Sarah's Key (13 page)

It was nearly over. She opened her eyes again. The policeman holding her had fat pink hands. She looked up at him while the other man shaved off the last locks.

It was the red-haired, friendly policeman from her neighborhood. The one her mother used to chat with. The one who always had a wink for her on her way to school. The one she had waved to the day of the roundup, the one who had looked away. He was too close now to look away.

She held his gaze, not glancing down once. His eyes were a strange, yellowish color, like gold. His face was red with embarrassment, and she thought she felt him tremble. She said nothing, staring at him with all the contempt she could muster.

He could only look back at her, motionless. The girl smiled, a bitter smile for a child of ten, and brushed off his heavy hands.

I

LEFT THE NURSING HOME in a sort of daze. I was due at the office, where Bamber was waiting for me, but I found myself heading back to the rue de Saintonge. There were so many questions going around my head that I felt swamped. Was Mamé telling the truth or had she gotten mixed up, confused, due to her illness? Had there really been a Jewish family living here? How could the Tézacs have moved in and not known anything, as Mamé had stated?

I walked slowly through the courtyard. The concierge’s loge would have been here, I thought. It had been transformed years ago into a small apartment. A row of metal mailboxes lined the hallway; there was no longer a concierge who brought mail up every day to each door. Madame Royer, that was her name, Mamé had said. I had read much about concierges and their particular role during the arrests. Most of them had complied with police orders, and some had even gone further, showing the police where certain Jewish families had gone into hiding. Others had plundered vacant apartments and hoarded goods right after the roundup. Only a few, I read, had protected the Jewish families the best they could. I wondered what sort of role Madame Royer had played here. I thought fleetingly of my concierge on the boulevard du Montparnasse; she was my age, and from Portugal, she had not known the war.

I ignored the elevator and walked up the four flights. The workmen were out on their lunch hour. The building was silent. As I opened the front door, I felt something strange engulf me, an unknown sensation of despair and emptiness. I walked to the older part of the apartment, the bit that Bertrand had shown us the other day. This is where it had happened. This is where the men came knocking on that hot July morning, just before dawn.

It seemed to me that everything I had read in the past weeks, everything I had learned about the Vel’ d’Hiv’ came to a head here, in the very place I was about to live in. All the testimonies I had pored over, all the books I had studied, all the survivors and witnesses I had interviewed made me understand, made me see, with an almost unreal clarity, what had happened between the walls that I now touched.

The article I had started to write a couple of days ago was nearly finished. My deadline was coming up. I still had to visit the Loiret camps outside Paris, and Drancy, and I had a meeting scheduled with Franck Lévy, whose association was organizing most of the commemorations for the sixtieth anniversary of the roundup. Soon, my investigation would be over, and I’d be writing about something else.

But now that I knew what had happened here, so close to me, so intimately linked to me, to my life, I felt I had to find out more. My search wasn’t over. I felt I had to know everything. What had happened to the Jewish family living in this place? What were their names? Were there any children? Had anybody come back from the death camps? Was everybody dead?

I wandered through the empty apartment. In one room, the wall was being torn down. Lost in the rubble, I noticed a long deep opening, cleverly hidden behind a panel. It was now partly revealed. It would have made a good hiding place. If these walls could talk. . . . But I didn’t need them to talk. I knew what had happened here. I could see it. The survivors had told me about the hot, still night, the bangs on the doors, the brisk orders, the bus ride through Paris. They had told me about the stinking hell of Vel’ d’Hiv’. The ones who told me were the ones who lived. The ones who got away. The ones who tore off their stars and escaped.

I wondered suddenly if I could cope with this knowledge, if I could live here knowing that in my apartment a family had been arrested and sent on to their probable deaths. How had the Tézacs lived with that? I wondered.

I pulled out my cell phone and called Bertrand. When he saw my number show up, he mumbled, “Meeting.” That was our code for “I’m busy.”

“It’s urgent,” I said.

I heard him murmur something, then his voice came across clearly.

“What’s up,
amour
?” he said. “Make it quick, I’ve got someone waiting.”

I took a deep breath.

“Bertrand,” I said, “do you know how your grandparents got the rue de Saintonge apartment?”

“No,” he said. “Why?”

“I’ve just been to see Mamé. She told me they moved in during July of ’42. She said the place had been emptied because of a Jewish family arrested during the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup.”

Silence.

“So?” asked Bertrand, finally.

I felt my face go hot. My voice echoed out through the empty apartment.

“But doesn’t it bother you that your family moved in, knowing the Jewish people had been arrested? Did they ever tell you about it?”

I could almost hear him shrug in that typical French fashion, the downturn of the mouth, the arched eyebrows.

“No, it doesn’t bother me. I didn’t know, they never told me, but it still doesn’t bother me. I’m sure a lot of Parisians moved into empty apartments in July of ’42, after the roundup. Surely that doesn’t make my family collaborationists, does it?”

His laugh hurt my ears.

“I never said that, Bertrand.”

“You’re getting too heated up about all this, Julia,” he said with a gentler tone. “This happened sixty years ago, you know. There was a world war going on, remember. Tough times for everybody.”

I sighed.

“I just want to know how it happened. I just don’t understand.”

“It’s simple,
mon ange
. My grandparents had a hard time during the war. The antique shop wasn’t doing well. They were probably relieved to move into a bigger, better place. After all, they had a child. They were young. They were glad to find a roof over their heads. They probably didn’t think twice about the Jewish family.”

“Oh, Bertrand,” I whispered. “How could they
not
think about that family? How could they not?”

He blew kisses down the phone.

“They didn’t know, I guess. I’ve got to go,
amour
. See you tonight.”

And he hung up.

I stayed in the apartment for a while, walking down the long corridor, standing in the empty living room, running my palm along the smooth marble mantelpiece, trying to understand, trying not to let my emotions overwhelm me.

W

ITH RACHEL, SHE HAD made up her mind. They were going to escape. They were going to leave this place. It was that, or die. She knew it. She knew that if she stayed here with the other children, it would be the end. Many of the children were ill. Half a dozen had already died. Once, she had seen a nurse, like the one in the stadium, a woman with a blue veil. One nurse, for so many sick, starving children.

Escaping was their secret. They had not told any of the other children. No one was to guess anything. They were going to escape in broad daylight. They had noticed that during the day, at most times, the policemen hardly paid attention to them. It could be easy and fast. Down behind the sheds, toward the water tower, where the village women had tried to push food through the barbed wire, they had found a small gap in the rolls of wire. Small, but maybe big enough for a child to crawl through.

Some children had already left the camp, surrounded by policemen. She had watched them leave, frail, thin creatures with their shorn heads and ragged clothes. Where were they being taken? Far away? To the mothers and fathers? She didn’t believe that. Rachel didn’t either. If they were all to be taken to the same place, why had the police separated the parents from the children in the first place? Why so much pain, so much suffering, thought the girl. “It’s because they hate us,” Rachel had told her with her deep, hoarse voice. “They hate Jews.” Such hate, thought the girl. Why such hate? She had never hated anyone in her life, except perhaps a teacher, once. A teacher who had severely punished her because she had not learned her lesson. Had she ever wished that woman dead? she pondered. Yes, she had. So maybe that’s how it worked. That’s how all this had happened. Hating people so much that you wanted to kill them. Hating them because they wore a yellow star. It made her shiver. She felt as if all the evil, all the hatred in the world was concentrated right here, stocked up all around her, in the policemen’s hard faces, in their indifference, their disdain. And outside the camp, did everybody hate Jews, too? Is this what her life was going to be about from now on?

She remembered, last June, overhearing neighbors in the stairway on her way home from school. Feminine voices, lowered to whispers. She had paused on the stairs, her ears cocked like a puppy’s. “And do you know, his jacket opened, and there it was, the star. I never would have thought he was a Jew.” She heard the other woman’s sharp intake of breath. “Him, a Jew! Such a proper gentleman, too. What a surprise.”

She had asked her mother why some of the neighbors didn’t like Jewish people. Her mother had shrugged, had sighed, bending her head over her ironing. But she had not answered the girl. So the girl had gone to see her father. What was wrong with being a Jew? Why did some people hate Jews? Her father had scratched his head, had looked down at her with a quizzical smile. He had said, hesitatingly, “Because they think we are different. So they are frightened of us.” But what was different? thought the girl. What was so different?

Her mother. Her father. Her brother. She missed them so much she felt physically ill. She felt as if she had fallen into a bottomless hole. Escaping was the only way for her to have some sort of grip on her life, on this new life she could not understand. Maybe her parents had managed to escape as well? Maybe they were all able to make their way back home? Maybe. . . . Maybe. . . .

She thought of the empty apartment, the unmade beds, the food slowly rotting in the kitchen. And her brother in that silence. In the dead silence of the place.

Rachel touched her arm, making her jump.

“Now,” she whispered. “Let’s try, now.”

The camp was silent, almost deserted. Since the adults had been taken away, there were fewer policemen, they had noticed. And the policemen hardly talked to the children. They left them alone.

The heat pounded down on the sheds, unbearable. Inside, feeble, sick children lay on damp straw. The girls could hear male voices and laughs from farther on. The men were probably in one of the barracks, keeping out of the sun.

The only policeman they could see was sitting in the shade, his rifle at his feet. His head was tilted back against the wall, and he seemed fast asleep, his mouth open. They crept toward the fences, like quick, small animals. They could glimpse green meadows and fields stretching before them.

Silence, still. Heat and silence. Had anybody seen them? They crouched in the grass, hearts pounding. They peered back over their shoulders. No movement. No noise. Was it that easy, thought the girl. No, it couldn’t be. Nothing was ever easy, not anymore.

Rachel was clutching a bundle of clothes in her arms. She urged the girl to put them on, the extra layers would protect their skin against the barbs, she said. The girl shuddered as she struggled into a dirty, ragged sweater, a tight, tattered pair of trousers. Who had these clothes belonged to, she wondered, some poor dead child whose mother had gone, and who had been left here to die alone?

Still crouching, they drew near the small gap in the rolls of wire. There was a policeman standing a little way off. They could not make out his face, just the sharp outline of his high round cap. Rachel pointed to the opening in the wire. They would have to hurry now. No time to waste. They got down on their stomachs, snaked their way to the hole. It seemed so small, thought the girl. How could they possibly wriggle through, not cut themselves on the barbed wire despite the extra clothes? How did they ever think they were going to make it? That nobody was going to see them? That they’d get away with it? They were crazy, she thought. Crazy.