Sarah's Key (10 page)

The girl took her mother’s hand as they were shoved toward the barracks. The inside was bare and grimy. Planks and straw. Stench and dirt. The latrines were outside, planks of wood astride holes. They were ordered to sit there, in groups, to piss and defecate in view of all, like animals. It revolted her. She felt she could not go. She could not do this. She looked on as her mother straddled one of the holes. She bowed her head in shame. But she finally did what she was told, cringing, hoping no one was looking at her.

Just above the barbed wire, the girl could glimpse the village. The black spire of a church. A water tower. Roofs and chimneys. Trees. Over there, she thought, in those nearby houses, people had beds, sheets, blankets, food, and water. They were clean. They had clean clothes. Nobody screamed at them. Nobody treated them like cattle. And they were just there, just on the other side of the fence. In the clean little village where she could hear the church bell chime.

There were children on vacation over there, she thought. Children going on picnics, children playing hide-and-seek. Happy children, even if there was a war, and less to eat than usual, and maybe their Papa had gone away to fight. Happy, loved, cherished, children. She couldn’t imagine why there was such a difference between those children and her. She couldn’t imagine why she and all these people here with her had to be treated this way. Who had decided this, and what for?

They were given tepid cabbage soup. It was thin and sandy. Nothing else. Then she watched as rows of women stripped naked and fought to wash their dirty bodies under a trickle of water over rusty, iron washbasins. She found them ugly, grotesque. She hated the flabby ones, the skinny ones, the old ones, the young ones; she hated to have to see their nudity. She did not want to look at them. She hated having to see them.

She huddled against her mother’s warmth and tried not to think of her brother. Her skin felt itchy, her scalp too. She wanted a bath, her bed, her brother. Dinner. She wondered if anything could be worse than what had been happening to her over the past few days. She thought of her friends, of the other little girls in her school who also wore stars. Dominique, Sophie, Agnès. What had happened to them? Had some been able to escape? Were some safe, hiding somewhere? Was Armelle hiding with her family? Would she ever see her again, see her other friends again? Would she go back to school in September?

That night, she couldn’t sleep; she needed her father’s reassuring touch. Her stomach hurt her, she felt it contract with pain. She knew they were not allowed to leave the barracks during the night. She clenched her teeth, wrapping her arms around her belly. But the pain grew worse. Slowly she got up, tiptoed through the rows of sleeping women and children, to the latrines outside the door.

Glaring spot lights swept the camp as she huddled over the planks. The girl peered in and saw thick pale worms writhing in the dark mass of shit. She was afraid a policeman up there in the watchtowers would see her bottom, and she pulled her skirt down over her loins. She quickly made her way back to the barrack.

Inside, the air was stuffy and foul. Some children whimpered in their sleep. She could hear a woman sobbing. She turned to her mother, gazing at the sunken, white face.

Gone was the happy, loving woman. Gone was the mother who used to sweep her into her arms and whisper love words, Yiddish nicknames. The woman with the glossy honey locks and the voluptuous figure, the one all the neighbors, all the shopkeepers would greet by her first name. The one who smelled a warm, comforting, motherly smell: delicious cooking, fresh soap, clean linen. The one with the infectious laugh. The one who said that even if there was a war, they’d pull through, because they were a strong, good family, a family full of love.

That woman had little by little disappeared. She had become gaunt, and pale, and she never smiled or laughed. She smelled rank, bitter. Her hair had become brittle and dry, streaked with gray.

The girl felt like her mother was already dead.

THE OLD WOMAN LOOKED at Bamber and me with rheumy, translucent eyes. She must be getting on toward a hundred, I thought. Her smile was toothless, like a baby’s. Mamé was a teenager compared to her. She lived just above her son’s shop, the newsdealer on the rue Nélaton. A poky apartment cluttered with dusty furniture, moth-eaten rugs, and withered plants. The old lady sat in a sagging armchair by the window. She watched us walk in and introduce ourselves. She seemed pleased to be entertaining impromptu visitors.

“American journalists, so,” she quavered, appraising us.

“American and British,” corrected Bamber.

“Journalists that are interested in the Vel’ d’Hiv’?” she asked.

I got my pen and pad of paper out and balanced them on my knee.

“Do you remember anything about the roundup, Madame?” I asked her. “Could you tell us something, even the smallest detail?”

She let out a cackle.

“You think I don’t remember, young lady? You think I have forgotten, maybe?”

“Well,” I said, “it was a while ago, after all.”

“How old are you?” she asked bluntly.

I felt my face redden. Bamber hid a smile behind his camera.

“Forty-five,” I said.

“I am going to be ninety-five years old,” she said, flaunting decayed gums. “On July 16, 1942, I was thirty-five. Ten years younger than you are now. And I remember. I remember everything.”

She paused. Her dimmed eyes looked outside, onto the street.

“I remember being woken very early by the rumbling of buses. Buses just outside my window. I looked outside and I saw the buses arrive. More and more buses. Our own city buses, the buses I used every day. Green and white. So many of them. I wondered why on earth they were here. Then I saw the people come out. And all the children. So many children. You see, it’s hard to forget the children.”

I scribbled away as Bamber slowly clicked his camera.

“After a while I got dressed and went down with my boys, who were small then. We wanted to know what was going on, we were curious. Our neighbors came, too, and the concierge. Then we saw the yellow stars, and we understood. The Jews. They were rounding up the Jews.”

“Did you have any idea of what was going to happen to these people?” I asked.

She shrugged her old shoulders.

“No,” she said. “We had no idea. How could we? It was after the war that we found out. We thought they were being sent to work somewhere. We did not think anything bad was going on. I remember someone said, ‘It’s the French police, no one will harm them.’ So we did not worry. And the next day, even when this had happened in the middle of Paris, there was nothing in the papers, nothing on the radio. No one seemed preoccupied. So we weren’t either. Until I saw the children.”

She paused.

“The children?” I repeated.

“A few days later, the Jews were taken away again by bus,” she continued. “I was standing on the sidewalk, and I saw the families come out of the
vélodrome,
all these dirty, crying children. They looked frightened, filthy. I was appalled. I realized that in the
vélodrome,
they hadn’t had much to eat or drink. I felt helpless and angry. I tried to throw them bread and fruit, but the police would not let me.”

She paused again, for a long time. She seemed tired all of a sudden, weary. Bamber quietly put his camera away. We waited. We did not move. I wondered if she was going to speak again.

“After all these years,” she said finally, her voice subdued, almost a whisper, “after all these years, I still see the children, you know. I see them climbing onto the buses and being driven away. I did not know where they were going, but I had this feeling. This horrible feeling. Most of the people around me were indifferent. They felt like this was normal. It was normal for them that the Jews were being taken away.”

“Why do you think they felt that way?” I asked.

Another cackle.

“We French had been told for years that Jews were the enemies of our country, that’s why! In ’41 or ’42, there was an exhibit, at the Palais Berlitz, if I remember correctly, on the boulevard des Italiens, called ‘The Jew and France.’ The Germans made sure it went on for months. A big success with the Parisian population. And what was it? A shocking display of anti-Semitism.”

Her gnarled old fingers smoothed out her skirt.

“I remember the policemen, you know. Our own good Parisian policemen. Our own good honest gendarmes. Pushing the children onto the buses. Shouting. Using their batons.”

She bent her chin to her chest. She mumbled something I did not catch. It sounded like, “Shame on us all for not having stopped it.”

“You didn’t know,” I said softly, touched by her suddenly watery eyes. “What could you have done?”

“Nobody remembers the Vel’ d’Hiv’ children, you know. Nobody is interested.”

“Maybe this year, they will,” I said. “Maybe this year, it will be different.”

She pursed her shrunken lips.

“No. You’ll see. Nothing has changed. Nobody remembers. Why should they? Those were the darkest days of our country.”

SHE WONDERED WHERE HER father was. Somewhere in the same camp, in one of the sheds, surely, but she only saw him once or twice. She had no notion of the days slipping by. The only thing that haunted her was her brother. She woke at night, trembling, thinking of him in the cupboard. She took out the key and stared at it with pain and horror. Maybe he was dead by now. Maybe he had died of thirst, of hunger. She tried to count the days since that black Thursday the men had come to get them. A week? Ten days? She didn’t know. She felt lost, confused. It had been a whirlwind of terror, starvation, and death. More children had died at the camp. Their little bodies had been taken away amid tears and cries.

One morning, she noticed a number of women talking with animation. They looked worried, upset. She asked her mother what was going on, but her mother said she didn’t know. Not to be deterred, the girl asked a woman who had a little boy her brother’s age, and who had slept next to them for the past few days. The woman’s face was reddish, as if she had a fever. She said there were rumors, rumors going around the camp. The parents were going to be sent East, to work. They were to prepare for the arrival of the children, who were to come later, in a couple of days. The girl listened, shocked. She repeated the conversation to her mother. Her mother’s eyes seemed to click open. She shook her head vehemently. She said no, that couldn’t possibly happen. They couldn’t possibly do that. They couldn’t separate the children from the parents.

In that sheltered, gentle life that seemed far away, the girl would have believed her mother. She used to believe everything her mother said. But in this harsh new world, the girl felt she had grown up. She felt older than her mother. She knew the other women were saying the truth. She knew the rumors were true. She did not know how to explain this to her mother. Her mother had become like a child.

When the men came into the barracks, she did not feel afraid. She felt she had been hardened. She felt a thick wall had grown around her. She took her mother’s hand and held it tight. She wanted her mother to be brave, to be strong. They were ordered outside. They had to file into another shed, by small groups. She waited in line patiently with her mother. She kept looking around her to catch a glimpse of her father. He was nowhere to be seen.

When it was their turn to step into the shed, she saw a couple of policemen sitting behind a table. There were two women standing next to the men, wearing ordinary clothes. Women from the village, looking at the lines of people with cold, hard faces. She heard them ordering the old woman in front of her in the line to hand over money and jewelry. She watched the old woman fumble with her wedding ring, her watch. A little girl of six or seven stood next to her, shivering with fear. A policeman pointed to the tiny gold rings the little girl wore in her ears. She was too frightened to take them off herself. The grandmother bent down to unclasp them. The policeman let out a sigh of exasperation. This was going far too slowly. They’d be here all night at this rate.