Waiting for the Violins (27 page)

One of them shone his torch beam on her identification, then on the radio valise, and Antonia caught her breath silently. In thirty seconds she would be arrested for espionage. But her rucksack seemed to interest him more. “Let’s see what you’ve got in there.” He handed his torch to his partner and helped her slide the rucksack off her shoulders. “Medicines? Bandages? A thermometer?”

A reply would have been useless. He was about to find her gun. She wondered if she could tip the bike over on them and escape by running. Senseless.

Dry-mouthed, she watched him unbuckle the top of the rucksack and slide one hand inside halfway up his arm. He groped around for a moment, then stopped abruptly. His eyes met hers, and she knew he had his hand on the gun. She stared back, it seemed, for a lifetime.

He pressed his lips together as if in thought, then withdrew his arm slowly from the rucksack. Without taking his eyes from her, he buckled the top closed again and handed the sack back to her.

“Be more careful in the future, mademoiselle,” he said in the impassive voice of an official. “The next time, you may not be so lucky.” And he waved her on.

“Thank you, monsieur,” she said, subdued. Then, quietly, “Perhaps we’ll see each other again after the war.”

“With a little luck,” he said, and strode away. Her heart still pounding, she rode off in the direction of the Rue Marché au Charbon.

*

She hammered on the door of Christine’s shop until the door opened. Without asking questions Christine helped her in with her bicycle and locked the door behind them. She led her toward the rear of the dark shop, where she clicked on a small lamp.

“What’s happened?”

Antonia pressed her fingers to her lips, trying to keep them from trembling. But now, in the safety of Christine’s shop, she could no longer hold her feelings back and broke into tears. “Sandrine, they’ve got Sandrine.”

“Dear God.” Christine took the bicycle from her and pointed with her chin toward a chair. “Sit down. Did anyone follow you here?” She wheeled the bicycle into a narrow storeroom behind the stairs. A moment later she was back.

“No, I don’t think so. The street was empty.” She took a few breaths. “The Gestapo arrived to raid the house just after I escaped. I can’t go back, and I don’t know what will happen to Gaston and Mathilde.”

She glanced up at Christine, whose face, even in the dim light, seemed drawn, and the realization hit home. “But we’re all in danger, aren’t we? If they can make her talk, they’ll come for us all.”

“Yes. They will. But when I signed on to this, I knew it was life-and-death. I’ve already lost my husband and my son to the Germans. Then we lost Andrée and Frédéric, and two of our couriers. And yesterday the Jews under my care were arrested.”

“What? Aisik and Rywka taken?”

“Yes, in a street roundup. To Mechelen, I’m sure.”

“What about Moishe? They were staying with him.”

“Also captured. During an action. I don’t know where he is, or if he’s even alive.”

“Oh, God. The whole family.” Overwhelmed, she slumped, laying her face in her hands.

“Except the baby. The baby will live.”

“That’s something, I suppose,” she answered, monotone. She was limp, indecisive. “Oh, Christine. I was so brave and hopeful when I left England. But now it seems like everything’s lost. What are we doing this for if everyone we care for is gone?”

“Is that why you’re doing this? For a handful of people? You give up too easily. I’ve lost everyone too. I have no joy in my life except in the thought that we might defeat these monsters. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in conscience, and in my final hour—even if it’s in a Nazi cell—I’ll be able to answer to it.”

“You’re right. They haven’t arrested us yet, and until they do, we can keep on trying to free Sandrine. Better to fall in a rescue attempt than cornered in a shop, eh?”

Christine squeezed her shoulder. “Exactly. Let’s talk to the others at the café tomorrow. I’ll also contact our partisan friends. They’ll have some ideas about what to do.”

Antonia nodded glumly. “I need to contact the SOE and let them know what’s happened, but of course you’re right. Tomorrow we’ll have clear heads.”

“In the meantime, it’s the hour for the BBC report. Come on in and have a listen. Maybe we’ll hear something encouraging.” Christine opened the door at the far end of the shop, and Antonia stepped through it for the first time.

She puzzled for a moment until she realized she was looking at an apartment that consisted of two stories. The lower part, behind the ground floor storefront where they stood, was a kitchen-and-bathroom combination. Useful for keeping an eye on the shop.

“Come upstairs, where the radio is,” Christine said, starting up the tiny spiral staircase. The upper floor consisted of a bedroom and sitting room rather like the Goldman apartment, with a cushion-covered bed that served as a sofa.

“Make yourself comfortable, dear,” Christine said, pulling two chairs over to the cupboard where the radio sat. “Lately, the news has been good, and the Germans seem to be on the back foot. She switched on the radio but didn’t touch the dial. Obviously, it was set permanently to the critical station.

After an initial buzzing and crackling, the always-thrilling
da-da-da-DUM
of Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony
sounded, Morse code for the letter V. Then the familiar upper-class voice began.

This is London calling, the European News Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation
.
Here is the news: Americans have begun independent air raids on German soil, beginning with the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven. Meanwhile, the RAF continues its heavy bombing of Berlin. In the Pacific theater, the American heavy cruiser
USS Chicago
has been sunk by Japanese aerial torpedoes in the Solomon Islands.

The Casablanca Conference between President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and General Charles de Gaulle, representing the Free French Forces, has ended with the demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender. Premier Joseph Stalin declined to attend, citing the Stalingrad crisis. In Stalingrad, however, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus has just surrendered the German Sixth army to Soviet troops. In the wake of this victory, Chairman Stalin insists that the Western Allies establish a second front to alleviate pressure on the Red Army.

And now here are our personal messages.

Christine turned down the volume. “Stalingrad fallen. I think that’s the death knell for the fascists. There
will
be a second front sooner or later, and the Germans will lose this war.”

“I’m sure you’re right, but it won’t be in time to save Sandrine or Moishe, or the others.”

Christine stood up. “Then
we
have to do it. For now, your room is empty and the bed is made up. Go ahead and send your report to London, and I’ll contact Kuba. Then, instead of lamenting, we should both get a good night’s sleep. I’ll wake you at seven thirty.”

Antonia grunted dull agreement and took up her radio and rucksack. Following Christine to the first-story landing, she began composing her SOE report in her head. She would tell them the ominous truth, that while the battlefront war might be progressing, the resistance they had planned on seemed to be crumbling.

She began the long plod up the stairs.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Sandrine sat shackled with eight others, thrown back and forth in the rear of the van, uncertain of her destination. Since the Milice in Bayonne had determined her true identity—she’d never learned how—she assumed she would go to one of the prisons in Brussels. Not until the doors of the van opened and she looked out toward the gate of a stone fortress did she realize she’d been brought to Breendonk, Belgium’s concentration camp.

She hadn’t been shot, she suspected, because Alexander von Falkenhausen had learned of her capture and intervened. Had he felt a faint pang of conscience? Nostalgia? Loyalty? Shame?

But no one had officially interrogated her yet, and, given what usually happened to resistants who withheld information, she wasn’t sure that was an improvement.

She knew as much about Breendonk as most people outside the collaborating government did—that it was a massive stone fortress from an earlier century that served as a collection camp for resistants, Communists, black marketers, and Jews in preparation for deportation.

But the chilling stone portal and long cobblestone corridor was medieval and correspondingly terrifying. Heavy steel doors opened and closed behind the parade of new prisoners, and shouts of the guards echoed against the stone surfaces.

At the end of the corridor was the reception area. She received prison clothing and learned she was Prisoner
Nr. 925, but while the other new arrivals were then shunted off down one corridor, the guards prodded her down another toward a section marked S
PECIAL
P
RISONERS
.

Heavy keys opened the half-wood, half-iron door, and with her hands still cuffed behind her back, she was shoved into a cell too small to lie down in. A hinged wooden bench locked upright on the wall rendered sitting impossible as well.

“Don’t move,” the guard snarled, locking the heavy door in front of her. The grillwork at the top enabled him to monitor her every move, so she obeyed and waited patiently. But after an hour of standing motionless, she began to sway. Her sense of balance failed, and she began to rock. Her legs and back ached, and so she shuffled slowly back to support herself against the rear wall.

“The order was not to move,” the guard shouted as he yanked opened the cell door. He smashed his truncheon against her head and shoulder, causing her to fall to her knees. With her hands behind her back, she couldn’t fend off his blows, and he continued to beat her. Finally he stood back and shouted, “Stand up. The order was to stand up!”

She struggled to her feet, bleeding from her nose and with her head ringing, and tried to brace herself by spreading her feet. “At attention. You’ll learn respect if I have to break every bone.” The guard struck her legs from both sides, forcing her feet together. When she finally stood upright again, he stopped beating her and stepped back out of the cell, slamming the door in front of him.

How long would she have to stand that way? She could feel her face begin to swell, and the ache all along her back and legs grew in intensity. But they hadn’t shackled her feet for some reason, and since the guard couldn’t see them, she edged them apart centimeter by centimeter, increasing her ability to balance and shift her weight subtly from side to side. It gave her something to think about in the long, torturous hours.

How long had it been anyhow? There was no window in the corridor, and the light from the overhead bulb outside her door was constant. A change of guard told her that some meaningful unit of time had passed.

“Please, can I have some water? I’m so thirsty,” she called out to the new man, but he ignored her.

The hours passed, and the tormenting dryness in her mouth compounded her misery. Finally, when she feared going mad, the door creaked open again.

“Dinnertime, kids.” The guard laughed. “And then beddie-bye.” He elbowed her aside and released the hinged plank that had been hooked to the wall. It fell with a loud clatter, taking up half the width of the cell at the height of her knee. The guard pivoted her around, reshackled her hands in front of her, and pushed her onto the bench.

“Here you go, Princess.
Bon appétit
,” he said, and presented her with a canister of water.

She drank greedily, the lukewarm water flowing exquisitely down her throat, soothing her. She barely paused for breath, afraid the guard would seize the canister before she’d emptied it, but he was occupied in the next cell, tormenting the prisoner with the same sort of derision. She wondered faintly who the man was.

She was permitted to lie down during the night, but with her hands once again shackled behind her, she found little relief. She dozed for a few minutes at a time, then jerked awake when the pain in her shoulder became too sharp, and she labored to sit up and then lie down on her other side. A bucket was provided for urination, but it was just another form of torment to have to pull apart her prison clothing with shackled hands and then pull it together again. By morning, she was dazed and deranged. Concerns about Antonia, and the others on the line, and even about her own likely death, faded before the physical suffering of the moment.

Still, she consoled herself, hearing the man in the cell next to her being beaten, that such numbness of spirit had its advantages. The pain became duller too, more absorbed into a permanent state of being. If that was the only torment, she could perhaps remain silent.

The malevolence on the face of the new guard who hauled her to her feet in the morning quickly disabused her of that hope. “Time for interrogation,” he said, pulling a wool hood over her head. As if she wasn’t already helpless, she was now completely at his mercy.

He prodded her to make a right turn, and with repeated jabs to her back, he forced her down a long corridor. After a series of turns, the guard shoved her against the wall, telling her to wait, and then yanked off the hood. She blinked in the bright light, finding herself in a curious curved hallway.

A moment later, another prisoner was led into the same hallway and placed alongside her. The guard jerked off his hood and she stepped back, startled.

Moishe. His face was a mass of bruises with one eye swollen shut.

She was about to greet him by name but caught herself. He also turned away from her toward the guard. Of course. Acknowledging each other would only provide more information to their captors.

They stood in obedient silence for a few moments until the guard prodded her around the last corner into the interrogation room and she balked, nauseous with fear. Now she grasped why they had brought two prisoners to be interrogated at once. She was going to be tortured, and he would hear her screams.