Sarah's Key (18 page)

It was of a ten-year-old girl. I read the caption: june 1942. Taken at the school on the rue des Blancs-Manteaux. Right next to the rue de Saintonge.

The girl had slanted, light-colored eyes. They would have been blue or green, I thought. Shoulder-length pale hair with a bow in it, slightly crooked. A beautiful, shy smile. A heart-shaped face. She was sitting at her school desk, an open book in front of her. On her chest, the star.

Sarah Starzynski. A year younger than Zoë.

I looked back at the list of names. I didn’t need to ask Franck Lévy where convoy number 15 leaving Beaune-la-Rolande had gone. I knew it was Auschwitz.

“What about the garage on the rue de Bretagne?” I asked.

“That’s where most of the Jews living in the third arrondissement were gathered before being taken to the rue Nélaton and the
vélodrome
.”

I noticed that after Sarah’s name, there was no mention of a convoy. I pointed this out to Franck Lévy.

“That means she was not on any of the trains that left for Poland. As far as we know.”

“Could she have escaped?” I said.

“It’s hard to say. A handful of children did escape from Beaune-la-Rolande and were saved by French farmers living nearby. Other children, who were much smaller than Sarah, were deported without their identities being clear. In that case, they were listed for example as “One boy, Pithiviers.” Alas, I can’t tell you what happened to Sarah Starzynski, Miss Jarmond. All I can tell you is that she apparently never arrived in Drancy with the other children from Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers. She is not in the Drancy files.”

I looked down at the beautiful, innocent face.

“What could have happened to her?” I murmured.

“The last trace of her we have is at Beaune-la-Rolande. She may have been saved by a neighboring family. She could have remained hidden during the war under another name.”

“Did that happen a lot?”

“Yes, it did. A great number of Jewish children survived, thanks to the help and generosity of French families or religious institutions.”

I looked at him.

“Do you think Sarah Starzynski was saved? That she survived?”

He looked down at the photograph of the lovely, smiling child.

“I hope she was. But now you know what you wanted. You know who lived in your apartment.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, thank you. But I still wonder how my husband’s family could live there after the Starzysnkis’ arrest. I can’t understand that.”

“You must not judge them so harshly,” warned Franck Lévy. “There was indeed a considerable amount of Parisian indifference, but don’t forget Paris was occupied. People feared for their lives. Those were very different times.”

As I left Franck Lévy’s office, I suddenly felt fragile, on the verge of tears. It had been a draining, taxing day. My world closed in around me, pressing down on me from every side. Bertrand. The baby. The impossible decision I was going to have to make. The talk I was going to have with my husband tonight.

And then, the mystery concerning the rue de Saintonge apartment. The Tézac family moving in, so quickly after the Starzynskis had been arrested. Mamé and Edouard not wanting to talk about it. Why? What had happened? What didn’t they want me to know?

As I walked toward the rue Marbeuf, I felt like I was being swamped by something enormous, something I could not deal with.

Later on that evening, I met Guillaume at the Select. We sat near the bar, away from the noisy
terrasse
. He had a couple of books with him. I was delighted. They were the exact ones I just could not get my hands on. Particularly one concerning the Loiret camps. I thanked him warmly.

I had not planned to say anything about what I had discovered that afternoon, but it all came tumbling out. Guillaume listened to every word, intently. When I finished, he said that his grandmother had told him about Jewish apartments being plundered right after the roundup. Others had seals fixed on their doors by the police, seals that would be broken several months or years later when it was obvious that no one was coming back. According to Guillaume’s grandmother, the police often worked closely with the concierges, who were able to find new tenants quickly by word of mouth. That’s probably how it had happened for my in-laws.

“Why is this so important to you, Julia?” Guillaume asked, finally.

“I want to know what happened to that little girl.”

He looked at me with dark, searching eyes.

“I understand. But be careful about questioning your husband’s family.”

“I know they are holding something back. I want to know what it is.”

“Be careful, Julia,” he repeated. He smiled, but his eyes remained serious. “You’re playing with Pandora’s box. Sometimes, it’s better not to open it. Sometimes, it’s better not to know.”

Franck Lévy had said the same thing that very morning.

FOR TEN MINUTES, JULES and Geneviève had rushed about the house, like frantic animals, not speaking, wringing their hands. They seemed in agony. They tried to move Rachel, to carry her down the stairs, but she was too weak. They had finally kept her in bed. Jules did his best to calm Geneviève down, without much success; she kept collapsing on the nearest sofa or chair and bursting into tears.

The girl trailed after them like a worried puppy. They wouldn’t answer any of her questions. She noticed Jules glancing again and again toward the entrance, peering through the window at the gates. The girl felt fear pluck at her heart.

At nightfall, Jules and Geneviève sat face to face in front of the fireplace. They appeared to have recovered. They seemed calm and composed. But the girl noticed Geneviève’s hands trembling. They were both pale, they looked incessantly at the clock.

At one point, Jules turned to the girl. He spoke quietly. He told her to go back down into the cellar. There were large bags of potatoes. She would have to climb into one of them and hide there as best as she could. Did she understand? It was very important. If somebody went into the cellar, she would have to be invisible.

The girl froze. She said, “The Germans are coming!”

Before Jules or Geneviève could say a word, the dog barked, making them all jump. Jules signaled to the girl, pointing to the trapdoor. She obeyed instantly, slipping into the dark, musty cellar. She couldn’t see, but she managed to find the potato bags, toward the back, feeling the rough material with her palms. There were several large sacks of them, piled one on top of the other. Quickly, she pulled them apart with her fingers and slithered between them. As she did so, one of the bags split open, and potatoes came tumbling around her, noisily, in a series of quick thumps. She hastily layered them around and over her.

Then she heard the steps. Loud and rhythmic. She had heard those steps before, in Paris, late at night, after the curfew. She knew what they meant. She had peered out of the window, and she had seen the men march by along the feebly lit street, with their round helmets and their precise movements.

Men marching. Marching right up to the house. The steps of a dozen men. A man’s voice, muffled but still clear, came to her ears. He was speaking German.

The Germans were here. The Germans had come to get Rachel and her. She felt her bladder loosen.

Footsteps just above her head. The mumble of a conversation she did not catch. Then Jules’s voice, “Yes, Lieutenant, there is a sick child here.”

“A sick Aryan child, sir?” came the foreign, guttural voice.

“A child that is ill, Lieutenant.”

“Where is the child?”

“Upstairs.” Jules’s voice, weary now.

She heard the heavy steps rock the ceiling. Then Rachel’s thin scream all the way from the top of the house. Rachel torn from the bed by the Germans. Rachel moaning, too feeble to fight back.

The girl put her hands over her ears. She didn’t want to hear. She could not hear. She felt protected by the sudden silence she had created.

As she lay under the potatoes, she saw a dim ray of light pierce the darkness. Somebody had opened the trapdoor. Somebody was coming down the cellar stairs. She took her hands off her ears.

“There is no one down there,” she heard Jules say. “The girl was alone. We found her in our dog shed.”

The girl heard Geneviève blowing her nose. Then her voice, tearful, spent.

“Please don’t take the girl with you! She is too ill.”

The guttural response was ironic.

“Madame, the child is a Jew. Probably escaped from one of the nearby camps. She has no reason to be in your house.”

The girl watched the orange flicker of a flashlight creep along the stone cellar walls, edging closer, then, aghast, she saw the oversized black shadow of a soldier, cut out like a cartoon. He was coming for her. He was going to get her. She tried to make herself as small as possible, she stopped breathing. She felt as if her heart had stopped beating.

No, he would not find her! It would be too hideously unfair, too horrible if he found her. They already had poor Rachel. Wasn’t that enough? Where had they taken Rachel? Was she outside in a truck with the soldiers? Had she fainted? Where were they taking her, she wondered, to a hospital? Or back to the camp? These bloodthirsty monsters. Monsters! She hated them. She wished them all dead. The bastards. She used all the swearwords she knew, all the words her mother had forbidden her ever to use. The dirty fucking bastards. She screamed the swearwords in her mind, as loud as she could in her mind, closing her eyes tight, away from the orange spot of light coming closer, running over the top of the sacks where she was hiding. He would not find her. Never. Bastards, dirty bastards.

Jules’s voice, again.

“There is no one down there, Lieutenant. The girl was alone. She could hardly stand. We had to look after her.”

The Lieutenant’s voice droned down to the girl, “We are just checking. We are going to look around your cellar, then you will follow us back to the Kommandantur.”

The girl tried not to move, not to sigh, not to breathe, as the flashlight roamed over her head.

“Follow you?” Jules’s voice seemed stricken. “But why?”

A curt laugh: “A Jew in your house and you ask why?”

Then came Geneviève’s voice, surprisingly calm. She sounded like she had stopped crying.

“You saw we were not hiding her, Lieutenant. We were helping her get better. That’s all. We didn’t know her name. She could not speak.”

“Yes,” continued Jules’s voice, “we even called a doctor. We weren’t hiding her in the least.”

There was a pause. The girl heard the Lieutenant cough.

“That is indeed what Guillemin told us. You were not hiding the girl. He did say that, the good
Herr Doktor.”

The girl felt potatoes being moved over her head. She remained as still as a statue, not breathing. Her nose tickled and she longed to sneeze.

She heard Geneviève’s voice again, calm, bright, almost hard. A tone she had not heard Geneviève use.

“Would you gentlemen care for some wine?”

The potatoes stopped moving around her.

Upstairs the Lieutenant guffawed, “Some wine?
Jawohl!
”

“And some pâté, perhaps?” said Geneviève, with the same bright voice.

Steps retreated up the stairs, and the trapdoor slammed shut. The girl felt faint with relief. She hugged herself, tears streaming down her face. How long did they remain up there, glasses tinkling, feet shuffling, hearty laughs ringing out? It was endless. It seemed to her that the Lieutenant’s bellow was jollier and jollier. She even caught a greasy belch. Of Jules and Geneviève, she heard nothing. Were they still up there? What was going on? She longed to know. But she knew she had to stay where she was until Jules or Geneviève came to fetch her. Her limbs had gone stiff, but still she dared not move.

At last, the house went silent. The dog barked once, then no more. The girl listened. Had the Germans taken Jules and Geneviève with them? Was she all alone in the house? Then she heard the stifled sound of sobs. The trapdoor opened with a groan and Jules’s voice floated down to her.

“Sirka! Sirka!”

When she came up again, her legs aching, her eyes red with dust and her cheeks wet and grimy, she saw that Geneviève had broken down, her face in her hands. Jules was trying to comfort her. The girl looked on, helpless. The old woman glanced up. Her face had aged, had caved in. It frightened the girl.

“That child,” she whispered, “taken away to her death. I don’t know where, or how, but I know she will die. They wouldn’t listen. We tried to make them drink, but they kept their heads clear. They let us be, but they took Rachel.”

Geneviève’s tears flowed down her wrinkled cheeks. She shook her head in despair, grasped Jules’s hand, held it close.

“My God, what is our country coming to?”

Geneviève beckoned to the girl, clasped her small hand in her weathered old one. They saved me, the girl kept thinking. They saved me. They saved my life. Maybe somebody like them saved Michel, saved Papa and Maman. Maybe there is still hope.

“Little Sirka!” sighed Geneviève, squeezing her fingers. “You were so brave down there.”