Black Radishes (16 page)

Gustave caught Jean-Paul’s eye, and despite the ache in his throat, he started to laugh.

“Snow!” said Jean-Paul, mockingly. “Anyone want to build a snowman?”

He nudged Gustave again, grinning, and started toward the staircase. Gustave took a last long look at Europe before turning to gaze the other way, over the vast emptiness of the ocean, toward America. Then he and Jean-Paul darted down the winding steps and through the excited crowd to join their family on the deck below, squinting, as they ran, against the almost painful brilliance of the morning.

Author’s Note

Like Gustave in
Black Radishes
, my father was born in France in 1929. It was not an auspicious year to be born a Jewish child in Europe. Anne Frank was also born that year. But my father was one of the lucky few. He and his mother and sister escaped from France and survived the Holocaust.

Gustave and his parents follow the route taken by my father’s family. They moved first from Paris to Saint-Georges-sur-Cher. They lived there for several years as the situation for Jews in France steadily worsened, before they were finally able to obtain all the right papers and begin their voyage to America. They traveled through Spain and Portugal, since both were officially neutral countries, and then set sail from Lisbon for the United States.

My father’s family was fortunate in several ways that allowed them to escape and survive. Because my father, his sister, and his parents were all French-born, they were not among the first Jewish victims in France. The government of Vichy France, under Maréchal Pétain, first allowed the Nazis to take foreign-born Jews and only later handed over those who had been born in France.

Also, the village of Saint-Georges, where my father’s family settled, happened to be just south of the demarcation line, so it fell into the safer unoccupied zone. At the time that my father’s extended family traveled to Saint-Georges, no one knew that the Germans would occupy part of France in 1940. And certainly no one imagined the demarcation line between the two zones of France or knew where it would go. It was simply a matter of chance that their house was on the south side of the Cher, the river that divided the two zones in that part of France. In fact, just one month after my father and his mother and sister left France, in November of 1942, the Allies landed in North Africa, and the Nazis occupied the former unoccupied zone.

My father’s family was also lucky because they had an American relative, an aunt in New Orleans. The United States government refused to give most European Jewish refugees permission to enter the country. Those who wanted to come to live in the United States had to obtain an affidavit from someone already living in America. This was a sworn statement promising to provide money to the new arrivals if they needed it. Most of the desperate European Jews trying to survive the war did not know anyone in the United States who could make them such a promise. My father says that conversations among adult Jews in France during the war years almost always involved the word “affidavit.” “Have you got an affidavit yet?” “Can you get an affidavit?” they would ask one another. Other countries where Jews tried to find refuge also imposed difficult restrictions on immigrants. Many Jews were unable to flee to safety because of these restrictions.

During the war, the Nazis deported many Jews from France. More than seventy-seven thousand died in Nazi camps. Approximately eleven thousand of them were children under the age of eighteen. But despite the ready cooperation of the Vichy government with the Nazis, and despite the anti-Semitism of many French citizens, Jews living in France had an unusually high survival rate compared with Jews living in other European countries. Nearly three-quarters of the Jews in France survived. This was partly because of the actions of French people like Nicole and her father in the novel, some of them in the French Resistance but many with no Resistance ties, who helped Jews hide and escape.

Black Radishes
is fiction: it is not my father’s story. But some events from his life are woven into the novel. Like Gustave and his family and a large part of the French population, my father’s family panicked during the German invasion and took to the roads, trying, fruitlessly, to escape into Spain. Later, while my relatives were living in Saint-Georges, they were denounced to the police for supposedly signaling to British planes from the attic—but, as in
Black Radishes
, they were able to show that there was no entrance to the attic from their part of the house. Like Gustave’s parents, the adults in my father’s family buried their valuables in the yard behind their house and instructed the children to remember where the valuables were. They did this out of fear that the children would be left alone to fend for themselves if the parents were arrested and put in concentration camps. This did happen to Jews in the unoccupied zone, even before the Nazis occupied the area.

And one of my father’s cousins had a Swiss passport. He used that passport to cross the demarcation line. Using his fluent German and his charm to befriend the German soldiers, he discovered that they loved black radishes. He smuggled food and people across the demarcation line by having black radishes on hand as a distraction.

Near Saint-Georges is the famous château of Chenonceau. The Meniers really were chocolate manufacturers who owned this beautiful, historic castle spanning the Cher. Part of the château is in what was the occupied zone and part is in what was the unoccupied zone of France. If you visit Chenonceau, you will hear the tour guides tell you about the way the château was used to help people cross from one zone to the other during World War II. And you can still buy Menier and Poulain chocolate bars in France!

While writing
Black Radishes
, I spoke with people who lived during this time, and I am deeply grateful to them for sharing their stories. I also read many memoirs and works of history. Anecdotes about people who painted dogs’ tails in the forbidden colors of the French flag—blue, white, and red—appear in several places. The basic story about the boy who was forced to march and shout, “This is a German, not a Boche!” is true as well, although I imagined lots of additional details. It is also true that French people helped Jews and others cross the Cher in hidden, illegal boats. One brave family owned a mill with a stone ford under the water and helped people across by leading them over it. These events are mentioned in Robert Gildea’s
Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation
, 2003; Limore Yagil’s
Chrétiens et Juifs sous Vichy, 1940–1944
, 2005; and Georgette Guéguen-Dreyfus’s
Résistance Indre et vallée du Cher
, 1970. Among the many works of history I consulted, I also relied particularly on Robert O. Paxton’s
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944
, 1972; Renée Poznanski’s
Jews in France During World War II
, translated by Nathan Bracher, 2001; Eric Alary’s
La ligne de démarcation, 1940–1944
, 2003; Hanna Diamond’s
Fleeing Hitler: France 1940
, 2007; and Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt’s
Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946
, 2009.

Acknowledgments

My father, Jean-Pierre Meyer, and my aunt, Eliane Norman, shared with me many memories, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, of their childhood in France during the war years. I am more grateful to them than I can say for telling me stories that were at times painful for them to remember. My particular thanks also go to Marie-Hélène Gold, Paul Fameau, Eliane Fameau, Irène Epstein, and Odile Donis for their memories of wartime and postwar France. Patricia Barry told me about the trees at Chenonceau, and Annette Moser, vice-consul at the consulate general of Switzerland, provided me with important details about laws regarding Swiss citizenship in the 1930s. My Wellesley colleagues, Venita Datta, Nicolas de Warren, Andrew Shennan, Vernon Shetley, Catherine Masson, Michèle Respaut, and Jens Kruse, generously shared references, books, and information about subjects as diverse as French chocolate, camouflage paint, high and low German, newsreels, Catholic traditions, and the sandbags around the monuments of Paris.

I am grateful to my agent, Erin Murphy, for encouraging me to rework the novel’s opening. Susan Lubner, Patricia Bovie, Jacqueline Davies, Jacqueline Dembar Greene, Ginny Sands, and Beth Glass read drafts (and, in some instances, draft after draft) of
Black Radishes
. Their comments, advice, and encouragement were invaluable to me as I shaped the manuscript into its final form. The judges for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ Work-in-Progress Grant, and particularly Arthur A. Levine, gave me confidence at a crucial moment through their interest in my work. A suggestion from George Nicholson about Gustave’s reading material made its way into the novel. And Rebecca Short and Françoise Bui, with their patient and tireless editing, helped me to rethink crucial aspects of the book and shaped it and improved it in innumerable ways.

I am thankful to Wellesley College and to the Susan and Donald Newhouse Center for the Humanities for supporting leave time that enabled me to complete this novel. Jo Rodgers knows how deeply grateful I am to her. And, as always, I am more thankful than I can say to Ken Winkler and Hannah Meyer-Winkler for their daily love and companionship. Ken told me to put everything else aside and write this book. And Hannah reminds me every day, by her wonderful example, what actual children are really like.

About the Author

Susan Lynn Meyer was born in Baltimore and grew up hearing her father’s stories about his French childhood and his family’s escape from the Nazis. She studied literature and is now a professor of English at Wellesley College, where she teaches Victorian and American literature. The author lives with her husband and daughter in Sherborn, Massachusetts.
Black Radishes
is her first novel.