Such Good Girls (14 page)

Amid the general misery and loneliness of Flora’s months there, no event was more vivid than what happened one night in early 1944, when the tranquility of the monastery was broken by the sudden scurrying around of the sisters. They burst into the cottage where the children were sleeping and began packing up their bags by candlelight.

“Levez-vous! Levez-vous!” they whispered urgently. “Les gens viennent vous chercher! Ramassez vos affaires! Levez-vous!”

During the ensuing scramble, one of the sisters began folding Flora’s clothes to put them into her suitcase. “Mon Dieu!” she cried, seeing that Flora’s mother had embroidered her Jewish name on every piece, while for months she’d been answering to Marie Hamon. Wasting no time, the nun took a small pair of sewing scissors and ripped out every dangerous stitch. The nun was destroying, thread by thread, the visual confirmation of Stefanie’s presence in Flora’s life, the only proof that she ever had a mother.

As Flora screamed for her to stop, the nun clapped her hand over Flora’s mouth. “Tais-toi, Marie!” the nun said. “C’est dangereux!”

The nun kept severing the threads that spelled out FLORA and HILLEL and yanking them out of the inside of her collars and the waistbands of her skirts. When she was through, she gathered up the nest of black threads in her lap and it all disappeared inside her habit.

Sobbing, Flora was sure now that her mother would never be able to find her.

In a hushed storm of activity, under cover of darkness, and barely saying farewell to the nuns who had hidden them for months and at great risk, the children and their bags were quietly loaded onto a truck that sat with its motor humming in the monastery’s driveway. Most of the children held hands, shaking, as the truck, its driver unseen beyond the canvas top, rolled out onto L’Avenue Sainte Colette and into the night. None of them had any idea that they had just escaped right under the eyes of the increasingly suspicious Gestapo stationed right across the street.

The children were dropped off at different locations one by one, the driver walking around to the back of the truck to call out a name and offering a hand to help the child down and into his or her new home. For Flora, the destination was the rural home in Châteauneuf of two middle-age ladies, an Englishwoman and a Russian dancer who liked to prance and twirl about the living room, showing off her long legs. Not only were they much nicer than the nuns, although equally eccentric in their own way, but Flora, who loved to dance, would join the Russian in her improvised pirouettes and arabesques. It had been a long time since she had felt free to express herself. To dance was to feel free momentarily from her confusion and grief and thoughts of her absent mother. After the nuns, the women’s warmth, and their delight in the scrawny Flora’s lack of inhibition, made it easy for Flora to fall in love with them and bury, for the moment, her memories of the convent and the life that had come before.

She could leave the house only to be in the garden, where she fed the women’s chickens. One day, a boy appeared in the garden, thirteen or fourteen years old, almost as thin as she was, dressed in dirty shorts and sandals. For a brief time they became friends. She taught him how to feed the chickens, tossing handfuls of corn and cut-up apples. He taught her how to knit, no doubt a skill he had picked up in hiding. Where he came from she never knew.

The friendship distracted her from her worries, but like everything else it was taken from her. After only a few weeks, the two women told Flora they could no longer afford to keep her. She felt betrayed. A man appeared that night and drove her west to the next village, Magagnosc, where a wife and her husband welcomed her with the stilted congeniality she was getting used to. There her life became quite difficult again. Although she had her own room, the wife paid little attention to her while the irritable husband, an engineer, punished the high-spirited Flora for the slightest infraction of their house rules or her failure to complete her chores. Flora looked on sadly when he offered his wife bread before her. They had no children, and therefore no toys. Maybe that’s why he decided to teach her the names of all 206 bones of the human skeleton. She didn’t get very far before they both gave up in frustration.

He told her repeatedly that he was an atheist and that those who believed in God were fools, weaklings, or worse.

It was cruel, since Flora needed all the help she could get.

“You do know what happens to you after you die, don’t you?” he told her.

“I’m going to heaven,” said Flora, thinking of the nuns.

“This is what I’m talking about! There is no heaven. No God, no heaven, no angels. If there was a God, you wouldn’t have to stay with us because the Germans wouldn’t be taking all the Jews away and you’d be with your mother. I will tell you what happens after you die,” the husband said. “They put your body in the ground, but that’s not the worst of it.” He waited in vain for her Flora to ask him what the worst of it was. “You’ll be eaten by worms,” he said finally. “That’s what happens.”

She had been left by her mother, abandoned by the sisters, betrayed by the two ladies, and now taunted by the engineer. She spent most of her time talking to the couple’s goats and hugging them. What she felt was a faraway, distant sorrow.

Fortunately before long the atheist announced that he and his wife wouldn’t be able to take care of her any longer. Unlike the other separations in her life, this one barely touched her. Her life with her mother on Avenue Monplaisir had receded so far behind a scrim of rosary games, nearsighted nuns, and free-form dancing around a dining room table that when the man packed up her things and put Flora and her suitcase on the back of his bicycle one morning, it seemed almost—almost—like the normal course of things.

He pedaled her several kilometers to the town of Grasse, known as the Perfume Capital of the World. From a distance, Grasse reminded her of Vence. It was a jumble of medieval stucco buildings with painted shutters, built on a hill. He walked Flora, still on his bicycle, into the heart of the old village, past charcuteries and patisseries with little food in their windows. At La Place de la Poissonerie, a square surrounded by tall, five-and six-story buildings painted yellow ocher and rust, they stopped. There the atheist introduced himself and Flora to a group of people who had gathered to find her a new home.

She sat on a bench, feeling spikes of desperation pushing up through her numbness. The atheist sat around a café table with the strangers, who periodically glanced over at her. She could hear one couple, easily the oldest of them, debating in an unfamiliar language. The tall man with a long face and receding hairline was gesturing with a chopping motion of his right hand at a woman, somewhat younger, who wore a strand of wooden beads and a sort of long, flowing turquoise dress that wrapped around her. Finally, it was this couple, old enough to be her grandparents, who told her that she was coming with them.

“I’m Andrée Karpeles,” the woman in the long dress said in French, “and this is my husband, Adalrik Hogman.” The long-faced man stood a bit behind her, saying nothing. “Our house is out in the country and we’ll have to walk there, but I’ll carry your suitcase for you.”

The man was holding out his hand to her. In it was a single white sugar cube.

“My husband is Swedish and I’m afraid he doesn’t speak French that well,” the woman said.

Flora took the cube and licked it a few times, finally resting it on her tongue and letting it dissolve in slow, quiet ecstasy.

After a brief word with the engineer, the three of them set off on foot through the narrow streets of Grasse and into the surrounding countryside. With Andrée carrying her suitcase and Adalrik marching silently next to them, they traipsed through woods and past springtime fields of sweet-smelling white jasmine flowers. It was the perfect setting for a girl named Flora, but she didn’t notice or care. Flora was thinking, Who are these old people? and wondering what was to become of her now.

After what seemed like several hours on foot, they came to the end of a dirt road in the hills and Flora saw a huge, three-story stone house with a terra-cotta tile roof hidden behind a row of Italian cypress trees. The property was dotted with cacti, some growing out of enormous urns. Low hedge-bordered paths led to a rectangular pond into which a fountain shot a high-arcing jet of water. While Andrée showed Flora around the property, a white mutt with brown markings, the couple’s pet, pranced behind them.

She was given her own room upstairs. It seemed like paradise, but the very next morning, as Flora was exploring the downstairs rooms, there were several loud raps on the front door. Andrée told Flora to run upstairs and hide in her room, but instead she stopped and sat at the top of the stairs, from which she could just see the bottom of the front door, which Andrée opened to a pair of glossy black boots.

“Je m’excuse de vous déranger, Madame Hogman,” a man’s voice said, “mais j’ai été informé que vous hébergez une jeune fille. Une jeune fille juive.”

Flora froze at the sound of a gendarme who already seemed to know of her presence there. Hours of walking over hill and dale to what seemed like the end of the world, and her existence had been discovered the first day?

Flora listened as Andrée explained that, of course, there was no Jewish girl living with them, she would never allow such a thing. After a brief pause, Flora heard the policeman say, “Quand même, je vous conseille d’être prudente, si vous me permettez.” All the same, be careful, he said.

Only a few days later, a Kübelwagen pulled up to the house and a German soldier jumped out and knocked on the side door. This time Mr. Hogman accompanied his wife to answer the door.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” the soldier asked.

“Français,” Andrée replied.

In broken French, the soldier insisted on coming inside to search for metal objects for the Third Reich to turn into much needed ammunition in a war they were now losing.

On hearing this, Adalrik stepped outside and escorted him to the front door to point at a document taped to it. By this point, Flora had run to the kitchen in the back of the house and hidden herself in the pantry, closing the door behind her.

“Comme vous voyez clairement, monsieur,” she faintly heard Andrée explain to the solider.

After the German had driven off, Andrée and Adalrik showed Flora the official stamped document taped to the inside of the front door’s window.

“This says that our house is protected by the Swedish Consulate,” she explained to Flora, “and no one can come in unless we want them to. As long as you stay in the house, you’re safe.”

The next and most stable phase of Flora’s life began a few months later, when the war ended and the Hogmans eventually adopted her, after which she became Flora Hogman and grew to adulthood. Andrée was over sixty and an accomplished painter by the time Flora arrived, and was unlike any adult she had ever met before. As a close friend and devotee of Rabindranath Tagore, the prolific Indian Buddhist poet, musician, and the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Andrée had become a yoga aficionada who occasionally dressed in saris. She knew a lot of people, such as the sister of the Nobel Prize–winning French writer and mystic Romain Rolland, and she had met the famous French writer Colette. After a year and a half of austere nuns and capricious hosts, Flora felt in some ways an immediate affinity for this woman, who treated her like a child to be loved, and took time to tutor Flora, who had already lost two years of schooling, in arithmetic, reading, and, of course, drawing.

Andrée had a fine sense of life’s ironies—with which Flora was already too well acquainted—and the two of them laughed a lot together like schoolgirls. Flora found in Andrée a soul mate who encouraged her love of dancing.

“Let’s see you dance some more,” Andrée would say.

“Again?”

“Rabindranath, you know, was a big proponent of Manipuri dance. He almost single-handedly revived it back in the 1920s.” Flora was fascinated, though she had no idea what her foster mother was talking about.

Adalrik, who had retired from the liquor business, was a different story. He didn’t speak French and Flora didn’t speak English, but he seemed remote in a way not entirely explained by their lack of a common language. When she brought him his tea, he would simply say “tack” or “tack så mycket.”

“You must be grateful to him,” Andrée told her. “He took you in because I wanted to.”

That was pure Andrée, the streak of childish insensitivity. She was a woman with her own ideas about things, some of which, to say the least, rubbed Flora the wrong way. With a logic that would forever escape Flora, Andrée, a Jew-turned-Buddhist, made her convert to Protestantism, even though all her classmates were Catholics. In Catholic France, being a Protestant was only somewhat better than being a Jew. Flora endured months of Sunday school, learning the Protestant catechism. It made so little sense to her, this latest visit to the smorgasbord of the world’s religions, that at the moment of her confirmation Flora decided to become an atheist.

While Flora could secretly resist Andrée’s religious control, she was helpless to defend herself against Andrée’s fashion dictates. She cut Flora’s hair like an Indian girl she had known in Tagore’s family and sometimes made her wear saris at home. Andrée disdained modern culture and denied Flora access to popular music and books, though there were plenty of Bach and Brahms recordings, and Flora had the run of Andrée’s library of leather-bound volumes by Tolstoy, Hugo, Balzac, Rousseau, Baudelaire, and editions of Tagore’s poetry, short stories, and novels, some of which Andrée herself had illustrated.

After the war, for a while there was no word of Flora’s real mother; rather, the French children’s welfare agency L’Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, which itself had saved thousands of Jewish children during the German occupation, put Flora in contact with two living relatives she didn’t know. There was an eccentric aunt on her father’s side who lived in Geneva and who, Andrée would tell Flora later, had been intent on kidnapping her. The other relative was her mother’s half-brother, who lived in Haifa, Israel, to whom Andrée wrote in 1945: