“Say, they won’t, Maman, don’t just say you hope not.”
“I can’t say they won’t, Jacqueline. I can only hope they won’t. But you and Nicole must understand that just because we are safe, and have a home to live in, we must help others who are not so lucky. One day the war will end and—”
“And then nobody will sleep here ever, ever, ever, ever--.”
“Jacqueline!”
Later Papa went out for his morning walk. He generally met some friends at the
café,
and stayed there, talking and drinking coffee until dinnertime.
We had sweet and sour veal stew and peas for dinner. Often now, Maman and Papa traded their sweaters for food instead of money. But their supply was dwindling. They had bought large quantities of sweaters before the war started, but once Paris had been occupied, most of the manufacturers had fled. Some of them now worked in Lyon, but it was becoming harder and harder to get wool or dyes. Most of the sweaters were now made out of synthetic fabrics that were neither warm nor long-lasting. The colors were muddy, and the prices were ridiculous, Papa said. And even these were becoming unavailable.
My parents worked the outdoor markets still, but not every day. There was not enough stock for them to go every day. Maman continued to sew at home whenever she could. I did more and more of the housework and cooking, particularly on the days that my parents were gone.
Maman still complained that I had a big mouth but very often now she was pleased with me.
“Really, Nicole, for a girl your age, you are certainly very capable. Look how you washed all our stockings. And the soup is made, and the table set. There is really nothing you can’t do once you make up your mind.”
“And me, Maman?” from Jacqueline. “Is there nothing I can’t do too? Just like Nicole?”
“Of course not!” from me. “You’re only seven, and I’m eleven. Of course you can’t do what I can do. You’re too little.”
“I’m not little, am I, Maman? And I can do anything Nicole can do, can’t I ?”
“All right,
dinde.
Tomorrow you can do all the shopping, and make the soup for supper.”
“I can do it,” Jacqueline said, her cheeks a bright red, but not as bright as her long red curls which were trembling across her shoulders.
“We’ll see just what you can do,” I said. “You don’t even know how to wash the dishes, and when Maman asks you to put away your clothes, you always cry and whine like the big baby you are.”
“MAMAN! MAMAN!”
“Nicole,” Maman sighs, “there is only one thing, perhaps, you can’t do.”
“What is it?” I say, hands on my hips, chin out.
“Shut your mouth,” Maman says.
After dinner, my parents, Jacqueline, and I walked along the Avenue du Lac. The summer months are the months when the tourists come to Aix-les-Bains, but often September and October are the most beautiful months of the year. This day, the sky was as blue as Jacqueline’s eyes, with great, rippling, white puffs of clouds. The air smelled clean and fresh, and there was just enough of a cool breeze on your back to make you feel like walking.
We kept meeting people we knew, many of them, refugees who had stayed with us until they could find places for themselves. Some of them could not find jobs, and Maman said they were living off their savings. I could not understand how they were able to laugh and joke so much. Some of them were separated from members of their family and others had lost almost everything of value. When they came to us, most of them were frightened, upset, sometimes hysterical. But once a few days had passed, they would be laughing and joking as if nothing terrible or unusual had happened.
Here now was M. Henri Bonnet, whose wife had died of an appendicitis attack the day the Germans occupied Paris. So many of the doctors and nurses had left the town, and there was so much confusion that M. Bonnet could find nobody to operate on his wife. And he had left his children with a neighbor who was not there when he returned. Nobody knew where the neighbor had gone or what had happened to the children but everybody told him to get out of Paris since he was Jewish. He thought somebody might have taken the children to his sister in Dijon, so he went there. But the children were not in Dijon, and he could not return to Paris. He wrote letters to everybody he could think of but nobody had seen the children.
“Good day, M. Bonnet.”
“Good day, Nicole. Oh, David, I was just on my way over to invite you and Henriette to come to the movie with me tonight. They are showing
La Femme du Boulanger
and it is such an enchanting film. Have you seen it? No? Oh, then you really must. It is absolutely delightful, and Raimu is so funny.”
I thought M. Bonnet was disgusting. If Papa and Maman were ever separated from Jacqueline and me, I had no doubt they would be too busy looking for us to go to the movies.
M. Bonnet was laughing so hard, he had to wipe the tears from his eyes. “So then, he finds out what she really thinks of him
...
”
“M. Bonnet,” I said, “have you heard any news about your children ?”
That made him stop laughing. He blinked a few times, and there was still a tear in one corner of his eye. “No,” he said, “nothing.”
Papa took him by the arm, and they walked on in front of us. Maman took me by the arm too. “What is the matter with you?” she asked. “Have you lost your senses? Why did you torment that poor man like that?” She shook my arm.
“Because he was laughing,” I said. “How can he laugh, and go to the movies when his wife died, and his children are lost? If we were lost you and Papa wouldn’t laugh, and you wouldn’t go to the movies. You’d look for us.”
Maman pulled me closer to her, and held me against her for a moment. “Listen, Nicole, M. Bonnet
is
looking for his children, and he
is
grieving. Did you see his face when you asked about them? He is grieving but he has hope that he will find them again. He has lost a great deal, but if human beings can hold on to hope, they can live through the worst of times.”
“But you and Papa would look for us. You wouldn’t laugh.”
“Papa and I would look for you as long as we had any strength left in our bodies, and we would hope for as long as we were alive that we would find you.”
“And you wouldn’t laugh.”
“I think we would. People who don’t laugh are dead.”
I pulled my arm away, and cried, “If I were separated from you, I would look for you, and that’s all I would do. I’d look for you, and I’d find you, and I’d never laugh until I did.”
Jacqueline was sobbing. Big tears rolled down her cheeks. “I don’t want to be separated from Maman and Papa. You stop that, Nicole. You stop it!”
Maman picked Jacqueline up, and said, “We are not being separated, silly. Nicole and I were just saying if.”
“Say we’ll never be separated, Maman. Say it! Say never!”
“Of course,
ma poupée,
you know we won’t be.”
“But say it, Maman, say never, never, never.”
“Never!” said Maman.
“And I wouldn’t laugh,” I said, “never, never, never.”
Maman began laughing then, and soon Jacqueline buried her head in Maman’s shoulder, so we shouldn’t see she was laughing, and I laughed too.
We met the Rostens in front of the beach, and they came back to our house for tea. Mme. Rosten said that her cook had left because she felt it was degrading for her to work for Jews.
Dr. Rosten said, “Our Vichy government is a spawning ground for anti-semitism, and it will get worse, mark my words. Yesterday, one of my patients told me he was going to stop coming to me. He planned on using a Christian doctor. ‘Very good, M. Langeron,’ I told him, ‘and perhaps you will be good enough to pay your bill which I have carried for several years now.’
"Sue me". he said, and of course he knows a Vichy court will very likely decide in his favor.”
“Langeron,” murmured Mme. Rosten, taking a tiny sip out of one of Maman’s good tea cups. She was wearing a yellow suit, and a brilliant gold and blue scarf. Her small head was covered with short, black curls, each one perfect. “Langeron? Isn’t that the man who dragged you out of bed in the middle of the night when his son fell off the roof?”
“The times are getting worse and worse for Jews,” her husband said. “Not only in occupied France but here as well. We are no longer safe. Today a Jew can no longer work for the government and a Jewish doctor cannot collect his bills. Tomorrow
...
Why do we stay? What are we waiting for?”
Françoise
and I took our tea out on the
veranda.
But I remembered something so I went back into the room.
“Jacqueline,” I said, “do you want to come out on the
veranda
with Françoise and me?”
“Me?” Jacqueline was startled.
“Yes, maybe we’ll play
Belote.”
Jacqueline jumped up and came toward me.
“Me too?” asked Monique, Françoise’s little sister.
I could hear Françoise groan in back of me.
“Of course, Monique.”
We dealt out the cards and began to play. Jacqueline was my partner. I smiled at her, and didn’t say one single word when she made stupid moves—and she made many of them. She didn’t remember. She never did, but I was always sorry later when I picked on her as I had done this morning.
April 1942
Lucie had been out of school for two days before we heard what had happened.
“It’s hard to believe,” Papa said. “He seemed such an ordinary, conventional man, even rather stuffy. I never saw him dressed in anything but a suit, and he always carried a cane.”
“What, Papa?” Jacqueline asked. “What man?”
“M. Fiori,” Papa said. “We are talking about him. A terrible thing has happened. The poor man was arrested three days ago and is being sent back to Italy.”
“But why, Papa?” I cried. “What did he do?”
“Nothing,” said Maman. “He was a good man, and nowadays it is a crime to be a good man.” Her cheeks were pink and her eyes were full of angry lights. “They always seemed so standoffish. And you remember the time their girl called Nicole a Dirty Jew. I didn’t realize
...
and now it’s too late, and his family is gone too. There is nothing we can do to help.”
“Where is his family? Where is Lucie?”
“Nobody knows for sure,” Maman said. “Mme. Barras says that Mme. Fiori told Mme. Bonheur that she and the children would go back to Italy with her husband, but then suddenly they disappeared. Mme. Bonheur thinks they were persuaded to go into hiding.”
“But what did M. Fiori do?” I asked.
“He was a socialist,” Papa said. “He was a leader in the Socialist Party in Italy, and fought against Mussolini. After Mussolini came to power, the Socialist Party was outlawed, and its leaders were arrested. M. Fiori had to flee or he would have been arrested too. So he came here to France, knowing that he was safe, and that our country would protect him.”
“And now,” my mother cried, “our country is no better than Italy, and no better than Germany.”
“Poor man!” Papa said. “Does anyone know who informed ?”
“No, but you can be sure that whoever it was, he will be punished. The underground will find out. They will track him down and , . .”
“What will they do?” asked Jacqueline.
“They will shoot him, of course,” I said.
“Of course?” said Papa.
“Yes, of course,” said Maman. “And it will serve him right. There is nothing lower or more despicable than an informer.”
“But Henriette, did you hear? Your own child talks of shooting as a matter of course.”
“David,” Maman said, “why don’t we go? It doesn’t make sense to stay here any more.”
“Where would we go?”
“To Switzerland.”
“But Henriette, you know this can’t last. Now that the United States has entered the war, and the Germans are being pushed back in Russia, it’s bound to come to an end. Soon.”
“Yes, I know, but I’m afraid.”
Papa said, “The important thing is not to panic. In two years, since we lost the war, the Germans have not come here to Aix-les-Bains. They are certainly not going to come now when every soldier they have is needed up north or on the Russian front. The Vichy government, and that senile, old fool, Pétain, will disappear once the war ends. And we will be here where we want to be instead of homeless in some Swiss prison camp.”
At school the next day, Mlle. Legrand came into our classroom and spoke to us about what had happened. I was now attending
I’école secondaire,
and in 1941 Mlle. Legrand had become directress. People said she got the post because she was pro-German. There were pictures of Maréchal Pétain hanging in all the classrooms.
She waited while we sang
“La Marseillaise,”
and sat with her head bowed during the moment of silence she had initiated in the past year. In general, most of the girls used the moment of silence to make furtive, funny faces at each other, and there were always stifled giggles which some of the teachers ignored. But this morning, with Mlle. Legrand standing in front of the classroom, there were no funny faces and no laughter.
“I am sure,” she said, “you have all heard about what has happened to Lucie Fiori’s family. It is impossible for us not to feel sad at the loss of a classmate, and to hope and pray that she will be safe wherever she is.”
Mlle. Legrand lowered her head again, and several of the girls in the class who were friends of Lucie’s did the same. You could see their lips moving as they prayed.
“It is sad,” said Mlle. Legrand, “that the innocent must always suffer along with the guilty. In some cases, the guilty do not suffer at all.
“Today in France, it is you and me, and other innocents who are suffering not only from physical hardships—these are unimportant. You may not have as much to eat as you would like, but none of you is starving. And even if you were, that would be preferable to being starved spiritually and morally.
“Which is why France is suffering and bleeding today. Because evil, little, grasping men have brought our country to its knees. Men who have thought only of material needs, and not of their country’s honor. Men who have no morality, no religion, no ideals.