Sarah's Key (21 page)

“If you try and stop me,” she said darkly, “if you stop me, I’ll run away.”

She stood up, headed to the door. They hadn’t moved, they were staring at her, petrified.

“Wait!” said Jules at last. “Wait one minute.”

“No. I am not waiting. I am going to the station,” said Sarah, her hand on the handle.

“You don’t even know where the station is,” Jules said.

“I’ll find out. I’ll find my way.”

She unlatched the door.

“Good-bye,” she said to the old couple. “Good-bye, and thank you.”

She turned and walked to the gates. It had been simple. It had been easy. But as she walked past the gates, bending to stroke the dog’s head, she suddenly realized what she had done. She was on her own now. Completely on her own. She remembered Rachel’s shrill scream. The loud, marching steps. The Lieutenant’s chilling laugh. Her courage petered out. Against her will, she turned her head, looked back at the house.

Jules and Geneviève were still watching her through the windowpane, frozen. When they both moved, it was exactly at the same time. Jules grabbed his cap and Geneviève her purse. They hurried outside, locked the front door. When they caught up with her, Jules put a hand on her shoulder.

“Please don’t stop me,” mumbled Sarah, reddening. She was both happy and annoyed that they had followed her.

“Stop you?” Jules smiled. “We’re not stopping you, you silly, stubborn girl. We’re coming with you.”

W

E MADE OUR WAY to the cemetery under a hot, dry sun. I felt queasy all of a sudden. I had to stop and breathe. Bamber was concerned. I told him not to worry, it was just lack of sleep. Once again, he looked dubious, but made no comment.

The graveyard was small, but we took a long time finding anything. We had nearly given up when Bamber noticed pebbles on one of the graves. A Jewish tradition. We came closer. On the flat white stone, we read:

The Jewish deported veterans had this monument established ten years after their internment in order to perpetuate the memory of their martyrs, victims of Hitlerian barbarity. May 1941–May 1951

“Hitlerian barbarity!” remarked Bamber dryly. “Makes the French sound like they didn’t have anything to do with the whole business.”

There were several names and dates on the side of the tombstone. I leaned forward for a closer look. Children. Barely two or three years old. Children who had died at the camp, in July and August 1942. Vel’ d’Hiv’ children.

I had always been acutely aware that everything I had read about the roundup was true. And yet, on that hot spring day, as I stood looking at the grave, it hit me. The whole reality of it hit me.

And I knew that I would no longer rest, no longer be at peace, until I found out precisely what had become of Sarah Starzynski. And what the Tézacs knew and were so reluctant to tell me.

On our way back to the town center, we saw an old man shuffling along, carrying a bag of vegetables. He must have been in his eighties, with a round, red face and white hair. I asked him if he knew where the former Jewish camp used to be. He looked at us suspiciously.

“The camp?” he asked. “You want to know where the camp was?”

We nodded.

“Nobody asks about the camp,” he mumbled. He picked at the leeks in his basket, avoiding our eyes.

“Do you know where it was?” I persisted.

He coughed.

“Of course I do. Lived here all my life. When I was a kid, I didn’t know what that camp was. Nobody mentioned it. We acted as if it wasn’t there. We knew it had something to do with Jews, but we didn’t ask. We were too afraid. So we minded our own business.”

“Do you remember anything specific about the camp?” I asked.

“I was about fifteen years old,” he said. “I remember the summer of ’42, crowds of Jews coming from the station, passing on this very street. Right here.” His crooked finger pointed down the large street we were standing on. “Avenue de la Gare. Hordes of Jews. And one day, there was a noise. An awful noise. My parents used to live at a distance from the camp. But we still heard it. A roar that went through the entire town. Went on all day. I heard my parents talking to the neighbors. They were saying that the mothers had been separated from the children, back at the camp. What for? We didn’t know. I saw a group of Jewish women walking to the station. No, they weren’t walking. They were stumbling along the road, crying, bullied by the police.”

His eyes looked back down the street, remembering. Then he picked up his basket with a grunt.

“One day,” he said, “the camp was empty. I thought, the Jews have gone. I didn’t know where. I stopped thinking about it. We all have. We don’t talk about it. We don’t want to remember. Some people here don’t even know.”

He turned and walked away. I scribbled it all down, feeling my stomach heave again. But this time I wasn’t sure whether it was morning sickness, or what I deciphered in the old man’s eyes, his indifference, his scorn.

We drove up the rue Roland from the Place du Marché and parked in front of the school. Bamber pointed out that the street was called rue des Déportés—Deportee Road. I was thankful for that. I don’t think I could have stood it if it had been called avenue de la République.

The technical school was a grim, modern building with an old water tower looming over it. It was difficult to imagine the camp had been here, under thick cement and parking lots. Students were standing around the entrance, smoking. It was their lunch break. On an unkempt square of grass in front of the school, we noticed strange, curving sculptures with figures carved into them. On one of them, we read, “They must act with and for each other, in a spirit of fraternity.” Nothing more. Bamber and I looked at each other, puzzled.

I asked one of the students if the sculptures had anything to do with the camp. He asked, “What camp?” A fellow student tittered. I explained the nature of the camp. It seemed to sober him up a little. Then the other student, a girl, said there was some sort of plaque, just a little farther down the road, heading back to the village. We hadn’t noticed it on our drive up. I asked the girl if it was a memorial. She said she thought so.

The monument was in black marble with faded gold lettering. It had been erected in 1965 by the mayor of Beaune-la-Rolande. A gold star of David was etched out on its summit. And there were names. Endless names. I picked out two names that had become painfully, achingly familiar: “Starzynski, Wladyslaw. Starzynski, Rywka.”

On the bottom of the marble post, I noticed a small, square urn. “Here are deposited the ashes of our martyrs from Auschwitz-Birkenau.” A little farther up, beneath the list of names, I read another sentence: “To the 3,500 Jewish children torn from their parents, interned at Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers, deported and exterminated at Auschwitz.” Then Bamber read out loud, with his polished British accent: “Victims of the Nazis, buried at the graveyard of Beaune-la-Rolande.” Below, we discovered the same names engraved on the tomb in the cemetery. The Vel’ d’Hiv’ children who had died in the camp.

“ ‘Victims of the Nazis’ again,” muttered Bamber. “Looks like a good case of amnesia to me.”

He and I stood and looked on, in silence. Bamber had taken a few photographs, but now his camera was back in its case. On the black marble, there was no mention that the French police alone had been responsible for running the camp, and for what had happened behind the barbed wire.

I looked back toward the village, the sinister dark spire of the church on my left.

Sarah Starzynski had toiled up that very road. She had walked past where I was standing now, and she had turned left, into the camp. Several days later, her parents had come out again, to be taken to the station, on to their deaths. The children had been left alone for weeks, then sent to Drancy. And then to their solitary deaths, after the long trip to Poland.

What had happened to Sarah? Had she died here? There had been no sign of her name in the graveyard, on the memorial. Had she escaped? I looked beyond the water tower, standing at the edge of the village, heading north. Was she still alive?

My cell phone rang, making us both jump. It was my sister, Charla.

“Are you OK?” she asked, her voice surprisingly clear. It sounded like she was standing right next to me, and not thousands of miles away across the Atlantic. “I had a feeling I should call you.”

My thoughts dragged away from Sarah Starzynski to the baby I was carrying. To what Bertrand had said last night: “The end of us.”

Once again, I felt the sheer heaviness of the world around me.

T

HE TRAIN STATION AT Orléans was a busy, noisy place, an anthill swarming with gray uniforms. Sarah pressed against the old couple. She did not want to show her fear. If she had made it all the way here, that meant there was hope left for her. Hope back in Paris. She had to be brave, she had to be strong.

“If anybody asks,” whispered Jules, as they waited in the line to buy the tickets to Paris, “you are our granddaughter Stéphanie Dufaure. Your hair is shaved off because you caught lice at school.”

Geneviève straightened Sarah’s collar.

“There,” she said, smiling. “You do look nice and clean. And pretty. Just like our granddaughter!”

“Do you really have a granddaughter?” asked Sarah. “Are these her clothes?”

Geneviève laughed.

“We have nothing but turbulent grandsons, Gaspard and Nicolas. And a son, Alain. He’s in his forties. He lives in Orléans with Henriette, his wife. Those are Nicolas’s clothes, he’s a little older than you. Quite a handful, he is!”

Sarah admired the way the old couple pretended to be at ease, smiling at her, acting like this was a perfectly normal morning, a perfectly normal trip to Paris. But she noticed the quick way their eyes darted around constantly, always on the watch, always on the move. Her nervousness increased when she saw soldiers checking on all passengers boarding the trains. She craned her neck to observe them. German? No, French. French soldiers. She had no identification on her. Nothing. Nothing except the key and the money. Silently, discreetly, she handed the thick wad of bills to Jules. He looked down at her, surprised. She pointed with her chin toward the soldiers barring the access to the trains.

“What do you want me to do with this, Sarah?” he whispered, puzzled.

“They are going to ask you for my identity card. I don’t have one. This might help.”

Jules observed the line of men standing in front of the train. He grew flustered. Geneviève gave him a dig with her elbow.

“Jules!” she hissed. “It could work. We must try. We don’t have any other choice.”

The old man drew himself up. He nodded to his wife. He seemed to have regained his composure. The tickets were bought, then they headed toward the train.

The platform was packed. Passengers pressed against them from all sides, women with squealing babies, stern-faced old men, impatient businessmen wearing suits. Sarah knew what she had to do. She remembered the boy who got away at the indoor stadium, the one who had slipped through the confusion. That was what she had to do now. Make the most of the pushing and squabbling, of the soldiers shouting orders, of the bustling crowd.

She let go of Jules’s hand and ducked. It was like going under water, she thought. A tight, compact mass of skirts and trousers, shoes and ankles. She clambered past, pushing herself on with her fists, and then the train appeared, right in front of her.

As she climbed on, a hand grabbed her by the shoulder. She composed her face instantly, molding her mouth into an easy smile. The smile of a normal little girl. A normal little girl taking the train to Paris. A normal little girl like the one in the lilac dress, the one she had seen on the platform, when they had been taken to the camp, on that day that seemed so long ago.

“I’m with my granny,” she said, flashing the innocent smile, pointing to the inside of the carriage. With a nod, the soldier let her go. Breathless, she squirmed her way onto the train, peering out of the window. Her heart was pounding. There were Jules and Geneviève emerging from the throng, looking up at her with amazement. She waved at them triumphantly. She felt proud of herself. She had gotten on the train all by herself, and the soldiers hadn’t even stopped her.