number in Paris for the Shoah Foundation and for the Jewish Boy Scouts. He then opened the website for Yad Vashem and began to explore, looking for references to France. In a section called Torchlighters, he came upon the thumbnail photo of a woman named Denise Siekierski with a French flag beside her name, and opened it. In a short filmed interview, interspersed with still photos of the young woman in wartime and then of German soldiers herding people onto railway wagons, Bruno heard her say, ‘In the Scouts, we learned to serve, and at that time that meant saving Jews.’

Fascinated, he listened to her account of working with Protestant pastors to smuggle Jews out of Marseille and then to find refuge for dozens of Jewish children in the remote villages of the Auvergne. He began to look further, but caught himself. This always happened on the Internet; one thing led to another and before he knew it, hours had flown by and he did not have the time. But he had an idea. This was the kind of research project that would interest Florence, the science teacher at the local
collège
and founder of its very popular computer club. If there was anything about the Halévy children on the Internet, they could find it.

First he had to see the Mayor. ‘You’re the town historian,’ he began. ‘Do you know anything about Jewish refugees in St Denis during the war?’

The Mayor shook his head. ‘I never heard of any Jews round here, and I can’t understand why not. I’d have thought people would have been proud of it, after the war. It sounds odd to me; that’s why I want you to look into it. Tell me about
this bequest the lawyer mentioned. Is it serious, do you think?’

‘Very serious. The lawyer wants to come down and talk to you directly.’ Bruno explained the unusual nature of David Halévy’s will and the prospect of more money if his executors approved the memorial. ‘But I need to make more inquiries. We need to know something about these children, when they were here, where they stayed, who cared for them and who brought them here.’

‘You might want to check the town archives in the basement,’ the Mayor suggested. ‘There are still files down there from the Vichy years. There might be ration cards or school enrolment lists that may have some trace of the children.’

‘I’m going to be tied up seeing Momu and the Brigadier, and nobody knows those archives like you do …’ Bruno let his voice trail away.

‘Point taken.’ The Mayor smiled, and Bruno was relieved to see that the old man suddenly looked rather less tired. ‘Leave the archives to me. It will make a pleasant change from fighting against cuts in the roads budget.’

Bruno headed back to the
collège
. Florence had started the computer club soon after being hired as a science teacher. She began by rescuing discarded laptops from the town’s
déchetterie
, then persuaded local businesses and the
Mairie
to donate their old computers and convinced
France Télécom
to provide free Internet access. Half the school was now enrolled, learning to write programs, tackle viruses and engage in video conferences with pupils in twinned schools in Scotland and Holland. The latest project was to build an online game and hope to sell it.

‘I’m sure they’ll love the idea of tracking down Jewish children in St Denis, but after what just happened to you, Bruno, you’ll have to convince me that it won’t be dangerous,’ Florence said, spooning out a thick tomato soup to her twin toddlers. Living in one of the subsidized apartments for teachers in a block adjoining the school, she could quickly go home for lunch with her children before taking them back to the
maternelle
for the rest of the afternoon. She handed Bruno a bowl of soup and scattered some basil leaves on top before serving herself.

‘It will be up to them, of course, to decide whether to take this project on,’ she said. ‘I can recommend it and you might want to come along and explain why it’s important. But the whole point about this club is that the kids have to run it.’

‘I’ll be happy to do so. This bequest could be worth a lot of money to the town,’ he said. ‘This soup is great.’

‘We made the herbs and tomatoes,’ little Daniel told him proudly. ‘We made the garden with
maman
and water it every day. That’s
basilic
in your soup and I planted it.’

‘I put in the lettuce,’ said his twin, Dora. ‘We want a garden as big as yours, Bruno, and maybe have chickens like you.’

‘You already have the chickens in the school garden
maman
made,’ said Bruno. He’d been impressed by the way Florence had persuaded Rollo and the education department that getting the
collège
pupils to create their own garden and raise their own chickens was the best way of teaching them environmental science. Once upon a time almost every pupil in the school had come from one of the surrounding farms and was raised knowing about animals and crops. But those days were long gone and more and more of the kids thought that food
came from supermarkets. Bruno reckoned that something of traditional France had died when a sandwich ceased to mean a
baguette
stuffed with ham and cheese and became sliced bread with some dubious filling, sold in triangles of plastic wrapping.

‘Would you like to share the omelette I’m making to go with Dora’s salad?’ Florence asked from the stove. ‘They’re our own eggs.’

‘I’d love to, but I have to go. I should have been at the Gendarmerie ten minutes ago,’ Bruno said, wiping his lips, finishing his glass of mineral water and kissing the children goodbye. ‘Let me know when I should come and talk to your computer club. And thanks for that delicious soup.’

Bruno barely registered the calls of ‘
Au ’voir
’ and ‘
À demain
’ and the clatter of feet on old stone stairs as the
Mairie
closed for the day. He was rapt, eyes fixed on his computer screen, making notes as he read the material the Shoah Foundation had sent him on the
Eclaireurs Israélites de France
, the Jewish Boy Scouts, and their founder, Robert Gamzon.

Bruno had long been fascinated by the tangled myths and realities of the Resistance and the various underground movements that sometimes seemed as concerned with political rivalries as with fighting the Nazi occupation and the Vichy régime. He had read widely, talked at length to some of the survivors and thought he knew the subject quite well. But now he felt on a voyage of discovery, learning something that was at once entirely new to him and deeply moving. It revealed a whole aspect of what it meant to be French.

He learned that France had not one Scout movement, but four. There was one for the Roman Catholics, another for the Protestants, yet another for the Jews and now one for the Muslims. Nor had he known how prescient many of his countrymen had been, beyond De Gaulle and that handful of politicians who had sounded the alarm on Nazi aggression in the 1930s.

Robert Gamzon, an engineer and devoted member of the Boy Scouts, had been one of them. When the British and French governments signed the Munich pact in September 1938, surrendering Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s demands, Gamzon acted. As founder and commissioner for the Jewish Scouts, Gamzon bought a farm near Saumur to establish a school for Jewish refugees from Germany. At the same time he raised money to buy houses in remote rural areas and began moving into them Jewish children from the cities. Convinced of the Nazis’ intentions towards the Jews and fearing the prospect of France’s defeat, he thought it an essential precaution. He moved the administrative centre of his Scout movement to Moissac, deep in south-western France, and persuaded those of his scoutmasters who were too old for military service to move to the south and set up more safe houses.

Gamzon himself went into the French army. In May 1940 he won the Croix de Guerre for blowing up the main telephone switchboard and control system in Reims while under fire. After Marshal Pétain took power amid the French collapse and sued for peace, Gamzon headed south to establish schools for the children he had moved to the countryside. There he launched another organization to help the Jewish refugees who had fled to France from elsewhere in Europe. They were now being pushed into internment camps, by the Nazis and the Vichy government in the truncated southern half of France nominally ruled by them.

Through contacts he made in Vichy, Gamzon established an intelligence network that warned him of planned arrests and round-ups. This was the origin of the
Sixième
, the clandestine wing of the Scouts, which forged documents and provided
fake identities and ration papers, and found jobs in hospitals and on farms.

Meanwhile, his wife Denise was based at Moissac, which had become a sanctuary for Jewish refugees. But the noose was tightening in the summer of 1942 when the Vichy police began the
rafles
, the raids to round up Jews. In Paris on 16 July, over 13,000 Jews were rounded up in
Opération Vent Printanier
, Operation Spring Breeze, and handed over to the German authorities A third of them were children, and Bruno was sickened to read that several thousand members of the French fascist party helped the police arrest and cram them into Paris’s Vélodrome d’Hiver to await the trains that led to Germany and finally to the death camp at Auschwitz.

Shortly before that
rafle
, Denise had received a phone call from her husband who said only, ‘Send back the bills for 1936.’ When she protested there were no such bills, he replied, ‘Think.’ Deducing that he meant the Jews who had arrived that year in France she sent the three men concerned into the woods. At dawn the next day the house was raided by Gendarmes. Denise then contacted an old friend, Hélène Rulland, who ran the Protestant Girl Guides. Hélène found remote villages to hide another thirty Jewish children.

Bruno began scribbling notes to himself. Almost certainly the Halévy children had been given false papers, so there would be little point in searching for traces of them by name in St Denis. The Protestant connection seemed promising, since Bergerac had been a Protestant stronghold in France’s wars of religion and there were churches and pastors locally he could ask. He read of the small village of Le Chambon, in the Auvergne highlands, whose pastor André Trocmé organized
sanctuary for some five thousand Jewish children in the remote woods and valleys. His cousin Daniel, the local teacher, was later shot by the Gestapo along with the village doctor, Roger le Forestier. Bruno made a note of all the names he could, planning to cross-check them against the St Denis records to see if there might be a family connection.

He sat back, feeling he was making progress, but wondering why all this was not much better known in France. It was something to be proud of, that an entire community was prepared to take such risks for the children of strangers. And it gave him a stirring tale to tell the young people in the
collège
computer club.

It was time to go. Bruno reluctantly closed his computer and called Fabiola to tell her he was on his way. She was already in the stables, saddling Victoria. By the time he arrived, Balzac at his heels, Fabiola had also saddled Hector, Bruno’s own horse. He kissed Pamela in greeting. She smiled but said nothing and returned to checking over the bridles and leathers. Bruno wasn’t sure whether she was embarrassed by the previous evening’s exchange or was damping down her frustration at not being allowed to ride. Pamela insisted that her collarbone was completely healed from her riding accident. Her doctor disagreed.

‘One more week,’ Fabiola said briskly, in what Bruno thought of as her doctor’s voice, the one that brooked no argument. ‘Then you can start some gentle trots around the paddock.’

‘But I can’t think about buying a new horse unless I can give it a test ride. I keep missing absolute bargains because you won’t let me back into the saddle,’ Pamela complained, petting Bruno’s dog and fondling the long, floppy ears. People
who liked horses were invariably fond of dogs, Bruno had noticed.

As Balzac snuffled his way around Hector’s legs to greet the horse whose stable he often shared, Bruno sat on the bench to put on his riding boots. He understood Pamela’s frustration, unable to ride but equally unable to keep out of the stables, watching Bruno and Fabiola take out the horses while aching to join them. Without complaint, she performed the physiotherapy and exercises Fabiola had recommended to get her muscles into shape, ready to ride again. He knew she spent hours on the Internet looking at horses for sale.

While she never spoke of the horse on which she’d been injured, she kept a photo of Bess on the table by her bed. Bess had broken a leg in a rabbit hole while galloping down a slope, throwing Pamela, who had been knocked unconscious and broken a collarbone in the fall. Bruno knew that he had no choice but to put the animal out of its misery; the bones had been shattered. Although Pamela had said he’d been right, he suspected that in some corner of her heart she would never forgive him. They hadn’t spoken of the incident since, but Bruno sometimes felt her resentment. Perhaps a new horse would ease matters. He hoped so.

Their relationship had never been easy for him to navigate. After an unhappy first marriage in Britain, Pamela insisted on her independence. She made it clear that she saw no permanent future with Bruno, but was content to treat him as a dear friend whom she welcomed, although less frequently, to her bed. At first, Bruno had assumed this was the result of the abstinence enforced by her injuries, but his doubts were growing. Pamela remained warm and loving, but while he
could not define precisely the change he felt in her manner toward him, he felt a reticence in her embraces. One night after a lovemaking that did not seem to have pleased her, he had asked her if something was wrong. ‘It’s not you, Bruno, it’s me, still sad about Bess, I suppose,’ Pamela had replied, kissing him fondly. ‘It will pass.’ But it hadn’t.