Sarah's Key (11 page)

T

HE 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.”

S

HE 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.

One of the village women went over to the small girl and with a quick gesture yanked the rings through her ears, tearing the tiny lobes. The little girl screamed, her hands creeping to her bloody neck. The old woman screamed, too. A policeman hit her in the face. They were pulled outside. A murmur of fear went through the line. The policemen waved their guns. There was silence.

The girl and her mother had nothing to hand over. Just the mother’s wedding band. A florid-faced village woman tore open the mother’s dress from collarbone to navel, revealing her pale skin and faded underclothes. Her hands groped through the folds of the dress, to the under-clothes, to the openings of the mother’s body. The mother flinched, but said nothing. The girl watched, fear rising through her. She hated the way the men eyed her mother’s body, hated the way the village woman touched her, handling her like a piece of meat. Were they going to do that to her, too, she wondered. Would they tear her clothes as well? Maybe they would take her key. She clenched it in her pocket with all her might. No, they couldn’t take that. She wouldn’t let them. She wouldn’t let them take the key to the secret cupboard. Never.

But the policemen were not interested in what was in her pockets. Before she and her mother stepped aside, she had one last look at the growing piles on the desk: necklaces, bracelets, brooches, rings, watches, money. What were they going to do with all that? she thought. Sell them? Use them? What did they need these things for?

Back outside, they were lined up again. It was a hot and dusty day. The girl was thirsty, her throat felt prickly and dry. They stood around for a long time, under the policemen’s silent glare. What was going on? Where was her father? Why were they all standing there? The girl could hear incessant whispers behind her. Nobody knew. Nobody could answer. But she knew. She felt it. And when it happened, she was expecting it.

The policemen fell upon them like a swarm of large, dark birds. They dragged the women to one side of the camp, the children to the other. Even the tiniest children were separated from their mothers. The girl watched it all, as if she was in another world. She heard the screams, the yells, she saw the women hurling themselves to the ground, their hands pulling at their children’s clothes, their children’s hair. She watched the policemen raise their truncheons and bludgeon the women’s heads, their faces. She saw a woman collapse, her nose a bloody pulp.

Her own mother stood next to her, frozen. She could hear the woman breathing in short, sharp gasps. She held on to her mother’s cold hand. She felt the policemen wrench them apart, she heard her mother shriek, and then saw her dive back toward her, her dress gaping open, her hair wild, her mouth contorted, screaming her daughter’s name. She tried to grab her mother’s hands, but the men shoved her aside, sending her to her knees. Her mother fought like a mad creature, overpowering the policemen for a couple of seconds, and at that precise moment, the girl saw her real mother emerge, the strong, passionate woman she missed and admired. She felt her mother’s arms hold her once more, felt the thick bushy hair caress her face. Suddenly torrents of cold water blinded her. Spluttering, gasping for breath, she opened her eyes to see the men drag her mother away by the collar of her sopping dress.

It seemed to her that it took hours. Tearful, lost children. Buckets of water thrown in their faces. Struggling, broken women. Sharp thuds of the blows. But she knew it had happened very fast.

Silence. It was done. At last, the crowd of children stood on one side, the women on the other. Between them, a sturdy row of policemen. The policemen kept repeating that the mothers and children over twelve were preceding the others, that the younger ones would leave next week, to join them. The fathers has already left, they were told. Everybody was to cooperate and obey.

She saw her mother stand with the other women. Her mother looked back at her daughter with a tiny, brave smile. She seemed to say, “You see, darling, we’ll be all right, the police said so. You’ll be coming to join us in a few days. Don’t worry, my sweet.”

The girl looked around her at the crowd of children. So many children. She looked at the toddlers, their faces crumpled with grief and fright. She saw the little girl with the bleeding ear lobes, palms outstretched to her mother. What was going to happen to all these children, to her? she thought. Where were their parents being taken?

The women were led away, out through the camp gates. She saw her mother head right and walk down the long road that led through the village to the station. Her mother’s face turned to her one last time.

Then she was gone.