A Week in Paris (43 page)

‘They are only being transferred,’ the more benign camp Kommandant was telling everyone. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ Some of the other internees were naïve or fearful enough to believe him. A few who protested found themselves branded as tiresome meddlers and confined to their hotels for a month. Kitty narrowly escaped being one of these.

After the train left, witnesses delivered the dreadful news that it was travelling east, in the direction of the German border. Much later, Kitty was to learn that in response to the increasing likelihood of defeat, the Nazis had stepped up their programme of extermination. Most of these poor people were never to be seen again.

Rejcel and Anna were safe this time, but Kitty had never seen Rejcel so terrified. She talked all the time about how they would be next. However, as the days passed, a new look of determination came into her eyes. ‘We have to escape,’ she told Kitty. ‘Another train will come. I know what will happen. This is what they do.’

‘How, though? How will you get away?’ Kitty knew that some of the inmates had connections with the Resistance outside. Sometimes internees did vanish. Some escaped and never returned, and you never heard what happened to them. Of those who were caught, some were shot. Others were brought back to the camp and deported to heaven knew where. For Kitty it wasn’t worth the risk. But for Rejcel the choice was starker. ‘I want to help you,’ Kitty whispered, her mind working quickly. She was sharing a room just with Sarah now. Perhaps they could hide Rejcel and her daughter there?

‘No, that would put you in danger,’ Rejcel replied when Kitty explained. ‘I’ve already spoken to a woman who can help. She knows people outside. Don’t ask me any more, I beg you. It’s better that way for all of us.’

And so it came about that when she looked for Rejcel a few days later, Kitty was told by the matronly woman they’d roomed with that Rejcel and Anna had gone. They’d been helped to escape the night before.
She didn’t even say goodbye
, Kitty thought, but if their disappearance was a shock, it was also a relief. She lived on her nerves for weeks though, fearing the news that they’d been caught. But no news of any kind came. A few other Jews vanished, too, but most stayed, dreading the consequences of being apprehended. Maybe there wouldn’t be another deportation, some told themselves. Maybe they
would
get to Brazil or Palestine, or wherever it was that they’d pinned their hopes on going.

They were wrong. In May another of the windowless trains arrived at the station and the whole pattern was repeated. The Poles’ cries of desperation as they were rounded up were terrible. Kitty could not bear to watch.

After that, very few Jews remained. Some, Kitty knew, were concealed about the camp until means were found to facilitate their escape. It came as some surprise to hear, long afterwards, that Adele Dunne had used her position in the camp office to help.

Summer 1944

Once again the camp at Vittel was abuzz with rumours. The inmates discussed with breathless excitement the news of the D-Day Landings, of Allied successes in Northern France and the merciless bombardment by the Allies of German cities. Then one hot day in the middle of July, the camp’s sound system rang out through the dusty grounds with momentous news. The names of nine hundred people were read out. They were to get themselves ready to leave the camp, to be repatriated. Kitty was one of them.

‘I can’t just go,’ she told Miss Dunne in a panic. ‘Not without collecting Fay.’ Adele was also on the list and she was in a hurry to pack. Everyone was told they could take up to forty pounds’ weight in luggage, but still the rules were ridiculous. No paper, even scraps. Or books or envelopes. Strip searches were threatened.

‘Of course you can’t,’ Miss Dunne replied. ‘You’ll have to tell them. Not everyone’s going at once. Perhaps Fay can be fetched. Why don’t we find someone who’ll telephone the convent? Or we can write. Oh Kitty, you can’t miss this opportunity to go home.’

Home
. Kitty wasn’t sure what she’d do when she arrived in England, but she longed to be there. Paris wasn’t home, not now, without Gene. There was nothing to stay for. So many of the people she’d loved had left or been lost. Milly and Jack, her teacher, Monsieur Deschamps. And Serge, what had happened to Serge?

In the end she found the doctor who had once smuggled out the letter for her and begged him to help her. He was a slow, careful man who considered her request gravely, then nodded. ‘I will do my best,’ he told her, and she gave him the address of Sainte Cécile’s. Father Paul must have a telephone number, though she didn’t know what it was.

It was with mixed feelings that she watched the first group of excited internees leave to board the train going west to the coast. It was a proper train with proper carriages, it was said, not those ominous box-cars. Miss Dunne was among them, a spare upright figure in her old-fashioned clothes, her face burnt brown by the baking summer sun, but still looking unmistakably English with her bright, dignified expression and an inelegant pair of sensible shoes. ‘Remember, Kitty,’ she told her, ‘if we don’t see each other again en route, it’s Little Barton where I live. Primrose Cottage. Ask anyone there, they’ll all know it.’

‘I’ll find you, Adele. Thank you. And good luck.’

Sarah, her roommate, had been allowed to leave a couple of months before, returning home to Paris, so Kitty had the room all to herself now. She lay awake that night, worrying about Fay and hoping against hope that her daughter would arrive in time for them to travel home with the other internees.

The day of departure grew closer, but there was no sign of Fay. ‘I sent your letter,’ the doctor assured her. ‘It seems the telephone system has been down in that part of Paris, so it’s difficult to find out what is happening, but I expect they’ll come. The only other thing you can do is to fetch her yourself.’

‘Would they let me do that?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know, but if you like I’ll help. Come and see me again this afternoon.’

When she sought him out he was in his office, writing up reports. He put down his pen and his face lit up with a broad smile. ‘There’s a train to Paris in the morning. It’s been arranged. Two of the guards are to go with you.’

‘Two? What do they expect me to do? But thank you, Doctor.’ She was indeed relieved.

‘And someone at the camp office is to telephone your Father Paul to know to expect you.’

Again, she thanked him. Once, when she’d consulted him about persistent headaches, she’d told him about Gene, and he’d always remembered that her husband had been a doctor, too, and had been especially kind.

The return to Paris seemed to pass more swiftly than the awful journey down to Vittel. Kitty shared her compartment with the guards, who ignored her, instead talking and laughing with each other as they played cards for small change. When night fell she slept, wrapped in a coat, trying to block out their snores. When she awoke it was morning and they were arriving in Paris.
Today I’ll see my daughter!
She was so nervous with excitement she could not eat.

‘Gone? Where? When?’ Cold shock coursed through Kitty’s limbs.

‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ said Mère Marie-François. ‘When we received the letter from the doctor at Vittel we discussed it at length, and decided that Thérèse should take Fay to you. They left two days ago and should be there by now. Your trains must have passed each other.’ The Reverend Mother clutched the rosary she wore in an unusual sign of distress. The presence of the guards seemed to fill the entrance hall. One asked something in German. The Reverend Mother answered in the same language. The guard looked puzzled, then shrugged and explained the situation to his comrade.

‘I’ve told them Fay isn’t here,’ the nun said. ‘They’ll take you back to Vittel. Surely you’ll meet them there.’

‘I hope so,’ Kitty said.

There was a train from Paris that passed through Vittel later that morning. They boarded it, but it was an hour late in leaving and Kitty could hardly keep still for anxiety. When it finally lurched into movement, her relief was palpable. In late afternoon, however, it came to a halt so suddenly that they were almost thrown across the carriage. Kitty’s German guards were on their feet and leaning out of the window, trying to discover what was happening. There were rumours of difficulties further down the line.

‘Bomb,’ one of the guards explained to her in English and mimed an explosion. It appeared that an air raid had damaged the track during the night. The train sat there for the rest of the day, waiting for it to be repaired.

Thérèse had never travelled so far before, and certainly not by herself. Not that she was quite alone, she had Fay with her, but that made her doubly nervous because she had such an important task to perform. She was to take Fay on the long train journey from Paris to the spa town of Vittel. She hadn’t even seen Vittel on a map, though she knew it was somewhere beyond the industrial city of Nancy, on the edge of Occupied France and near the borders of Germany and Switzerland. She didn’t want to leave Paris and she dreaded the moment when she would have to say goodbye to Fay, but the Reverend Mother had said she should be the one to do it and so she had to. She’d packed Fay’s little rucksack with her few items of clothing and a book of children’s Bible stories to read on the way and prepared a basket of food. She hoped it would be enough to last them for the journey, though it was a far cry from the generous picnics that she’d been given on outings as a child.

Fay was in a strange mood, by turns excited and tearful. ‘Aren’t you looking forward to seeing your mother?’ Thérèse asked her as she helped the child on with her cardigan and fitted the rucksack over her shoulders.

Fay thought a moment and nodded uncertainly, then leaned against Thérèse. The young woman felt her warm arms through the thick cloth of her habit as Fay hugged her tightly and she hugged her back, surprised and not a little moved by the unusually strong rush of affection. Fay had never been a demonstrative child, and since losing both her parents she didn’t always like to be touched. If she wanted reassurance she would clutch her wooden zebra and stroke its smooth striped sides. Zipper was safe in the rucksack, Thérèse had made sure of that.

Before they left the convent, she sent Fay to the refectory to say goodbye to the other nuns eating breakfast there whilst she went to fill a bottle of water for the journey. She knew it was a wrench for all of them to say goodbye to the little girl and couldn’t have borne to see their tears.

Father Paul travelled with them on the Métro to the Gare de l’Est, to make sure they boarded the right train, and it was only after they’d waved him goodbye and settled in their compartment that Thérèse noticed Fay’s rucksack was undone. Her clothes were all still inside, but a frantic search revealed that the toy zebra was missing.

Had Fay unbuckled the bag herself – and if so, when? Was it she who had taken Zipper out and left him somewhere? When had she last had him? Fay was clear that she’d undone the bag to check that he was in there when Thérèse had sent her for a last-minute visit to the lavatory. Then there had been a hurry to leave and she hadn’t rebuckled the bag properly. ‘We’ll find him and send him to you,’ Thérèse said. With luck the toy had been left at the convent rather than falling out on the street.

For a long while after this disaster, Fay sat opposite Thérèse cast in her own private shadow, her slight figure very upright, a tragic expression on her face as she stared out of the window at a passing view she did not see. She would not speak, and from time to time Thérèse wondered if her eyes were gleaming with tears. If so, the tears did not fall. She ate the bread that Thérèse passed her and sipped the water, and when night fell she consented to lie with her head in Thérèse’s warm lap where she quickly fell asleep.

She was fretful in the night, and when she woke her face was flushed and her forehead hot to the touch. Her eyes glittered with fever. Thérèse got her to drink a little of the water and after a while she revived.

When they arrived at Vittel, their train slid past another waiting at the other side of the platform. It was packed full of women, some of the younger ones leaning out of the windows, chattering and calling out to one another. Half a dozen German soldiers were loading a last few items of luggage.

Anxious to find out what was happening, Thérèse helped Fay with her bag and lifted her down from the train. How light she was, her shoulderblades protruding like wing buds under her thin cardigan. She gripped the child’s hand and hurried her across to the other train. A station guard moved past them, closing the doors.

‘Where is this train going, m’sieur? Who are these people?’ Thérèse asked him.

‘
Les Anglaises et les Americaines
,’ he replied, as though it should be obvious to her. ‘
Elles rentrent chez elles
. They are going home.’

‘Home? You mean to England?’

‘Yes, to England, America, wherever, I don’t know.’

‘Do they go through Paris?’

‘Paris? No, they can’t get through that way. South-west, they’ll go. Portugal, I’d say. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .’ And off he went, returning a dropped hat to a laughing fair-haired girl in a threadbare jacket who was leaning out of a window.

‘
Madame Kitty Knox, est-elle ici
?’ Thérèse asked the fair-haired girl, starting to panic. ‘This is her daughter.’

‘Mrs Knox? I know who you mean. Wait a minute.’ The head disappeared from the window and Thérèse heard Kitty’s name repeated in the compartment.

Down the train the final suitcase had been loaded and the guard was closing the last door.

The young woman’s head reappeared. ‘She’s not in this carriage,’ she told Thérèse, ‘but she should be somewhere further down. Someone here heard her name read out.’

Thérèse’s grip on Fay’s hand tightened as they hurried along the train, asking for Kitty. The guard passed them, checking the doors, a flag in his hand.