“You may call it that. Orphan hunters know that they can bring Jewish kids to us or sell them to people in another country. Children are the new postwar commodity. Poland, Romania, France, Austria, Greece—all European countries have suffered great population losses. They need to replenish their numbers quickly, and the only way to do that is to grab children of whatever nationality.”
“How absurd, after what the children have been through.”
“For them, children are tabulae rasae, clean slates on which each nation can engrave its identity.”
Within two hours of setting foot in France, Uzi thought, he had learned more about war than he had ever known.
In the dining room, Miriam stepped away to separate two kids whose argument seemed about to escalate. She returned to Uzi and sighed. “The French are our worst rivals. The nationalists have the audacity to claim our children. Do you get it? They now love the same kids who escaped their clutches when they deported their families to Auschwitz! They want to make them French!”
An older teenager wheeled a cauldron around and children clamored with their bowls held out.
“Please eat with us,” Miriam said. “It’s not much. We can’t afford the black market that snatches most available food.”
Uzi accepted a bowl of soup. A few strings of what could be chicken floated among pieces of vegetables.
Miriam took a deep breath. “Do you know that cooked frogs taste like chicken? And if we’re not careful, we may buy skinned dogs sold as lamb.”
“How do I begin my work?”
She glanced at the wall clock, then clapped her hands. “Give the children a talk in Hebrew. You have a couple of hours before your train.”
“My train to where?”
“A town called Châteauroux. It’s in the Loire Valley, which was part of the free zone until November 1942. Many Jews fled south through there. Unfortunately, it didn’t save them. You’ll rescue their hidden orphans.”
How?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sharon
Paris and Cherbourg, France
November 1968
Sharon walks through the gate of the Rodin Museum in Paris and is welcomed in the front garden by the giant sculpture of The Thinker. The day is cold, a bone-penetrating chill like Jerusalem in winter, and Sharon feels its sting. Without proper winter clothes, she can’t stroll through the sculpture gardens. She steps into the grand mansion and is soon entranced by the sinewy, sensuous bronze bodies with intertwining limbs. But what arrests her attention is the tenderness of white marble hands gently cupping some divine grace.
She gazes at it, feeling the power of the subtle emotion. By the end of her visit to Paris with Naomi and Pazit, she had ticked off her list most of the city’s main tourist attractions—Place de la Bastille, the Louvre, the Palais Garnier, Pont Alexandre III. The three of them ate Nutella crepes in Le Marais and watched street performers outside the Sorbonne. Now, she’s exploring the city alone before meeting new recruits tomorrow, and it makes the city her own.
Back outside, she realizes that there is no way to avoid buying winter clothes, although she hates spending money on items for which she will have no use in Tel Aviv. She heads to the flea market, where she buys leather boots and wool socks, rabbit-fur-lined leather gloves, and her first ever heavy coat: a secondhand loden in a popular dark green, lined with plaid fabric. Influenced by Dominique’s and Rachelle’s style, she purchases two printed scarves.
Finally warm, she wanders through narrow alleys where she glimpses small hidden gardens. She clicks her camera at the ornamental cast-iron lampposts and drinking fountains. Danny advised her to visit the Musée des Arts et Métiers, and she spends the rest of the afternoon awed by and absorbed in the displays of machinery and measuring instruments. By the time she leaves, she’s filled with admiration for the aptitude, inventiveness, and reach of the human mind. She belongs in this world of industrial design. She understands why Danny sent her here.
Back at the same small, cozy, Left Bank hotel where she stayed on the day of her arrival in Paris, Sharon writes to Savta on a Rodin Museum postcard and asks her to send her wool suit and have her birth certificate translated. She needs it in order to obtain a French driver’s license.
What a dream that is! Can you imagine that I’ll be learning to drive? Yes, I’m staying here for a while, but I miss you and your cooking. More in a letter. Love, Sharon
The thought of Savta’s loneliness weighs on her. She recalls their quiet times in the late afternoon on the veranda, the chirps and trills of the swallows in the background. Savta wanted Sharon to spread her wings; none of her letters has expressed how much that separation must hurt her.
Please pack my flute too, Sharon adds vertically in the margin. This afternoon, humming while walking, she caught herself tapping her fingers on her thigh. She craves the feel of the flute’s mouthpiece against her lips, the intake and outflow of breath that causes music to emerge from her center. Depriving herself of her art won’t bring Alon back, even if mourning for him will forever play a note in her head.
Nor will spending an evening in Paris alone in a hotel room.
She takes the Métro to Abbesses, the station at the foot of Montmartre, then challenges herself to climb the steep wide steps up the hill. She stops at each landing to drink in the view of the city below. Tourists stream up and down the wide landings, pose and point their cameras. When Sharon reaches the magnificent white church of the Sacré-Coeur, it is already dark, and she gazes at the panorama of the city lights stretching away to the horizon with the brilliantly lit Eiffel Tower as a landmark.
A side street leads to a large plaza filled with artists displaying their works. Music pours out of the unglazed glass of the cafés’ wall-size windows. The place teems with people, lights, colors, fancy clothes, and delicious smells of food and tobacco.
From one of the chansonniers pours the joyful notes of an accordion, and a group of Spanish students seated by the wall of windows belt out songs at the tops of their lungs. A young woman with a mane of wavy black hair passes around a pitcher of sangria. Catching Sharon’s eye, she motions to her to come in, and the others call out to her in Spanish, then English, then French. Sharon smiles. For the length of time she will spend with these people, their worry-free existence will nurture her illusion that life is simple.
She steps in. They make room for her on the backless bench, and someone shoves into her hand a glass of sangria with floating pieces of orange and strawberries. The accordion player switches to a French folk song Sharon knows, and she joins in, first humming, then giving herself over to full-throated singing. In the school choir, she sometimes sang solo. Soon, with the sangria flowing in her veins, she sings along with a pair of Italians who take over with a string of popular love songs.
Australian medical students on their summer break order platters of olives, cheese, and boudin noir, pig-blood sausage. Before long, one more table is pushed to the edge of theirs and four Germans join the group. Sharon cringes at the thought that their drinking songs will resemble those of their Nazi parents.
“Where are you from?” someone asks her.
“Israel.”
“The heroes of the world.” Someone raises his glass. “To Israel!”
“To Israel!” the others echo.
“Sing us one of your songs,” someone says, and the accordion player begins to play “Jerusalem of Gold.” Sharon sings, and the girl on her right puts her arm around her and sways to the rhythm. Carried away by the camaraderie, Sharon stands up and performs all four stanzas. Just for a moment, she is with all the students of the world, in spirit and in song, sharing with them the beauty of her country.
When the last notes fade, one of the Germans pulls over a chair behind Sharon, straddles it, and leans toward her. “The Six-Day War was a stunning victory of your tiny country against the mighty military of seven Arab countries armed with Russian weapons, tanks, and airplanes,” he explains to her in English as if she doesn’t know. “It took only six days for Israel to destroy those armies!” He raises his beer stein in salute, then offers it to her. “We love your country.”
Twenty-three years after the Holocaust, you love us? She’s never faced a German with Aryan liquid blue eyes, square jaw, and blond locks saluting her with a stein of beer, grinning. He can’t imagine how deeply she feels the collective victimhood of her people—and she’s tired of it. With the sangria flowing through the whole of her, Sharon understands why Danny is sick of thinking about the Holocaust. She is tired of mourning her murdered parents—and now Alon. She is tired of dreading the next war in Israel, of living in fear that she and everyone she knows may not survive. That Tel Aviv will be flattened by a shower of Russian-made missiles hurled by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon; or that Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, the United Emirates, or Libya will blacken the Israeli skies with their thousands of airplane bombers. It’s exhausting to always be on alert.
She accepts the German’s beer, gulps, and returns the stein to him. He throws his head back and empties the rest.
