Odette's Secrets (22 page)

January 1933

Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party come to power in Germany. Jews in that country begin to be excluded from public life.

November 1934

Odette Melspajz (later, Meyers) is born in Paris to Jewish parents of Polish origin, Berthe and George Melspajz.

September 1939

Hitler invades Poland as a first step toward conquering all of Europe. France and England declare war on Germany.

November 1939

George Melspajz joins the French army.

June/July 1940

France is defeated, and the German occupation begins. Marshal Phillippe Pétain is named head of the Vichy government in France, which collaborates with the Nazis.

May, August, December 1941

The first large-scale roundups of Jews take place. Only men are arrested. They are kept in camps in France.

March 1942

The first foreign-born Jews in France are deported to death camps in Poland.

May/June 1942

French Jews over the age of six are required to wear yellow stars on their clothing. They are forbidden to go to parks, restaurants, libraries, and other public places.

July 1942

Nearly thirteen thousand foreign-born Jews are arrested in Paris and deported to death camps. Odette escapes to the Vendée.

January 1943

The first roundups of French-born Jews begin.

March 1943

Berthe Melspajz joins Odette in hiding in the Vendée.

June 1944

After many sea and air battles, Allied forces invade France in a final, successful effort to defeat the Nazis.

August 1944

Paris is liberated.

October 1944

Berthe Melspajz and Odette return to Paris.

April 1945

Hitler commits suicide.

May 1945

Germany surrenders. The war in Europe is over. The death camps in Poland are liberated, and surviving Jews begin to try to return to their homes.

July 1945

George Melspajz returns home.

Author's Note

Odette's Secrets
is classed as a work of fiction, but it is based very closely on a true story. Here is how it came to be. One late August afternoon a few years ago, I was walking through the Marais, an old Jewish neighborhood in Paris, with my husband. We passed an elementary school with a bronze plaque. The plaque honored the memory of the Jewish children, students at the school, who had been deported from France during World War II. I put my hand on the warm stone of the school, thinking of those children. Who were they? What were their lives like in France during the war?

I began to read about life in Paris during World War II, especially about the life of French Jews. I learned that 11,400 children were deported. Most died in concentration camps in Eastern Europe. But more children survived in France than in any other European country, 84 percent. How did this happen?

Most were hidden in homes, convents, monasteries, farms, and schools all over the country. To stay successfully hidden, children had to reinvent themselves, to deny their families and their identity and “become” French
Christian children. How in the world were children able to do this? I wondered. And what was it like for them to readjust to reality after the war?

In October I was still thinking over these questions when I was invited to the American Library in Paris to read my book
The Costume Copycat
at the library's annual Halloween party. After all the pirates and princesses went home, I went upstairs to browse in the stacks. And there, by chance, I found
Doors to Madame Marie
, the autobiography of Odette Meyers, a woman who had been one of those hidden French children during the war.

I became fascinated by Odette's story. I pored over the photographs of her and her family and friends, read and reread her adventures, especially the passages where she described what it was like to switch selves, not once but twice, both in the remote countryside of the Vendée where she hid and then back in Paris again after the war. I visited the street where Odette's family lived, and sat in the square opposite their building, studying the door and the window of their apartment above. I walked up the street, as Odette did, imagining her holding the hand of her beloved Monsieur Henri as he led her past the French policemen sent to
arrest her and her mother on Black Thursday, July 16, 1942. Did the café and the convent she mentioned in her book look the same then? Where was her school? I explored the alleyway where her dear cousins lived, the cousins who were deported from France weeks after their arrest and never returned. I strolled in the park where Odette played, and in the cemetery where she came face-to-face with who she was after the war.

One night, I told my husband Odette's story. Together, we took the
Métro
to the 11th
arrondissement
and stood outside Odette's apartment building. “I
so
wish I could go inside!” I said, looking at the heavy oak door at the front of the building, a solid street door of the type that is always locked.

“Let's see if we can,” my husband said, and pressed his fingertips against the door. It swung open! In moments we were standing in the tiled hallway where Odette played with her red rubber ball. At the end was the tiny apartment of her godmother, Madame Marie, the place where Odette and her mother hid in her broom closet when the police came at dawn to arrest them. I couldn't believe my luck … the opening of that door seemed like a sign. I just
had
to write for children the story of Odette's remarkable life.

I had grown up in a neighborhood with many immigrants near Detroit just after World War II. War stories, including some involving the Holocaust, were part of the fabric of our lives. But I had never before heard the story of how children saved themselves from death through their own courage and ingenuity. This was the story I wanted to tell.

But how? Odette had lived and prospered as a mother, a teacher, and a writer, but she had died in 2002. Still, I knew she had a son, Daniel, and he lived in Paris.

I found her son's number in the Paris telephone directory. With my heart in my mouth, I dialed the number. I left a message, explaining who I was and what I hoped to do. Then I waited. A few days later, Daniel called me back and invited me to lunch in his sunny apartment on the rue Rambuteau. He listened to my request and made his decision almost immediately. His mother, he said, had often talked in schools and libraries to children about her wartime experience. He was sure she would want her story to live on. As her literary executor, he gave me permission to use the facts of her life as the basis of a book for children.

I was thrilled but wanted to learn as much as I could about Odette and her family and experiences first. Daniel gave me his grandmother's autobiography and some of his mother's poems. He showed me film clips and more family photographs. He also told me that although Odette and her three friends thought they were the only Jewish children in the small village where they lived in the remote country area of the Vendée, in fact, more than forty children were hidden there by local families.

I decided I needed to visit the Vendée. I took the train to Nantes, as Odette did at the time of her escape from Paris. All the way I studied the farmhouses, the villages, and the train stations passing by. What was there in 1942? Did Odette see it as I did? Then I drove to Chavagnesen-Paillers, the first village where Odette was hidden in plain sight during the war. My husband and I were standing outside the house where she lived when a kindly old man appeared at the upstairs window and invited us in. He was Jacques Raffin, who had been one of the children of the family that had sheltered Odette. He showed me the garden where they had played together on the swing and fed the pigeons. Afterward, we visited the school Odette
attended with her friends Cécile and Paulette, and the church where she went to Mass every Sunday. Finally, we went to the hamlet where Odette and her mother lived together under assumed names. We saw the forest and the square where she played hide-and-seek and hopscotch, the pathway she took walking to school in the town of Saint-Fulgent. The fields, the cows, and the cottages were all still there. Now that I had seen as much of Odette's wartime world as I could, I was ready to write.

I wrote and rewrote Odette's story many times before I was satisfied with it. At first I attempted to write it as a straight biography. This version seemed too dry. Then, with Daniel's permission, I tried writing it in first person, in free verse, imagining insofar as I was able the childhood voice of Odette, the poet-to-be. I imagined details such as the name Odette's beloved doll might have had, and the actual words that might have made up conversations to which Odette and her mother had alluded in their writings. Now the book became a work of fiction rather than nonfiction, but I hoped this might make it more accessible to today's children. When I was finally satisfied with my manuscript, I gave it to my agent, Steven Chudney,
whose own father had been hidden on a Christian farm in Poland during World War II. He found just the right editor for
Odette's Secrets
—Melanie Cecka, whose sensitive suggestions helped shape the book still further.

Odette Meyers's life, like that of her fellow writer Anne Frank, was threatened with extinction. But unlike Anne, she went on to live and thrive. She moved with her parents to California after the war, graduated from college, married the poet Bert Meyers, and raised two children, Daniel and Anat. She taught French literature and made many devoted friends. And she always made it a point to share the story of her childhood in schools, churches, and temples; in her autobiography; and in her contribution to the award-winning 1984 film
The Courage to Care
. My hope is that today's children, including her grandson Sacha, will come to know her life and times, her spirit and determination to survive, through this book.

Acknowledgments