Sarah's Key (19 page)

F

OR TEN MINUTES, JULES and Geneviève had rushed about the house, like frantic animals, not speaking, wringing their hands. They seemed in agony. They tried to move Rachel, to carry her down the stairs, but she was too weak. They had finally kept her in bed. Jules did his best to calm Geneviève down, without much success; she kept collapsing on the nearest sofa or chair and bursting into tears.

The girl trailed after them like a worried puppy. They wouldn’t answer any of her questions. She noticed Jules glancing again and again toward the entrance, peering through the window at the gates. The girl felt fear pluck at her heart.

At nightfall, Jules and Geneviève sat face to face in front of the fireplace. They appeared to have recovered. They seemed calm and composed. But the girl noticed Geneviève’s hands trembling. They were both pale, they looked incessantly at the clock.

At one point, Jules turned to the girl. He spoke quietly. He told her to go back down into the cellar. There were large bags of potatoes. She would have to climb into one of them and hide there as best as she could. Did she understand? It was very important. If somebody went into the cellar, she would have to be invisible.

The girl froze. She said, “The Germans are coming!”

Before Jules or Geneviève could say a word, the dog barked, making them all jump. Jules signaled to the girl, pointing to the trapdoor. She obeyed instantly, slipping into the dark, musty cellar. She couldn’t see, but she managed to find the potato bags, toward the back, feeling the rough material with her palms. There were several large sacks of them, piled one on top of the other. Quickly, she pulled them apart with her fingers and slithered between them. As she did so, one of the bags split open, and potatoes came tumbling around her, noisily, in a series of quick thumps. She hastily layered them around and over her.

Then she heard the steps. Loud and rhythmic. She had heard those steps before, in Paris, late at night, after the curfew. She knew what they meant. She had peered out of the window, and she had seen the men march by along the feebly lit street, with their round helmets and their precise movements.

Men marching. Marching right up to the house. The steps of a dozen men. A man’s voice, muffled but still clear, came to her ears. He was speaking German.

The Germans were here. The Germans had come to get Rachel and her. She felt her bladder loosen.

Footsteps just above her head. The mumble of a conversation she did not catch. Then Jules’s voice, “Yes, Lieutenant, there is a sick child here.”

“A sick Aryan child, sir?” came the foreign, guttural voice.

“A child that is ill, Lieutenant.”

“Where is the child?”

“Upstairs.” Jules’s voice, weary now.

She heard the heavy steps rock the ceiling. Then Rachel’s thin scream all the way from the top of the house. Rachel torn from the bed by the Germans. Rachel moaning, too feeble to fight back.

The girl put her hands over her ears. She didn’t want to hear. She could not hear. She felt protected by the sudden silence she had created.

As she lay under the potatoes, she saw a dim ray of light pierce the darkness. Somebody had opened the trapdoor. Somebody was coming down the cellar stairs. She took her hands off her ears.

“There is no one down there,” she heard Jules say. “The girl was alone. We found her in our dog shed.”

The girl heard Geneviève blowing her nose. Then her voice, tearful, spent.

“Please don’t take the girl with you! She is too ill.”

The guttural response was ironic.

“Madame, the child is a Jew. Probably escaped from one of the nearby camps. She has no reason to be in your house.”

The girl watched the orange flicker of a flashlight creep along the stone cellar walls, edging closer, then, aghast, she saw the oversized black shadow of a soldier, cut out like a cartoon. He was coming for her. He was going to get her. She tried to make herself as small as possible, she stopped breathing. She felt as if her heart had stopped beating.

No, he would not find her! It would be too hideously unfair, too horrible if he found her. They already had poor Rachel. Wasn’t that enough? Where had they taken Rachel? Was she outside in a truck with the soldiers? Had she fainted? Where were they taking her, she wondered, to a hospital? Or back to the camp? These bloodthirsty monsters. Monsters! She hated them. She wished them all dead. The bastards. She used all the swearwords she knew, all the words her mother had forbidden her ever to use. The dirty fucking bastards. She screamed the swearwords in her mind, as loud as she could in her mind, closing her eyes tight, away from the orange spot of light coming closer, running over the top of the sacks where she was hiding. He would not find her. Never. Bastards, dirty bastards.

Jules’s voice, again.

“There is no one down there, Lieutenant. The girl was alone. She could hardly stand. We had to look after her.”

The Lieutenant’s voice droned down to the girl, “We are just checking. We are going to look around your cellar, then you will follow us back to the Kommandantur.”

The girl tried not to move, not to sigh, not to breathe, as the flashlight roamed over her head.

“Follow you?” Jules’s voice seemed stricken. “But why?”

A curt laugh: “A Jew in your house and you ask why?”

Then came Geneviève’s voice, surprisingly calm. She sounded like she had stopped crying.

“You saw we were not hiding her, Lieutenant. We were helping her get better. That’s all. We didn’t know her name. She could not speak.”

“Yes,” continued Jules’s voice, “we even called a doctor. We weren’t hiding her in the least.”

There was a pause. The girl heard the Lieutenant cough.

“That is indeed what Guillemin told us. You were not hiding the girl. He did say that, the good
Herr Doktor.”

The girl felt potatoes being moved over her head. She remained as still as a statue, not breathing. Her nose tickled and she longed to sneeze.

She heard Geneviève’s voice again, calm, bright, almost hard. A tone she had not heard Geneviève use.

“Would you gentlemen care for some wine?”

The potatoes stopped moving around her.

Upstairs the Lieutenant guffawed, “Some wine?
Jawohl!
”

“And some pâté, perhaps?” said Geneviève, with the same bright voice.

Steps retreated up the stairs, and the trapdoor slammed shut. The girl felt faint with relief. She hugged herself, tears streaming down her face. How long did they remain up there, glasses tinkling, feet shuffling, hearty laughs ringing out? It was endless. It seemed to her that the Lieutenant’s bellow was jollier and jollier. She even caught a greasy belch. Of Jules and Geneviève, she heard nothing. Were they still up there? What was going on? She longed to know. But she knew she had to stay where she was until Jules or Geneviève came to fetch her. Her limbs had gone stiff, but still she dared not move.

At last, the house went silent. The dog barked once, then no more. The girl listened. Had the Germans taken Jules and Geneviève with them? Was she all alone in the house? Then she heard the stifled sound of sobs. The trapdoor opened with a groan and Jules’s voice floated down to her.

“Sirka! Sirka!”

When she came up again, her legs aching, her eyes red with dust and her cheeks wet and grimy, she saw that Geneviève had broken down, her face in her hands. Jules was trying to comfort her. The girl looked on, helpless. The old woman glanced up. Her face had aged, had caved in. It frightened the girl.

“That child,” she whispered, “taken away to her death. I don’t know where, or how, but I know she will die. They wouldn’t listen. We tried to make them drink, but they kept their heads clear. They let us be, but they took Rachel.”

Geneviève’s tears flowed down her wrinkled cheeks. She shook her head in despair, grasped Jules’s hand, held it close.

“My God, what is our country coming to?”

Geneviève beckoned to the girl, clasped her small hand in her weathered old one. They saved me, the girl kept thinking. They saved me. They saved my life. Maybe somebody like them saved Michel, saved Papa and Maman. Maybe there is still hope.

“Little Sirka!” sighed Geneviève, squeezing her fingers. “You were so brave down there.”

The girl smiled. A beautiful, courageous smile that touched the old couple right to their hearts.

“Please,” she said, “don’t call me Sirka anymore. That’s my baby name.”

“What should we call you then?” asked Jules.

The girl squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.

“My name is Sarah Starzynski.”

O

N MY WAY FROM the apartment, where I had checked on the work in progress with Antoine, I stopped by the rue de Bretagne. The garage was still there. And a plaque, too, reminding the passerby that Jewish families of the third arrondissement had been gathered here, the morning of July 16, 1942, before being taken to the Vel’ d’Hiv’ and deported to the death camps. This is where Sarah’s odyssey had started, I thought. Where had it ended?

As I stood there, oblivious to the traffic, I felt I could almost see Sarah coming down the rue de Saintonge on that hot July morning, with her mother, and her father, and the policemen. Yes, I could see it all, I could see them being pushed into the garage, right here, where I now stood. I could see the sweet heart-shaped face, the incomprehension, the fear. The straight hair caught back in a bow, the slanted turquoise eyes. Sarah Starzynski. Was she still alive? She would be seventy today, I thought. No, she couldn’t be alive. She had disappeared off the face of the earth, with the rest of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ children. She had never come back from Auschwitz. She was a handful of dust.

I left the rue de Bretagne and went back to my car. In true American style, I had never been able to drive a stick shift. My car was a small automatic Japanese model that Bertrand scoffed at. I never used it to drive around Paris. The bus and
métro
system were excellent. I felt I didn’t need a car to get around the city. Bertrand scoffed at that, too.

Bamber and I were to visit Beaune-la-Rolande that afternoon. An hour’s drive from Paris. I had been to Drancy this morning with Guillaume. It was very close to Paris, wedged in between the gray, shabby suburbs of Bobigny and Pantin. Over sixty trains had left from Drancy, situated smack in the heart of the French rail system, to Poland during the war. I had not realized, until we walked past a large, modern sculpture commemorating the place, that the camp was obviously lived in now. Women strolled by with baby carriages and dogs, children ran and shouted, curtains blew in the breeze, plants grew on windowsills. I was astounded. How could anyone live within these walls? I asked Guillaume if he knew of this. He nodded. I could tell by looking at his face that he was moved. His entire family had been deported from here. It was not easy for him to come to this place at all. But he had wanted to accompany me, he had insisted.

The curator of the Drancy Memorial Museum was a middle-aged, tired-looking man called Menetzky. He was waiting for us outside the minute museum that was only opened if one telephoned and made an appointment. We wandered around the small, plain room, gazing at photographs, articles, maps. There were some yellow stars, placed behind a glass panel. It was the first time I saw a real one. I felt impressed and sickened.

The camp had barely changed in the last sixty years. The huge U-shaped concrete construction, built in the late 1930s as an innovative residential project, and requisitioned in 1941 by the Vichy government for deporting Jews, now housed four hundred families in tiny apartments, and had been doing so since 1947. Drancy had the cheapest rents one could find in the vicinity.

I asked the sad Monsieur Menetzky if the residents of the Cité de la Muette—the name of the place, which oddly enough meant “City of the Mute”—had any idea where they were living. He shook his head. Most of the people here were young. They didn’t know, and they didn’t care, according to him. I then asked if many visitors came to this memorial. Schools sent their classes, he replied, and sometimes tourists came. We leafed through the visitors book. “To Paulette, my mother. I love you and will never forget you. I will come here every year to think of you. This is where you left for Auschwitz in 1944 and never came back. Your daughter, Danielle.” I felt tears prick the back of my eyes.

We were then shown into the single cattle wagon that stood in the middle of the lawn, just outside the museum. It was locked, but the curator had the key. Guillaume helped me up, and we both stood in the small, bare space. I tried to imagine the wagon filled up with masses of people, squashed against each other, small children, grandparents, middle-aged parents, adolescents, on their way to death. Guillaume’s face had gone white. He told me later he had never been into the wagon. He had never dared. I asked him if he felt all right. He nodded, but I could tell how disturbed he was.

As we walked away from the building, a stack of leaflets and books under my arm given to me by the curator, I could not help thinking of what I knew about Drancy. Its inhumanity during those years of terror. Endless trains of Jews shipped straight to Poland.