Sarah's Key

  Mame's doctor--the mournful but efficient Docteur Roche--once told me it was excellent therapy to ask Mame about the past. According to him, she probably had a better perception of what went on thirty years ago than that very morning.

  It was like a little game. During each of my visits, I would ask her questions. I did it naturally, not making a big thing out of it. She knew perfectly well what I was driving at, but pretended to ignore it.

  It had been amusing finding out about Bertrand as a young boy. Mame came up with the most interesting tidbits. He had been a gawky adolescent, not the cool dude I had heard of. He was a reluctant scholar, not the brilliant student his parents had raved about. At fourteen, there had been a memorable fight with his father about the neighbor's daughter, a promiscuous bottle-blonde who smoked marijuana.

  Sometimes, though, it wasn't fun delving into Mame's faulty memory. Often, there were grim, long blanks. She could not remember anything. On "bad" days, she shut up like a clam. She would glower at the television and set her mouth so that her chin jutted out.

  One morning, she couldn't figure out who Zoe was. She kept asking, "Who is this child? What is she doing here?" Zoe, as ever, had been adult about it. But later on that night I had heard her crying in bed. When I gently asked her what was the matter, she admitted she couldn't bear seeing her great-grandmother growing older.

  "Mame," I said, "when did you and Andre move into the rue de Saintonge apartment?"

  I expected her to screw up her face, looking like a wise old monkey, and come up with an "Oh, I can't remember at all . . ."

  But the answer was like a whiplash.

  "July 1942."

  I sat up straight, staring at her.

  "July 1942?" I repeated.

  "That's right," she said.

  "And how did you find the apartment? There was a war going on. It must have been difficult, surely?"

  "Not at all," she said breezily. "It had been suddenly vacated. We heard about it through the concierge, Madame Royer, who was friendly with our old concierge. We used to live on the rue de Turenne, just above Andre's shop, a cramped, poky little apartment with only one bedroom. So we moved in, with Edouard who was ten or twelve at the time. We were thrilled to have a bigger place. And it was a cheap rent, I remember. In those days, that quartier was not half as fashionable as it is now."

  I watched her carefully and cleared my throat.

  "Mame, do you remember if this was the beginning of July? Or the end?"

  She smiled, pleased to be doing so well.

  "I remember perfectly. It was the end of July."

  "And do you remember why the place was vacated so suddenly?"

  Another beaming smile.

  "Of course. There had been a big roundup. People were arrested, you know. There were lots of places that were suddenly vacant."

  I stared at her. Her eyes gazed back at mine. They clouded over when she saw the expression on my face.

  "But how did it happen? How did you move in?"

  She fussed with her sleeves, working her mouth.

  "Madame Royer told our concierge that an empty three-roomed apartment was free on the rue de Saintonge. That's how it happened. That's all."

  Silence. She stopped moving her hands and folded them in her lap.

  "But Mame," I whispered, "didn't you think these people might ever come back?"

  Her face had sobered, and there was something tight, painful, about her lips.

  "We knew nothing," she said finally. "Nothing at all."

  And she looked down at her hands and did not speak again.

  T

  HIS WAS THE WORST night. The worst night ever, for all of the children and for her, thought the girl. The sheds had been entirely looted. Nothing was left, no clothes, no blankets, nothing. Eiderdowns had been ripped in two, white feathers covering the ground like fake snow.

  Children crying, children screaming, children hiccuping with terror. The little ones could not understand, kept moaning for their mothers. They wet their clothes, rolled on the ground, shrieked with despair. The older ones, like her, sat on the dirty floor, their heads in their hands.

  No one looked at them. No one took care of them. They were rarely fed. They were so hungry, they nibbled dry grass, bits of straw. No one comforted them. The girl wondered: These policemen . . . didn't they have families, too? Didn't they have children? Children they went home to? How could they treat children this way? Were they told to do so, or did they act this way naturally? Were they in fact machines, not human beings? She looked closely at them. They seemed of flesh and bone. They were men. She couldn't understand.

  The next day, the girl noticed a handful of people watching them through the barbed wire. Women, with packages and food. They were trying to push the food through the fences. But the policemen ordered them to leave. Nobody came to look at them again.

  The girl felt like she had become someone else. Someone hard, and rude, and wild. Sometimes she fought with the older children, the ones who tried to grab the old stale bread she had found. She swore at them. She hit them. She felt dangerous, savage.

  At first, she had not looked at the smaller children. They reminded her too much of her brother. But now, she felt she had to help them. They were vulnerable, small. So pathetic. So dirty. A lot of them had diarrhea. Their clothes were caked with shit. There was no one to wash them, no one to feed them.

  Little by little, she came to know their names, their ages, but some of them were so small they could hardly answer her. They were thankful for a warm voice, for a smile, a kiss, and they followed her around the camp, dozens of them, trailing after her like bedraggled sparrows.

  She would tell them the stories she used to tell her brother, before his bedtime. At night, lying on the lice-infested straw, where rats made rustling noises, she would whisper the stories, making them even longer than they usually were. The older children gathered around, too. Some of them pretended not to listen, but she knew they did.

  There was an eleven-year-old girl, a tall black-haired creature called Rachel, who often looked at her with a touch of contempt. But night after night, she listened to the stories, creeping closer to the girl, so that she wouldn't miss one word. And once, when most of the little children were at last asleep, she spoke to the girl.

  She said in a deep, hoarse voice, "We should leave. We should escape."

  The girl shook her head.

  "There is no way out. The police have guns. We can't escape."

  Rachel shrugged her bony shoulders.

  "I am going to escape."

  "What about your mother? She will be waiting for you in the other camp, like mine."

  Rachel smiled.

  "You believed all that? You believed what they said?"

  The girl hated Rachel's knowing smile.

  "No," she said firmly. "I didn't believe them. I don't believe anything anymore."

  "Neither do I," said Rachel. "I saw what they did. They didn't even write down the little children's names properly. They tied on those small tags that got mixed up when most of the children took them off again. They don't care. They lied to all of us. To us and to our mothers."

  And to the girl's surprise, Rachel reached out and took her hand. She held it tight, the way Armelle used to. Then she got to her feet and disappeared.

  The next morning, they were woken very early. The policemen came into the barracks, pushing at them with their truncheons. The smaller children, hardly awake, started to scream. The girl tried to calm the ones nearest to her, but they were terrified. They were led into a shed. The girl held two toddlers by the hand. She saw a policeman holding an instrument in his hand. It had a strange shape. She didn't know what it was. The toddlers gasped with fear, backed away. They were slapped and kicked by the policemen, then dragged toward the man with the instrument. The girl watched, horrified. Then she understood. Their hair was being shaved off. All the children were to be shaved.

  She looked on as Rachel's thick black hair fell
to the floor. Her naked skull was white and pointed, like an egg. Rachel gazed at the men with hatred and contempt. She spat on their shoes. One of the gendarmes knocked her aside brutally.

  The little ones were frantic. They had to be held down by two or three men. When it was her turn, the girl did not struggle. She bent her head. She felt the cold pressure of the machine and closed her eyes, unable to bear the sight of the long, golden strands falling to her feet. Her hair. Her beautiful hair that everyone admired. She felt sobs welling up in her throat but she forced herself not to cry. Never cry in front of these men. Never cry. Ever. It's only hair. Hair will grow back.

  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 Mame 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 Tezacs have moved in and not known anything, as Mame 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, Mame 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 Levy, 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 Tezacs 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 Mame. 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."