Текст книги "The Nightingale"

Автор книги: Kristin Hannah

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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 31 страниц)

THIRTY-SIX

In February 1945, snow covered the naked bodies piled outside the camp’s newly built crematorium. Putrid black smoke roiled up from the chimneys.

Isabelle stood, shivering, in her place at the morning Appell—roll call. It was the kind of cold that ached in the lungs and froze eyelashes and burned fingertips and toes.

She waited for the roll call to end, but no whistle blared.

Snow was still falling. In the prisoners’ ranks, some women started to cough. Another one pitched face-first into the mushy, muddy snow and couldn’t be raised. A bitter wind blew across the camp.

Finally, an SS officer on horseback rode past the women, eyeing them one by one. He seemed to notice everything—the shorn hair, the flea bites, the blue tips of frostbitten fingers, and the patches that identified them as Jews, or homosexuals, or political prisoners. In the distance, bombs fell, exploded like distant thunder.

When the officer pointed out a woman, she was immediately pulled from the line.

He pointed at Isabelle, and she was yanked nearly off her feet, dragged out of line.

The SS squads surrounded the women who’d been chosen, forced them to form two lines. A whistle blared. “Schnell! Eins! Zwei! Drei!”

Isabelle marched forward, her feet aching with cold, her lungs burning. Micheline fell into step beside her.

They had made it a mile or so outside of the gates when a lorry rumbled past them, its back heaped high with naked corpses.

Micheline stumbled. Isabelle reached out, holding her friend upright.

And still they marched.

At last they came to a snowy field blanketed in fog.

The Germans separated the women again. Isabelle was yanked away from Micheline and pushed into a group of other Nacht und Nebel political prisoners.

The Germans shoved them together and shouted at them and pointed until Isabelle understood.

The woman beside her screamed when she saw what they’d been chosen for. Road crew.

“Don’t,” Isabelle said just as a truncheon hit the woman hard enough to send her sprawling.

Isabelle stood as numb as a plow mule as the Nazis slipped rough leather harness straps over her shoulders and tightened them at her waist. She was harnessed to eleven other young women, elbow-to-elbow. Behind them, attached to the harness, was a steel wheel the size of an automobile.

Isabelle tried to take a step, couldn’t.

A whip cracked across her back, setting her flesh on fire. She clutched the harness straps and tried again, taking a step forward. They were exhausted. They had no strength and their feet were freezing on the snowy ground, but they had to move or they’d be whipped. Isabelle angled forward, straining to move, to get the stone wheel turning. The straps bit into her chest. One of the women stumbled, fell; the others kept pulling. The leather harness creaked and the wheel turned.

They pulled and pulled and pulled, creating a road from the snow-covered ground behind them. Other women used shovels and wheelbarrows to clear the way.

All the while, the guards sat in pods, gathered around open fires, talking and laughing among themselves.

Step.

Step.

Step.

Isabelle couldn’t think of anything else. Not the cold, not her hunger or thirst, not the flea and lice bites that covered her body. And not real life. That was the worst of all. The thing that would get her to miss a step, to draw attention to herself, to be hit or whipped or worse.

Step.

Just think about moving.

Her leg gave out. She crumpled to the snow. The woman beside her reached out. Isabelle grabbed the shaking, blue-white hand, gripped it in her numb fingers, and crawled back to stand. Gritting her teeth, she took another pain-filled step. And then another.

*   *   *

The siren went off at 3:30 A.M., as it did every morning for roll call. Like her nine bunkmates, Isabelle slept in every bit of clothing she had—ill-fitting shoes and underwear; the baggy, striped dress with her prisoner identification number sewn on the sleeve. But none of it provided warmth. She tried to encourage the women around her to hold strong, but she herself was weakening. It had been a terrible winter; all of them were dying, some quickly, of typhus and cruelty, and some slowly of starvation and cold, but all were dying.

Isabelle had had a fever for weeks, but not high enough to send her to the hospital block, and last week she’d been beaten so badly she’d lost consciousness at work—and then she’d been beaten for falling down. Her body, which couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds, was crawling with lice and covered in open sores.

Ravensbrück had been dangerous from the beginning, but now, in March 1945, it was even more so. Hundreds of women had been killed or gassed or beaten in the last month. The only women who’d been left alive were the Verfügbaren—the disposables, who were sick or frail or elderly—and the women of Nacht und Nebel, “Night and Fog.” Political prisoners, like Isabelle and Micheline. Women of the Resistance. The rumor was that the Nazis were afraid to gas them now that the tide of war had turned.

“You’re going to make it.”

Isabelle realized she’d been weaving in place, beginning to fall.

Micheline Babineau gave her a tired, encouraging smile. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” Isabelle said. They both knew that the women who cried at night were the women who died in the morning. Sadness and loss were drawn in with each breath but never expelled. You couldn’t give in. Not for a second.

Isabelle knew this. In the camp, she fought back the only way she knew how—by caring for her fellow prisoners and helping them to stay strong. All they had in this hell was each other. In the evenings, they crouched in their dark bunks, whispering among themselves, singing softly, trying to keep alive some memory of who they’d been. Over the nine months Isabelle had been here, she had found—and lost—too many friends to count.

But Isabelle was tired now, and sick.

Pneumonia, she was pretty sure. And typhus, maybe. She coughed quietly and did her job and tried to draw no attention. The last thing she wanted was to end up in the “tent”—a small brick building with tarp walls, into which the Nazis put any woman with an incurable disease. It was where women went to die.

“Stay alive,” Isabelle said softly.

Micheline nodded encouragingly.

They had to stay alive. Now more than ever. Last week, new prisoners had come with news: the Russians were advancing across Germany, smashing and defeating the Nazi army. Auschwitz had been liberated. The Allies were said to be winning one victory after another in the west.

A race for survival was on and everyone knew it. The war was ending. Isabelle had to stay alive long enough to see an Allied victory and a free France.

A whistle blared at the front of the line.

A hush fell over the crowd of prisoners—women, mostly, and a few children. In front of them, a trio of SS officers paced with their dogs.

The camp Kommandant appeared in front of them. He stopped and clasped his hands behind his back. He called out something in German and the SS officers advanced. Isabelle heard the words “Nacht und Nebel.”

An SS officer pointed at her, and another one pushed through the crowd, knocking women to the ground, stepping on or over them. He grabbed Isabelle’s skinny arm and pulled hard. She stumbled along beside him, praying her shoes wouldn’t fall off—it was a whipping offense to lose a shoe, and if she did, she’d spend the rest of this winter with a bare, frostbitten foot.

Not far away, she saw Micheline being dragged off by another officer.

All Isabelle could think was that she needed to keep her shoes on.

An SS officer called out a word Isabelle recognized.

They were being sent to another camp.

She felt a wave of impotent rage. She would never survive a forced march through the snow to another camp.

“No,” she muttered. Talking to herself had become a way of life. For months, as she stood in line at work, doing something that repelled and horrified her, she whispered to herself. As she sat on a hole in a row of pit toilets, surrounded by other woman with dysentery, staring at the women sitting across from her, trying not to gag on the stench of their bowel movements, she whispered to herself. In the beginning, it had been stories she told herself about the future, memories she shared with herself about the past.

Now it was just words. Gibberish sometimes, anything to remind herself that she was human and alive.

Her toe caught on something and she pitched to the ground, falling face-first in the dirty snow.

“To your feet,” someone yelled. “March.”

Isabelle couldn’t move, but if she stayed there, they’d whip her again. Or worse.

“On your feet,” Micheline said.

“I can’t.”

“You can. Now. Before they see you’ve fallen.” Micheline helped her to her feet.

Isabelle and Micheline fell into the ragged line of prisoners, walking wearily forward, past the brick-walled perimeter of the camp, beneath the watchful eye of the soldier in the watchtower.

They walked for two days, traveled thirty-five miles, collapsing on the cold ground at night, huddling together for warmth, praying to see the dawn, only to be wakened by whistles and told to march again.

How many died along the way? She wanted to remember their names, but she was so cold and hungry and exhausted her brain barely worked.

Finally, they arrived at their destination, a train station, where they were shoved onto cattle cars that smelled of death and excrement. Black smoke rose into the snow-whitened sky. The trees were bare. There were no birds anymore in the sky, no chirping or screeching or chatter of living things filled this forest.

Isabelle clambered up onto the bales of hay that were stacked along the wall and tried to make herself as small as possible. She pulled her bleeding knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around her ankles to conserve what little warmth she had.

The pain in her chest was excruciating. She covered her mouth just as a cough racked her, bent her forward.

“There you are,” Micheline said in the dark, climbing onto the hay bale beside her.

Isabelle let out a sigh of relief, and immediately she was coughing again. She put a hand over her mouth and felt blood spray into her palm. She’d been coughing up blood for weeks now.

Isabelle felt a dry hand on her forehead and she coughed again.

“You’re burning up.”

The cattle car doors clanged shut. The carriage shuddered and the giant iron wheels began to turn. The car swayed and clattered. Inside, the women banded together and sat down. At least in this weather their urine would freeze in the barrel and not slosh all over.

Isabelle sagged next to her friend and closed her eyes.

From somewhere far away, she heard a high-pitched whistling sound. A bomb falling. The train screeched to a halt and the bomb exploded, near enough that the carriage rattled. The smell of smoke and fire filled the air. The next one could fall on this train and kill them all.

*   *   *

Four days later, when the train finally came to a complete stop (it had slowed dozens of times to avoid being bombed) the doors clattered open to reveal a white landscape broken only by the black greatcoats of the SS officers waiting outside.

Isabelle sat up, surprised to find that she wasn’t cold. She felt hot; so hot she was perspiring.

She saw how many of her friends had died overnight, but there was no time to grieve for them, no time to say a prayer or whisper a good-bye. The Nazis on the platform were coming for them, blowing their whistles, yelling.

“Schnell! Schnell!”

Isabelle nudged Micheline awake. “Take my hand,” Isabelle said.

The two women held hands and climbed gingerly down from the hay bales. Isabelle stepped over a dead body, from which someone had already taken the shoes.

On the other side of the platform, a line of prisoners was forming.

Isabelle limped forward. The woman in front of Isabelle stumbled and fell to her knees.

An SS officer yanked the woman to her feet and shot her in the face.

Isabelle didn’t slow down. Alternately freezing cold and burning hot, unsteady on her feet, she plodded forward through the snowy forest until another camp came into view.

“Schnell!”

Isabelle followed the women in front of her. They passed through open gates, past a throng of skeletal men and women in gray-striped pajamas who looked at them through a chain-link fence.

“Juliette!”

She heard the name. At first it meant nothing to her, just another sound. Then she remembered.

She’d been Juliette. And Isabelle before that. And the Nightingale. Not just F-5491.

She glanced at the skeletal prisoners lined up behind the chain link.

Someone was waving at her. A woman: gray skin and a hooked, pointed nose and sunken eyes.

Eyes.

Isabelle recognized the tired, knowing gaze fixed on her.

Anouk.

Isabelle stumbled to the chain-link fence.

Anouk met her. Their fingers clasped through the ice-cold metal. “Anouk,” she said, hearing the break in her voice. She coughed a little, covered her mouth.

The sadness in Anouk’s dark eyes was unbearable. Her friend’s gaze cut to a building whose chimney puffed out putrid black smoke. “They’re killing us to cover what they’ve done.”

“Henri? Paul?… Gaëtan?”

“They were all arrested, Juliette. Henri was hanged in the town square. The rest…” She shrugged.

Isabelle heard an SS soldier yell at her. She backed away from the fence. She wanted to say something real to Anouk, something that would last, but she couldn’t do anything but cough. She covered her mouth and stumbled sideways, got back into line.

She saw her friend mouth “Good-bye,” and Isabelle couldn’t even respond. She was so, so tired of good-byes.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Even on this blue-skied March day, the apartment on the Avenue de La Bourdonnais felt like a mausoleum. Dust covered every surface and layered the floor. Vianne went to the windows and tore the blackout shades down, letting light into this room for the first time in years.

It looked like no one had been in this apartment for some time. Probably not since that day Papa had left to save Isabelle.

Most of the paintings were still on the walls and the furniture was in place—some of it had been hacked up for firewood and piled in the corner. An empty soup bowl and spoon sat on the dining room table. His volumes of self-published poetry lined the mantel. “It doesn’t look like she’s been here. We must try the Hôtel Lutetia.”

Vianne knew she should pack up her family’s things, claim these remnants of a different life, but she couldn’t do it now. She didn’t want to. Later.

She and Antoine and Sophie left the apartment. On the street outside, all around them were signs of recovery. Parisians were like moles, coming out into the sunshine after years in the dark. But still there were food lines everywhere and rationing and deprivation. The war might have been winding down—the Germans were retreating everywhere—but it wasn’t over yet.

They went to the Hôtel Lutetia, which had been home to the Abwehr under the occupation and was now a reception center for people returning from the camps.

Vianne stood in the elegant, crowded lobby. As she looked around, she felt sick to her stomach and grateful that she’d left Daniel with Mother Marie-Therese. The reception area was filled with rail-thin, bald, vacant-eyed people dressed in rags. They looked like walking cadavers. Moving among them were doctors and Red Cross workers and journalists.

A man approached Vianne, stuck a faded black-and-white photograph in her face. “Have you seen her? Last we heard she was at Auschwitz.”

The photograph showed a lovely girl standing beside a bicycle, smiling brightly. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old.

“No,” Vianne said. “I’m sorry.”

The man was already walking away, looking as dazed as Vianne felt.

Everywhere Vianne looked she saw anxious families, photographs held in their shaking hands, begging for news of their loved ones. The wall to her right was covered with photographs and notes and names and addresses. The living looking for the lost. Antoine moved close to Vianne, put a hand on her shoulder. “We will find her, V.”

“Maman?” Sophie said. “Are you all right?”

She looked down at her daughter. “Perhaps we should have left you at home.”

“It’s too late to protect me,” Sophie said. “You must know that.”

Vianne hated that truth as much as any. She held on to her daughter’s hand and moved resolutely through the crowd, with Antoine beside her. In an area to the left, she saw a gathering of men in dirty striped pajamas who looked like skeletons. How were they still alive?

She didn’t even realize that she had stopped again until a woman appeared in front of her.

“Madame?” the woman—a Red Cross worker—said gently.

Vianne tore her gaze from the ragged survivors. “I have people I’m looking for … my sister, Isabelle Rossignol. She was arrested for aiding the enemy and deported. And my best friend, Rachel de Champlain, was deported. Her husband, Marc, was a prisoner of war. I … don’t know what happened to any of them or how to look for them. And … I have a list of Jewish children in Carriveau. I need to reunite them with their parents.”

The Red Cross worker, a thin, gray-haired woman, took out a piece of paper and wrote down the names Vianne had given her. “I will go to the records desk and check these names. As to the children, come with me.” She led the three of them to a room down the hall, where an ancient-looking man with a long beard sat behind a desk piled with papers.

“M’sieur Montand,” the Red Cross worker said, “this woman has information on some Jewish children.”

The old man looked up at her through bloodshot eyes and made a flicking motion with his long, hair-tufted fingers. “Come in.”

The Red Cross worker left the room. The sudden quiet was disconcerting after so much noise and commotion.

Vianne approached the desk. Her hands were damp with perspiration. She rubbed them along the sides of her skirt. “I am Vianne Mauriac. From Carriveau.” She opened her handbag and withdrew the list she had compiled last night from the three lists she’d kept throughout the war. She set it on his desk. “These are some hidden Jewish children, M’sieur. They are in the Abbaye de la Trinité orphanage under the care of Mother Superior Marie-Therese. I don’t know how to reunite them with their parents. Except for the first name on the list. Ari de Champlain is with me. I am searching for his parents.”

“Nineteen children,” he said quietly.

“It is not many, I know, but…”

He looked up at her as if she were a heroine instead of a scared survivor. “It is nineteen who would have died in the camps along with their parents, Madame.”

“Can you reunite them with their families?” she asked softly.

“I will try, Madame. But sadly, most of these children are indeed orphans now. The lists coming from the camps are all the same: mother dead, father dead, no relatives alive in France. And so few children survived.” He ran a hand through the thinning gray hair on his head. “I will forward your list to the OSE in Nice. They are trying to reunite families. Merci, Madame.”

Vianne waited a moment, but the man said no more. She rejoined her husband and daughter and they left the office and stepped back into the crowd of refugees and families and camp survivors.

“What do we do now?” Sophie asked.

“We wait to hear from the Red Cross worker,” Vianne said.

Antoine pointed to the wall of photographs and names of the missing. “We should look for her there.”

A look passed between them, an acknowledgment of how much it would hurt to stand there, looking through the photographs of the missing. Still, they moved to the sea of pictures and notes and began to look through them, one by one.

They were there for nearly two hours before the Red Cross worker returned.

“Madame?”

Vianne turned.

“I am sorry, Madame. Rachel and Marc de Champlain are listed among the deceased. And there is no record of an Isabelle Rossignol anywhere.”

Vianne heard deceased and felt an almost unbearable grief. She pushed the emotion aside resolutely. She would think of Rachel later, when she was alone. She would have a glass of champagne outside, beneath the yew tree, and talk to her friend. “What does that mean? No record of Isabelle? I saw them take her away.”

“Go home and wait for your sister’s return,” the Red Cross worker said. She touched Vianne’s arm. “Have hope. Not all of the camps have been liberated.”

Sophie looked up at her. “Maybe she made herself invisible.”

Vianne touched her daughter’s face, managed a small, sad smile. “You are so grown-up. It makes me proud and breaks my heart at the same time.”

“Come on,” Sophie said, tugging on her hand. Vianne allowed her daughter to lead her away. She felt more like the child than the parent as they made their way through the crowded lobby and out onto the brightly lit street.

Hours later, when they were on the train bound for home, seated on a wooden banquette in the third-class carriage, Vianne stared out the window at the bombed-out countryside. Antoine sat sleeping beside her, his head resting against the dirty window.

“How are you feeling?” Sophie asked.

Vianne placed a hand on her swollen abdomen. A tiny flutter—a kick—tapped against her palm. She reached for Sophie’s hand.

Sophie tried to pull away; Vianne gently insisted. She placed her daughter’s hand on her belly.

Sophie felt the flutter of movement and her eyes widened. She looked up at Vianne. “How can you…”

“We are all changed by this war, Soph. Daniel is your brother now that Rachel is … gone. Truly your brother. And this baby; he or she is innocent of … his or her creation.”

“It’s hard to forget,” she said quietly. “And I’ll never forgive.”

“But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.”

Sophie sighed. “I suppose,” she said, sounding too adult for a girl of her age.

Vianne placed a hand on top of her daughter’s. “We will remind each other, oui? On the dark days. We will be strong for each other.”

*   *   *

Roll call had been going on for hours. Isabelle dropped to her knees. The minute she hit the ground, she thought stay alive and clambered back up.

Guards patrolled the perimeter with their dogs, selecting women for the gas chamber. Word was that another march was coming. This one to Mauthausen, where thousands had already been worked to death: Soviet prisoners of war, Jews, Allied airmen, political prisoners. It was said that none who walked through its gates would ever walk out.

Isabelle coughed. Blood sprayed across her palm. She wiped it on her dirty dress quickly, before the guards could see.

Her throat burned, her head pulsed and ached. She was so focused on her agony that it took her a moment to notice the sound of engines.

“Do you hear that?” Micheline said.

Isabelle felt a commotion moving through the prisoners. It was hard to concentrate when she hurt so badly. Her lungs ached with every breath.

“They’re leaving,” she heard.

“Isabelle, look!”

At first all she saw was bright blue sky and trees and prisoners. Then she noticed.

“The guards are gone,” she said in a hoarse, ragged voice.

The gates clattered open and a stream of American trucks drove through the gates; soldiers sat on the bonnets and hung out the back, their rifles held across their chests.

Americans.

Isabelle’s knees gave out. “Mich … e … line,” she whispered, her voice as broken as her spirit. “We … made … it.”

*   *   *

That spring, the war began to end. General Eisenhower broadcast a demand for the German surrender. Americans crossed the Rhine and went into Germany; the Allies won one battle after another and began to liberate the camps. Hitler was living in a bunker.

And still, Isabelle didn’t come home.

Vianne let the letter box clang shut. “It’s as if she disappeared.”

Antoine said nothing. For weeks they had been searching for Isabelle. Vianne stood in queues for hours to make telephone calls and sent countless letters to agencies and hospitals. Last week they visited more displaced-person camps, but to no avail. There was no record of Isabelle Rossignol anywhere. It was as if she had disappeared from the face of the earth—along with hundreds of thousands of others.

Maybe Isabelle had survived the camps, only to be shot a day before the Allies arrived. Supposedly in one of the camps, a place called Bergen-Belsen, the Allies had found heaps of still-warm bodies at liberation.

Why?

So they wouldn’t talk.

“Come with me,” Antoine said, taking her by the hand. She no longer stiffened at his touch, or flinched, but she couldn’t seem to relax into it, either. In the months since Antoine’s return, they were playacting at love and both of them knew it. He said he didn’t make love to her because of the baby, and she agreed that it was for the best, but they knew.

“I have a surprise for you,” he said, leading her into the backyard.

The sky was a bright cerulean beneath which the yew tree provided a patch of cool brown shade. In the pergola, the few chickens that were left pecked at the dirt, clucking and flapping.

An old bedsheet had been stretched between a branch of the yew tree and an iron hat rack that Antoine must have found in the barn. He led her to one of the chairs set on the stone patio. In the years of his absence, the moss and grass had begun to overtake this part of the yard, so her chair sat unsteadily on the uneven surface. She sat down carefully; she was unwieldy these days. The smile her husband gave her was both dazzling in its joy and startling in its intimacy. “The kids and I have been working on this all day. It’s for you.”

The kids and I.

Antoine took his place in front of the sagging sheet and lifted his good arm in a sweeping gesture. “Ladies and gentlemen, children and scrawny rabbits and chickens who smell like shit—”

Behind the curtain, Daniel giggled and Sophie shushed him.

“In the rich tradition of Madelaine in Paris, which was Mademoiselle Mauriac’s first starring role, I give you the Le Jardin singers.” With a flourish, he unsnapped one side of the sheet-curtain and swept it aside to reveal a wooden platform set upon the grass at a not-quite-level slant. On it, Sophie stood beside Daniel. Both wore blankets as capes, with a sprig of apple blossoms at the throat and crowns made of some shiny metal, onto which they had glued pretty rocks and bits of colored glass.

“Hi, Maman!” Daniel said, waving furiously.

“Shhh,” Sophie said to him. “Remember?”

Daniel nodded seriously.

They turned carefully—the plank floor teetered beneath them—and held hands, facing Vianne.

Antoine brought a silver harmonica to his mouth and let out a mournful note. It hung in the air for a long time, vibrating in invitation, and then he started to play.

Sophie began to sing in a high, pure voice. “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques…”

She squatted down and Daniel popped up, singing, “Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?”

Vianne clamped her hand over her mouth but not before a little laughter slipped out.

Onstage, the song went on. She could see how happy Sophie was to do this once-ordinary thing, this little performance for her parents, and how hard Daniel was concentrating to do his part well.

It felt both profoundly magical and beautifully ordinary. A moment from the life they’d had before.

Vianne felt joy open up inside of her.

We’re going to be all right, she thought, looking at Antoine. In the shade cast by the tree her great-grandfather had planted, with their children’s voices in the air, she saw her other half, thought again: We’re going to be all right.

“… ding … dang … dong…”

When the song ended, Vianne clapped wildly. The children bowed majestically. Daniel tripped on his bedspread cape and tumbled to the grass and came up laughing. Vianne waddled to the stage and smothered her children with kisses and compliments.

“What a lovely idea,” she said to Sophie, her eyes shining with love and pride.

“I was concentrating, Maman,” Daniel said proudly.

Vianne couldn’t let them go. This future she’d glimpsed filled her soul with joy.

“I planned with Papa,” Sophie said. “Just like before, Maman.”

“I planned it, too,” Daniel said, puffing out his little chest.

She laughed. “How grand you both were at singing. And—”

“Vianne?” Antoine said from behind her.

She couldn’t look away from Daniel’s smile. “How long did it take you to learn your part?”

“Maman,” Sophie said quietly. “Someone is here.”

Vianne turned to look behind her.

Antoine was standing near the back door with two men; both wore threadbare black suits and black berets. One carried a tattered briefcase.

“Sophie, take care of your brother for a minute,” Antoine said to the children. “We have something to discuss with these men.” He moved in beside Vianne, placing a hand at the small of her back, helping her to her feet, urging her forward. They filed into the house in a silent line.

When the door closed behind them, the men turned to face Vianne.

“I am Nathaniel Lerner,” said the older of the two men. He had gray hair and skin the color of tea-stained linen. Age spots discolored large patches of his cheeks.

“And I am Phillipe Horowitz,” said the other man. “We are from the OSE.”

“Why are you here?” Vianne asked.

“We are here for Ari de Champlain,” Phillipe said in a gentle voice. “He has relatives in America—Boston, in fact—and they have contacted us.”

Vianne might have collapsed if Antoine had not held her steady.

“We understand you rescued nineteen Jewish children all by yourself. And with German officers billeted in your home. That’s impressive, Madame.”

“Heroic,” Nathaniel added.

Antoine placed his hand on her shoulder and at that, his touch, she realized how long she’d been silent. “Rachel was my best friend,” she said quietly. “I tried to help her sneak into the Free Zone before the deportation, but…”

“Her daughter was killed,” Lerner said.

“How do you know that?”

“It is our job to collect stories and to reunite families,” he answered. “We have spoken to several women who were in Auschwitz with Rachel. Sadly, she lived less than a month there. Her husband, Marc, was killed in Stalag 13A. He was not as lucky as your husband.”

Vianne said nothing. She knew the men were giving her time and she both appreciated and hated it. She didn’t want to accept any of this. “Daniel—Ari—was born a week before Marc left for the war. He has no memory of either of his parents. It was the safest way—to let him believe he was my son.”