Tell No One Who You Are (2 page)

Régine slept in the same room as her parents, in the crib she had used as a baby. She could not stretch her legs in it; she slept on her side, her knees bent to her chest. She had done this for so long, she found nothing strange or uncomfortable about it. Next to her parents’ bed was another small sewing machine where her mother did the family mending.

Léon did not have a proper bed, either. He slept on a sofa in the main room that was both a living room and a kitchen with two stoves. A gas stove was used for cooking, and in the winter Léon had the job of feeding the heating stove. He carried the heavy shovelfuls of coal from where it was stored out in the hall in a closet under the stairs that led to the third floor.

He did not seem to need much sleep. When he finished his homework, if he didn’t have to help in the workroom, he liked to go out with the other Léon and their friends. Régine would listen from her crib for him to come in, see the light go on under the door to the main room and know that he was reading the library books he brought home.

The most imposing piece of furniture in the main room was a wooden radio with large, round dials and four short legs. Régine’s mother turned on the radio first thing in the morning and shut it off before going to bed at night. The music seemed to help her now that she was ill and went out only to shop for food.

Régine had loved to go shopping with her mother before she got sick. At the fishmonger’s, Mrs. Miller prodded the fish
and studied the eyes to decide if it was fresh enough. She was equally fussy with chickens, which she brought home from the market freshly killed according to Jewish law. She plucked the feathers and held the chicken over a flame to burn off ends that clung to the skin. Then came the ritual of soaking it in salted water to get rid of all traces of blood. The neck was stuffed before roasting in the oven, and Régine liked eating that part best.

Her mother still shopped carefully, but lately she seemed in a hurry to get home and lie down to rest before starting supper. Régine liked to help. She learned to crush almonds with a mortar and pestle for apple cake and make dough for noodles. The dough had to be stretched over a white tablecloth until it was paper thin. It was left to dry and later cut into narrow strips, ready to be cooked and eaten in chicken soup.

While they worked together her mother asked how school had gone that day. She wanted all the details, not just what she had learned, what her marks were, but what songs they had sung and whether they had played hopscotch at recess. She told Régine she was lucky to have such a good teacher as Mademoiselle Descotte. But Régine knew that.

Before getting sick her mother had been very busy and popular with the other Jewish mothers in the neighborhood. They asked her how to cook certain dishes, what to give a sick child and sometimes even asked her to help settle an argument. She seemed to have time for everyone then. But now she was always tired.

On that Friday morning when Léon ran in, her mother started to tremble after crying out. She looked about to faint and Mr. Miller and Léon helped her onto a chair so she could sit down.

When she was able to speak, she put out her hand to her
husband. “Maurice,” she said, “you should have gone to England when I begged you.”

Régine knew what came next. Her father had been sure the war would end before it got to Belgium, but her mother had always been afraid. When the Germans invaded Poland, her mother had pleaded with him to go to England where her brother Shlomo lived. “Belgium is a small country,” she had argued. “The Germans came here in the last war. If they do it again, they will take you away.”

“I’m not leaving you,” her father said each time the argument started.

“But it’s you they’ll take. They want men to work for them. They won’t touch me or the children.”

That morning, as Régine and Léon stood watching, her mother tried again. She was almost in tears as she begged: “It’s not too late. Why don’t you go, now? I hear people have been escaping through France in the last few days. Please.”

Her father tried to sound his old calm self: “I’m staying with you and I’m staying to fight. If everybody leaves who will fight them?”

“Fight them?” her mother cried. “What can you do? You and your Solidarité friends. You think you help with those tracts urging people to resist the Germans? You think you can stop them by blowing up a few bridges and rail lines? And if they catch you, they’ll …” She broke into sobs and could not finish.

Her father put his arm around her mother and his voice was gentle. “It’s no use, Zlata. I’m staying with you, no matter what.”

A
FEW DAYS after the invasion, Régine saw German soldiers for the first time. She watched, standing at the apartment window with her father and mother, as they marched past, parading through the city, showing off their power.

“What will they do to us?” Régine asked.

Her father pursed his lips together and did not answer.

Everyone seemed to talk less. The schools reopened, but the teachers spoke to each other in whispers, as if they did not want to be overheard.

As soon as the shops opened, there was a rush on them. Housewives bought as much as they could carry, as if expecting that the following day there would be no food left to buy. Often there was very little, only rutabagas. Régine’s mother brought home
pain d’épice
, a kind of honey cake with ginger that would not easily go stale. And rutabagas. Coffee, loved by everyone in Belgium, including her parents, was no longer to be had. Instead the family drank a substitute made from chicory and malt. The only plentiful food was rutabagas, and Régine hated the vegetable.

She had always been a finicky eater, but as the war went on she stopped being finicky. For the first time in her life, she felt hunger. Léon suffered even more. He was a teenager and always hungry. The small rations became smaller. Before the war, the baker nearby sold all kinds of delicious bread. Now the only bread was gray and sticky. The once plentiful red
potatoes that used to arrive by train from Poland were difficult to come by, and the few that turned up in the shops were often rotten. Meat rations were tiny and had to last for an entire week. Then, in October, the Germans outlawed the killing of animals according to religious laws. “It’s bad enough we have so little meat,” Mrs. Miller said. “Now we can’t have it kosher.”

But Régine’s family would soon have worse things to worry about.

T
HE BRITISH AIR FORCE
started to bomb areas in Europe held by the Germans.

One afternoon Régine helped her father place wide strips of tape across the windows in the apartment. She held the roll as he pulled and stretched the tape across the glass in the shape of an X. Her mother and Léon did the same at the other window. Soon both windows were marked with an X so that if bombs fell nearby, the glass would not shatter.

At night they hung a large, dark blanket in each window. It covered the glass so that no light shone outside. The Germans imposed this regulation so enemy bombers attacking at night would see nothing but darkness below and simply fly over.

The first time the bombers came, the sound of the air-raid sirens was terrifying, a loud, wailing noise in the distance. Her father turned out all the lights in the apartment and then crept to one of the windows. Pulling up a corner of the blanket, he peered through the small opening. Régine joined him while her mother and brother stood at the other window.

“Look!” said her father, pointing to the full moon. “There’s some light after all!”

In the eerie glow the buildings seemed like shadows on the deserted street. Off in the distance, the air-raid sirens continued their slow wailing.

Then Régine heard another sound, a slow, rumbling noise
coming from far off. She looked up at her father and saw from his expression that he had heard it too. He peeled back more of the blanket and bent down to have a better view of the sky. Now there was no mistaking the rumbling: it was getting closer, growing louder and louder, until it drowned out the sound of the sirens. Régine covered her ears. Her father nudged her to bend down and look where he was pointing.

“There. Up in the sky. See?”

The planes approached, silhouetted against the sky. They flew in long, flowing lines, one after the other, and in the moonlight each plane looked like a giant roaring monster. Her father quickly put the corner of the blanket back into place and stepped away from the window. He pulled Régine with him, pushing her down to the floor. Her mother and brother were crouching together, away from their window, just as her father had taught them to do.

The noise was deafening. Régine held her breath and closed her eyes. She had never heard such a loud, terrifying roar.
The bombers must be directly over the building
. Her father’s arms tightened around her and she clenched her fists as she waited for the sound of exploding bombs.

Time seemed to slow down. Seconds seemed like minutes as she waited. Then the roar of the last plane trailed off in the distance and the air-raid sirens sounded again. The planes were gone and the danger was over.

Régine opened her eyes but couldn’t move. She was too scared.

“It’s all right,” her father said. He pulled her to her feet. Her brother and mother stood up. Régine let out her breath and hugged her father.

Now everyone could try to get to sleep.

The next morning, Régine helped take down the blankets from the windows. What a relief to see the sun shining and
people walking in the street below. But when darkness came again, she helped put the blankets back up. This became a routine during the first weeks after the Germans arrived, except sometimes the bombers came and sometimes they didn’t.

Her father tried to make her feel better about the planes. “The bombers are enemy planes only to the Germans. They will help end the war,” he said. Régine had mixed feelings about the bombers. The planes were a danger, a necessary evil. They aroused both fear and hope, like the skull-and-crossbones labels on the medicines her mother took. She was sorry her mother had to take such dangerous medicines but hoped they would make her better.

T
HE PERSECUTION
of the Jews in Belgium began a few months after the Nazis arrived. Five days after the ritual slaughter of animals was forbidden announcements ordered Jews, and anyone of Jewish origin, to register with the Nazi authorities. Their identity cards were marked in bold letters in German, Flemish and French:
Jude, Jood, Juif
.

Jews were now prohibited from working in government offices. Jews were prohibited from working as lawyers. From now on, no Jew could be employed as a journalist. Restrictions were imposed on the amount of money Jews could withdraw from their bank accounts.

The Nazis imposed the restrictions against the Jews slowly so as not to arouse the rest of the Belgian population. They waited six months before announcing their next set of restrictions. On May 31, 1941, Jewish people were told they could live only in the four largest cities in Belgium: Brussels, Antwerp, Liège and Charleroi. They could not leave their homes between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m. They were banned from riding on all but the last car on the trams and were banned altogether from the trains. On the streets, signs were posted outside Jewish-owned shops, identifying them as Jewish, again in three languages. Public buildings, from swimming pools to libraries, had notices saying: “NO ENTRY TO JEWS, NEGROES AND DOGS.”

Even listening to the radio was now a crime. Jews were
no longer allowed to own radios or transmitters. The family’s beloved old radio, as well as the big sewing machine, was carried out of the apartment by Régine’s father and brother and taken to the home of a non-Jewish neighbor for safekeeping.

But Régine’s father was still able to listen to the broadcasts from London. Every night, he climbed the stairs to the apartment above. Their neighbors, Monsieur and Madame Demers, who were not Jewish, invited him to listen to their small radio through headphones. In June, they heard of the German invasion of Russia. Régine’s father returned jubilant. “That will be the end of them,” he said. “Russia defeated Napoleon and it will defeat Hitler as well.”

And in December when the Japanese attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered the war, he was even more confident. “It won’t last long now,” he said.

But it did.

In January of 1942, it was announced that Jews were not allowed to leave the country. “You should have gone to England when you could,” Mrs. Miller told her husband wearily. “Now it’s too late.”

One day at school, a month after her tenth birthday on March 16, 1942, Régine passed a group of teachers standing in the hallway near her classroom and she heard part of the conversation. Mademoiselle Descotte was among them. “What a disgrace,” she heard her teacher tell the others. “We’ll be losing some of our best students.”

Régine did not know what her favorite teacher meant by this and nothing further was said about it in class. The day went on as usual at
l’école primaire
. Mademoiselle Descotte read aloud a composition that Régine had written for homework a few days before, and she flushed with embarrassment as the other students turned to look at her. Later the class sat
in a circle and sang songs. The voice of Mademoiselle Descotte, usually the loudest, seemed quieter. Something was wrong.

At home that night, Régine was told by her parents about the latest restriction imposed by the Germans against the Jews in Belgium. The regulation had been made four months earlier. “I guess we’re lucky the Germans took this long to implement it,” her father said bitterly.

Régine understood now what the teachers had been discussing in the hallway. Jewish children were prohibited from attending public schools. Régine would have to stay home, and so would Léon. “Don’t worry,” her father said. “It’s for a little while. Soon things will be back to normal again. I promise.”

That night, as the bombers flew overhead, Régine cried in her crib.