Gone to Soldiers (58 page)

The hunger was the worst. She thought about food all the time except when she was in pain from a beating or dreaming about escape, through the electrified fence where the bodies hung, past the towers, across the plain. They were never alone, always with hundreds of others standing, running, picking up rocks and running more, pushing to get at the ditch latrine, pushing to get the watery soup, pushing for space on a dirty wooden slab. To be alone with Maman was the only pleasure, sometimes accomplished on a Sunday afternoon briefly behind their barracks. She was standing outside. On her arm, a spindly grey twig covered with sores, dirty and disgusting as a run-over alley cat dying in the gutter, the ash came down, the black oily ash she hated to smell and feel, that soaked into their skin and their lungs and lay on them always like the shadow of death. She shivered in the wind waiting because it was very early morning and they were standing all in a row while their numbers were called and they stood until some of them fainted and were beaten or taken off to where the pillar of black smoke rose, from which the black ashes fell like deadly snow
.

JACQUELINE 6

Catch a Falling Star

6 juillet 1943

Daniela and I are settled in Toulouse now. We are living over a garage where we share a room that gives on a side street, with a view of a plumbing supply warehouse, all built of the red brick they use so much here. We live with M. and Mme Faurier, both naturalized Jews born in Galicia, but who have good false French identities and no accents. That is, they do not sound Polish or Yiddish but speak with a thick Toulouse accent, which to my ears is quite pleasant although Daniela finds it coarse.

Both Fauriers work in the garage, where besides cars he has taken to repairing appliances, bicycles, anything with moving parts. I saw him repairing a wagon the other day, whose axle had broken. She keeps the books and runs all over looking for parts, which are harder and harder to find. They have two girls, eight and eleven.

Daniela's chest has not quite cleared and she stays in Toulouse doing our local counterfeiting. She made mayoral seals for various towns out of dried potato, but now she has linoleum to work with. She has become very proficient. The local Resistance has good contacts in some mairies, so we can get the blanks right from them, but for others, we have to acquire them more roundabout.

Daniela is also busy as a nurse, since many refugees arrive sick, and often the escapees are wounded or have been tortured and maimed. People we spring from the camps generally have deficiency diseases, parasites, such ills as paratyphoid and the various strains of typhoid that come from desperately poor sanitation. The inmates organize the camps as best they can, but the physical conditions defeat them.

Me, I do not stay in Toulouse. With you, dear diary, in my blouse I go trekking the paths through the mountains. I will confess to you alone how my heart stopped when I first saw the Pyrénées. I was imagining mountains as in the Dordogne, green, steep but comfortable mountains with red ochre or limestone cliffs here and there. I saw before me a wall of rock, going up from a few conical foothills, up and up and up into permanent snowcapped peaks with glaciers hanging there, snow in June and forever. How can I go over those myself, I thought in terror of what I had blandly promised, let alone take children—children!—over? Impossible. But it is precisely the impossible we have to accomplish to save lives. So we do it.

Right now I am with my seven children camping without a fire near the town of Ustou. We take them as far as we can safely by train and in what vehicles are available; then we walk over the mountains into Spain. There is no easier way, as the roads are all patrolled by the Germans and they shoot on sight. They have guardhouses and patrols but the border is long and wild and many trails cross. The regular guides who take escaped prisoners, refugees and downed pilots across are Basques around here, or nearer the coast, Catalans.

Lately the way I have been working is to take the children over alone and meet my Spanish Basque guide just the other side of their border, where he takes over. We try to walk twenty kilometers a day, but in rough country, often we cannot manage anything like it. I carry the smallest as much as I can, but she is five and not a feather on my shoulder. The others in this flock, fortunately, range in age from nine to fourteen and are far better able to march along. Friday I must bring my children over the border to Spain, where I expect to meet the Basque guide who takes them on and a representative of the Joint (the American Joint Distribution Committee from which comes, illegally, much of our funds), who will see that my children go on safely and survive.

Some I forget, some I will always remember. They are all my charges. If I daydream, if I doze, if I become distracted, they will die. It is the future, the reluctant whimpering, weeping future I carry on my shoulder as I go panting along the rocky trail that always seems to climb far more than it descends. The smallest cries for her mother. Her mother is already dead, shot in Gestapo headquarters in Lyon. Her father has been deported. I lie and promise her that her mother is waiting on the far side of the mountains. If she is quiet and we all climb the mountains like good children, then she will find her mother on the other side of the Pyrénées.

I feel guilty lying to her, but it is the only way to save her, to keep her from crying and calling out. She knows about being caught. All the children understand that, even this little five-year-old. Sometimes she makes me think of the twins, because she has tight brown curls, but her eyes are blue and she seldom smiles although today the flowers beside the path made her smile. She still grips a Pyrénées geranium as she sleeps with her head in my lap. I am ashamed how grubby all the children are, but I have no way to keep them clean or to dry them properly. One of the reasons I cross them here rather than nearer to the sea where the way is often less steep is that the rivers up here are cold and swift but narrow and can often be crossed from rock to rock. Downstream it is necessary to swim, and too many of the children cannot. They suffer from the cold and the wet clothes afterwards, and they look at me so pitifully, but I must rush them on, always pushing them harder than they believe they can endure. Every hour I let them rest for five minutes, but then they do not want to rise again. Their little feet bleed. I carry a supply of bandages and plasters, but that helps only feebly. Parts of the route we can travel in the daytime, but others, like the frontier itself, must be crossed at night, unless clouds make fog on the mountains, some but not too much to find my way. At least there is no problem with water, until we climb above the tree line.

As I walk, I repeat that old litany of Daniela's, eyes on stalks, ears perked forward and back, listen to the inner voices too and trust your gut. My children, stolen from the death's-head legions. Shall I too one day have a child? Could I trust the world that much? Sometimes I feel as if I am a child too as I trot over the hills with them, hardly more capable than they are of what is demanded of us. Not that I should give you the impression I am dreaming of marriage and family. Only that being around the little ones makes me think, on the contrary, how casually people bring babies into this world, how often a birth is celebrated, when perhaps it should be mourned. Yet I grow attached to these grubby morsels of flesh, even when they are wicked and punch each other and steal each other's bread.

When I look at Gitel, a girl just turned fourteen, I realize how out of date is my picture of my sister, Naomi. I saw Rivka only for that moment at the viaduct as she and Maman were being marched to the railroad cars, but even then I noticed how tall she is. I am sure that she was taller than Maman. Gitel already has little breasts and a wariness with men not that of a child. She watches the other children for me and moves with a sadness which is different and more thoughtful and more permanent than theirs.

Gitel makes me think of the years passing with Naomi far from me. I am going to write her a letter tonight after this entry. Then when I have brought the children safely over, I am going to ask the Joint representative if he could mail it for me from Madrid. I will be very careful what I say, but I need to make that contact with my sister.

7 juillet 1943

Tomorrow I should meet my contacts and deliver this brood. Unfortunately, it is raining—drizzle, but cold, making the little ones shiver. I do not dare make fire this close to the border. Instead I gather them together to tell stories. While I write this, Gitel, the fourteen-year-old, describes a movie she saw.

When we got to Toulouse, things picked up for Daniela and for me. I am still trying to understand why, in spite of Daniela's continued weakness and our fears about those we left in Paris, we are much more cheerful here. I like the south. Also I feel as if the Resistance is all around us here. I know many Resistance groups are active in Paris, but the collaboration is so visible, the power of the Nazis so manifest, swastikas everywhere, that we felt a small minority struggling to die with dignity.

It isn't that everything seems to be turning from shit into flowers, as Lev, our local chief, says. In fact, the Gestapo and the Milice hit the Resistance hard this summer. I never met Jean Moulin, who was de Gaulle's emissary to the different Resistance groups, but Lev admired him. In a series of raids, the Gestapo arrested the heads of a number of the groups and tortured Moulin to death and executed many others.

But for Daniela and me, it is moving from feeling a member of a tiny cell to being a member of a movement that feels large. No matter how bleak our lives and how vulnerable we are one by one to arrest, torture, deportation, execution, there always seem to be people to replace those lost. More come in than the Germans catch. News of the war is better these days, the Allied armies fighting their way up Sicily (although why they wanted to attack there mystifies us), the Soviets pushing the Germans back across the map. We know that if we can last, victory will come, and that is a new sensation. Here instead of working in a little cell with only tentative contacts with other isolated cells, the whole Jewish underground is interrelated and connected to the rest of the Resistance.

Furthermore, I feel at home in Toulouse, maybe because the countryside where the maquis rule is much closer here than in Paris. Maquis is a local word for the scrub vegetation of the mountains, but people use it lately to mean the guerrillas that have set up armed camps there. Or maybe I feel good because I am away from Nazi flags and among rocks and trees often, maybe because where we live is pleasant, near the canal with its little bridges and plane trees, with other Jews who have a family still. Our life flows now as swiftly as the mighty Garonne through this rosy brick city.

14 juillet 1943

I delivered my charges safely to our regular guide and to the Joint representative. He agreed to mail my letter, but not until he is in Lisbon. At first, I was devastated, but then I agreed. What does it matter whether she receives the letter in one month or in two, after such a long silence? She cannot reply to me. She can only know I am thinking of her.

Today is Bastille Day. Last Bastille Day I had that lacerating quarrel with Maman. I saw my first underground paper that day,
Libération
. Publishing papers is a riskier business than counterfeiting identity cards or shepherding refugees, for everyone in the Resistance I have known who has worked on a clandestine paper has been caught and deported or executed. It is hard to hide a printing press, and the noise they make seems to tip off the police eventually. Some right-winger turns them in for the reward.

I have a young man with me, a British agent who is on his way to Lyon with money and a fancy new type of radio, only the size of a brick, for the underground Combat organization there. They could use such a radio in Toulouse too. They never had enough of anything: not of money, not of arms, not of safe houses, not of radios or information.

The young man, whom I am to call Girard, speaks good French, although a little bookish. He seems afraid of me. I was extremely unwashed when he met me. If I have to touch him, he shrinks a little. It is amusing how much confidence his timidity gives me. When I saw I was to cross the mountains with a young man alone, I was frankly not overjoyed. I anticipated problems which have not developed. The shier he is, the more expansive and confident I feel in his company. I am no longer afraid of him, and I have gotten him to tell me about the blitz in London and about what is happening in North Africa, which is even worse than we had heard.

The Americans are still clutching hard to the Vichy Fascists there and sustaining them in power. Many resistants are
still
in camps, and Jews were only allowed to leave off the yellow star months after the Americans came. We cannot allow that to happen here. The only thing that will prevent that kind of degrading replacement of one foul regime with another version of the same is if we have a strong Resistance the Allies cannot ignore, so they won't be able to leave French Fascists in power after the Germans go home.

Girard, who worked in a cheese import firm before the war, shared a flask of whiskey with me and we toasted liberation and Bastille Day, watching the sunset steal over the snowfields across the defile and then descending to a place I like to camp beside a spring that gushes from a cliff. It was still except for the sound of the copper bells on goats and sheep below in the pastures. It was getting dark and I almost lost my way, whether because of the whiskey or because of the lurid purplish light. We actually went past the little path to the spring before I realized it, and had to turn back, because here is where we are to spend a few hours till the moon rises. The night is chilly in spite of it being the middle of July, and the warmth of the whiskey is appealing, a pocket of calming heat right in my belly. Still, today of all days I would like to be down in Toulouse, where I know a major demonstration is planned, with the forbidden tricolor and distribution of clandestine papers.