The Sweetness of Forgetting (22 page)

“How did you escape being captured?”

“I was eleven years old when they came for us. My parents, they did not believe all the rumors we were hearing. But Rose believed. She could not convince my parents. They thought that she was crazy, that she was a fool for accepting the predictions of Jacob, whom they viewed as a young rebel who knew nothing.”

There it was again. That name. “You never told me who Jacob is.”

Alain searches my face for a moment. “Jacob was everything,” he says simply. “Jacob was the one who told me to run if the police came. Jacob was the one who told me to try to convince my family. Jacob was the one who saved me, for when the police came for us, to take us away, I climbed out the back window, fell to the ground from three floors above, and ran.”

He looks down at his hands for a long moment. They’re gnarled and scarred. Finally, he draws a deep breath and continues. “I let my family die, because I was scared,” he says. He looks up at me and there are tears in his eyes. “I did not try hard enough to persuade them. I did not take Danielle and David, the younger ones, with me. I was frightened, very frightened, and because of that, they are all gone.”

A tear runs down his cheek. Before I can even consider what I’m doing, I’ve crossed the room to hug him. He stiffens for a moment, and then I feel his arms encircle my shoulders. His
whole body is shaking. “You were eleven,” I murmur. “You are not to blame.”

I pull away, and he sighs. “No matter who holds the blame, my family was all murdered, and I am still here, seventy years later. I have lived with that all my life. It is heavy in my heart.”

I can feel tears in my own eyes as I sit back down. “How did this Jacob know? How did he know to tell you to run?”

“He was part of an underground movement against the Nazis,” Alain says. “He believed the rumors of the death camps. He believed they were exterminating us systematically. He was in the minority. But Rose believed him. And Jacob was my hero, so I believed him too. He must have saved her.”

“How?” I ask softly.

Alain looks at me for a long moment. “I do not know. But she was the love of his life. He would have done anything to protect her. Anything.”

I blink. “She loved him too?”

He nods. “With a strength I’d never known she had,” he says. He looks off into the distance for a long time. “That is why, for all these years, I’ve always firmly believed that she died. For if she had lived, I know she would have come back for him.”

“She must have believed that he was dead too,” I murmur. “Was his name at the Hôtel Lutetia?”

Alain looks perplexed. “Yes, it was,” he says. “He was hoping beyond hope that she had made it out, that she had survived, despite the rumors we had heard. His name was always there, so if she came back, she would find him.”

“But my grandfather came back,” I tell him. “In 1949. To find out what happened to her family. That’s what my grandmother said.”

“There were no records of me,” Alain says. “That is surely why he did not find me. But Jacob did everything to be listed, just in case Rose had somehow survived.”

I swallow hard and wonder what this means. Had Mamie
not given Jacob’s name to my grandpa? Or had my grandfather found Jacob’s name on survivor lists after all and told Mamie otherwise, because he realized how much she apparently loved him and wanted to protect the life he’d already begun with her? I shudder involuntarily.

“Did this Jacob escape, like you and my grandmother did?” I ask Alain. “Before the roundup?”

Alain shakes his head and draws a deep breath. “Jacob was at Auschwitz,” he says simply. “He survived because he was so sure Rose was safe somewhere, and he had vowed he would find her. He told me, when I last saw him, that he could not believe she was dead, because he would have felt it in his soul. It was that hope of reuniting with her that kept him alive in that hell on earth.”

Chapter
Thirteen

Rose

Annie had been to see Rose earlier that day; Rose was sure of it. But she couldn’t quite make sense of what the girl had said.

“Mom’s in Paris right now,” Annie had declared, her gray eyes flashing with excitement. “She left me a message! She said she might have, like, found something!”

“How nice, my dear,” Rose had replied. But she couldn’t quite place who Annie’s mother was. Was she a relative of Rose’s? Or maybe one of her customers at the bakery? But she couldn’t tell the girl that she didn’t remember her mother. So instead, she said, “Did your mother find something nice at a boutique? A scarf or some shoes, perhaps?” Paris was, after all, known for its shopping.

Annie had laughed then, a bright sound that reminded Rose of the birds that used to sing outside her window on the rue du Général Camou, so very long ago. “No, Mamie!” she had exclaimed. “She went to the Holocaust museum! You know, to find out what happened to those people you told us about!”

“Oh,” Rose had murmured, all of the breath suddenly gone from her lungs.

Annie had departed soon after, and Rose had been left alone with her thoughts, which were closing in on her. The girl’s words had triggered a tornado of memories that threatened to lift Rose off her feet and take her away, into the past, where she found herself dwelling more and more frequently now. Most days, the memories rolled in uninvited, but this day, it was the mentions of Paris and the Holocaust, the Shoah, that sent Rose spinning backward to that terrible day in 1949 her dear Ted had come home and confirmed her worst fears.

She loved her husband. And because she loved her husband, she had told him about Jacob, because she knew she was supposed to be honest with the people she loved. And she
had
been honest—to
a point. She had told Ted that there was a man she had loved very much in Paris. It had hardly needed to be said; she knew it was already clear.

But when he’d asked her if she loved the man in Paris more than she loved him, she hadn’t been able to meet his eye. And so he had known. He had always known.

She wished she felt differently. Ted was a wonderful man. He was a wonderful father to Josephine. He was trustworthy and loyal. He had built her a life she never could have dreamed of all those years ago in the land of her birth.

But he wasn’t Jacob. And that was his only flaw.

For the first few years after the war, she hadn’t wanted to know. Not officially, anyhow. When she’d first been married to Ted and they’d been living in New York, in an apartment not far from the Statue of Liberty, there had been bits and pieces of news from other immigrants who drifted in from France. Survivors, they called themselves. Rose thought that, instead, they looked like ghosts, already dead. Pale, washed out, hollowed eyes, floating through rooms like they didn’t quite belong there.

I knew your mother,
one of the ghosts would say.
I watched her die at Auschwitz.

I saw sweet little Danielle at Drancy,
another would say.
I don’t know if she made it to the transport.

And the bit of news that shattered her soul, from a ghost named Monsieur Pinusiewicz, whom she’d known in a former life. He was the butcher whose shop was just down the street from her grandparents’ bakery.

That boy you were running around with? Jacob?

Rose had stared at him. She hadn’t wanted him to go on, because she could see the truth written in his eyes. She couldn’t bear to hear it. She made a muffled sound, for it was all she could muster, and he took it as a signal to go on.

He was at Auschwitz. I saw him there. And I saw him the day they led him to the gas chamber.

And that was it. He was gone. The ghost of Monsieur Pinusiewicz, as well as the last shred of hope she had that she could somehow find her past again.

By the time she left New York, she knew they were all gone. The ghosts had told her. One had watched her father get sick while working at Auschwitz’s crematorium. One had held her mother’s hand as she died. Another had worked alongside Helene and had one day returned from the field, a day that Helene had been too sick to rise from her bed, to find her on the floor, beaten to death by the guards, her lovely brown hair matted with blood. The fates of the others were less clear, and Rose didn’t ask questions. What mattered was that they were all dead. All of them.

And so, when Ted had promised her a life far away from these hollow-eyed ghosts, far away from New York, in a magical place called Cape Cod, where he said the waves washed up on sandy beaches, and cranberry bogs grew, she said yes. Because she loved him. And because she needed to finish becoming someone else. She needed to concentrate on building a family, because the one she’d had was gone forever.

But by 1949, seven years after she’d left Paris, she had needed to know for sure. She knew she could not bury Rose Picard without the certainty that could only come from the official records. What if one of the ghosts was wrong? What if little Danielle had survived and was in an orphanage somewhere, believing there was no one in the world who loved her? What if Helene hadn’t died on that floor but had escaped and was waiting for her, wondering where she was? What if the ghost who said she’d held Rose’s mother’s hand had been mistaken about the identity of the woman she’d watched die?

But Rose couldn’t go. It had been nothing short of miraculous that her falsified papers had gotten her into the United States in the first place. She knew it was likely that the immigration people had looked the other way only because she had married Ted, a war hero. She had made her bargains; now her life was here, and she had a little girl who needed her. She didn’t trust France. She didn’t trust
that she could get out again. And she feared her heart wouldn’t be able to bear going back anyhow.

And so she asked Ted to go. And because he loved her, and because he was a good man, he said yes.

He left on a shining summer Monday. She waited, the seconds ticking by like minutes, the minutes feeling like hours. Time stretched like the taffy she, Ted, and little Josephine had eaten on their trip to Atlantic City the summer before.