“Thousands of Jewish children must have gotten lost. It was wartime. Chaos galore: bombs leaving millions of French families homeless and fleeing; Nazis seizing all farm produce; defeated French soldiers wandering about wounded and dazed; the Vichy government yanking half a million Frenchmen from their families and sending them to labor in Germany; fierce fighting among the Communists, the collaborators, and the Maquis. In the midst of that, who knew or cared about Jewish children?”
The salt water dries on Sharon’s skin, tightening it. Her face stings when she rubs it. How had her mother survived? “What about monasteries?”
“It wasn’t hard to hide one child or two or three, but you couldn’t hide hundreds of them. Some orphanages operated, but most shut down during the war.”
Sharon wonders how Youth Aliyah found thousands of children all over Europe after the war. Did its agents knock on doors of monasteries and farmhouses and ask to take the Jewish orphans to another country whose language the children did not speak? Her mother was almost an adult and could decide for herself, but who gave away the four-year-old Danny?
Then it occurs to Sharon: If Danny was four at the time he arrived, the year must have been 1946. It was pre-Israel, the same year her mother arrived—and many thousands of refugees in dozens of clandestine voyages.
When Sharon and Rachelle reach the umbrella, Danny and Dominique are not there, nor are their heads bobbing in the water. Sharon assumes that they are beyond the curve of boulders, making love, and Rachelle’s silence about their absence tells her that she shares the same assumption.
Rachelle takes out a rattan picnic basket and begins to spread its contents on a red-checkered tablecloth. A fresh baguette, sliced tomatoes, salami, dried figs, and three kinds of cheese. A salad of beans and grains in a bowl lined with lettuce leaves. She places the cheese on a cutting board and decorates the arrangement with a cluster of green grapes. The plates are china, the utensils stainless steel, and the wineglasses are stemmed. Sharon admires anew the way the French do everything with style, even a beach picnic, down to the matching red-checkered napkins that Rachelle hands her to fold into triangles.
Sharon adds her cake, still in its baking pan, mulling over their conversation. Even if records of hidden children were kept, babies became attached to their caretakers, and teens must have matured in the four or five years of war and moved on.
“The orphanages,” she says. “Were they like in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist?”
“Better, allowing for severe wartime shortages. At first, a Jewish humanitarian organization was permitted to operate as long as the Vichy government controlled it. OSE—that’s Œuvre de secours aux enfants—smuggled many children to Switzerland. Then its leaders were arrested. Some children escaped. Others were sent to concentration camps.”
Escaped and all alone in a hostile world. Where did her mother hide for years? Or had she survived a camp? Sharon pours water into the glasses.
Rachelle sips some. “There were also many state orphanages—not Jewish—and more opened after liberation. The country was in shambles, and parents couldn’t feed their children, so they let the state take care of them.”
“The ‘orphans’ weren’t actually orphans? They had living parents?”
“Seventy-five percent of institutionalized French children had at least one living parent. Non-Jews might have lost their farms, but Jewish survivors of concentration camps didn’t even have a change of clothes or the tools of their previous occupations. They’d been away from their children for years, tortured, and they were often too broken to bond anew with them.”
Seventy-five percent. Could one or both of Danny’s parents be alive? Sharon looks at the coarse sand around her. The Allies had landed on these serene beaches several kilometers east of this spot. She always assumed that with that audacious campaign, so costly in human lives, the misery ended. In fact, another stage of misery and anguish had begun.
When Danny and Dominique reappear, their arms are so tight around each other that they keep tripping. Danny drops onto the sand, plucks up the bottle of red wine and a corkscrew, and deftly opens it.
They chat while eating. Danny and Sharon can’t mention even the most innocuous details of their work or joke about an anecdote. Disparate pieces of information and coincidental stories might be woven together to reveal a scheme not intended to become public. Dominique, though, is a charismatic talker.
“You have no idea what went on here just five months ago. The students’ revolution in Paris spread nationwide to labor unions. The whole country came to a dead stop. Here in Normandy, all the shipyard workers went on strike. Grievances bubbled up. School boards agreed to overhaul our archaic education system, but around here, they did nothing about it all summer. I begged my editor to let me expose their apathy.” She flings back her blond curls and ties them in a knot. “He stole my idea and assigned it to a male reporter. The piece was so lame! It didn’t address the fact that classes have resumed with the same old dogmatic and idiotic methods.” She turns to Sharon. “You know what first-graders write on? Slate.”
“Why slate?”
“Exactly. They are not taught to hold a pencil, only chalk to scratch on a Stone Age slate.”
Were records of hidden Jewish children also written in chalk on slate?
After lunch, Danny and Sharon play beach paddleball, a popular Israeli game. They position themselves on the water’s edge, where ripples flirt with the sand, leaving it tightly packed. The familiar thwack of the hard, small ball brings Sharon memories of long beach days with Alon. The two of them could volley back and forth in a long play reminiscent of their lovemaking.
Sharon begs off, claiming fatigue, and calls Rachelle to take her paddle.
She lies down under the umbrella, and she must have dozed off, because when she opens her eyes, Rachelle is resting nearby. The slow rhythmical rising and falling of the breasts that spill out of her tiny bikini top indicate that she is sleeping. The sun has moved in the sky, and Dominique and Danny are lying across from them, their upper bodies in the shade cast by the boulders. Only their feet are in the sun, their soles facing Sharon.
Her eyes are not fully open when she notices a blue stain at the bottom of Danny’s foot. A jellyfish sting?
Alarmed, she calls, “Danny! Your foot!”
He sits up slowly and unhurriedly clears the sand off the blue stain. “Oh, yes, my foot.”
Sharon stares at a tattoo of a Star of David.
Part II
ALIYAH—GATHERING FROM DIASPORA:
And He will set up an ensign for the nations, and will assemble the dispersed of Israel, and gather together the scattered of Judah from the four corners of the earth.
—Isaiah 11:12
Chapter Twenty-One
Uzi Yarden
Marseille, France
September 1946
Uzi Yarden scanned his foreign surroundings. The huge Marseille port with its fleets of ships was now behind him, and he was walking along a row of gigantic weatherworn warehouses. Trucks chugged in both directions.
He stopped to stare at the landscape in front of him, then glanced at his map to verify that this was supposed to be the Jewish quarter. What had happened here? Where were the streets that ascended from the port, fanned out, and climbed up the hill? Piles of rubble stretched up the slope. A lone, distant bulldozer pushing white bricks, wood beams, and mangled iron was the only sign of life. Dread spread through Uzi. No use trying to guess which street would lead to the address where he would receive his momentous assignment: rescue Jewish orphans.
In his twenty-two years, Uzi had rarely traveled even as far as Haifa, eighty kilometers from his kibbutz, and had never imagined crossing the Mediterranean and landing in France, of all places. Nothing was familiar. The Haganah section leader in his kibbutz who briefed him had warned Uzi to expect the unexpected. How did one conjure up unexpected situations? What other scenes as shocking as the demolished Jewish quarter of Marseille might he encounter?
