Uzi smiled and shook his hand. At least the pastor spoke English. Uzi would have to put forth some effort to utter the sentences in a language he was better at reading. Châteaux? This building certainly wasn’t one. “Nice to meet you,” he said, forming his words with care.
Pastor Gaspard raised his voice as if to make himself better understood. “An exaggeration, of course, but there are dozens of châteaux in the region. Some have been in ruins for ages; others were recently bombed. Many are still intact, but their heirs can no longer afford to maintain them.”
He led Uzi into a room with an unlit fireplace that smelled of ashes and offered him tea and a sandwich. While Uzi ate—his first food since the soup the day before at Miriam’s orphanage—Pastor Gaspard explained, speaking slowly, that he was a Calvinist devoted to rescuing Jewish children and uniting them with their culture and biblical mission of life in the land that God had given them. “We are an isolated enclave of Huguenots. Most of us are in the south. Our people have been prosecuted, like yours. Murdered for our faith. We know what it’s like.”
“Thank you. We can use all the help we can get,” Uzi said.
“It’s God’s work. For us Protestants, the Bible is the highest authority—and you surely know what it says about your people. Chosen.”
“What do you mean, chosen?”
“Chosen by God. You are His special people.”
Uzi had never heard this. Or, rather, in his twelve years of Bible classes, which were part of the national curriculum—the Bible taught as a book of poetry and history, not as God’s word—no one had ever taken this chosen nonsense seriously. If Uzi had reported this conversation in the kibbutz dining room, they all would have had a big laugh. Chosen for tsuris—troubles—would be the consensus. Thank You, God, but could You please choose someone else?
The pastor went on. “We reject the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal supremacy. We treat all religions as equal. Now there are custody battles in courts between the children’s Jewish blood relatives and the adoptive Christian families who refuse to relinquish the children they’ve baptized. We make our stance clear: We honor the wishes of the dead parents.”
“Thanks. Where do I start?”
“The children you are looking for live at farms and monasteries. They may be attending regular schools in the village, ignorant of their real identity. With the help of the underground, we tried to keep lists. Often we lost track, because there wasn’t a single person or organization in charge.” Pastor Gaspard stopped as if mulling over the dilemma anew. “Some children matured during the war years and moved to hunting cabins on deserted estates or found work on farms. They are out of our reach unless they seek our help. There are many caves in the region where people found refuge during the war, but there is no access to food, so I doubt that anyone lives there now. Anyway, I’m warning you that should you get lost in one, we have no search team.”
The more Pastor Gaspard spoke, the more eerie and otherworldly this project became.
He told Uzi to bring the children in transit to him, and he and his wife would care for them in their home behind the church. Then he led Uzi to a house in an alley a block away and introduced him to Hilda Berkowitz. “She’s the social worker keeping track of the Jewish children,” he explained.
The conversation in English had given Uzi a headache. He was relieved that Hilda, a thin, bony woman almost as tall as he was, spoke Yiddish.
At her invitation, he sat down at her dining table. “It’s been thirty hours since I arrived in Marseille, and I’ve accomplished nothing,” Uzi told her after the pastor had left. “Where do I go first?”
“Jugendliche,” she said. “Youth. Don’t just burst through a door. Get the lay of the land. Get to understand each case and strategize your moves.” She pointed a long finger at Uzi’s chest. “But don’t dawdle. We are grateful for the heroism of local people who sheltered and saved our children, often risking their own families’ lives, but it’s time. We fear for our children’s Jewish souls.”
She opened a ledger. Written in the columns were squiggles and symbols, not words. “It’s coded,” she explained. “For some children, we forged new identities but kept records of their parents’ names. For their safety, the underground moved them from one hiding place to another. The problem is that only one person knew the next person in the chain.”
“Might as well have used bread crumbs.”
“You’ll follow those bread crumbs.” She took out a map. “I’m assigning you to the areas surrounding two villages.”
Uzi thought of his experience tracking the Arab infiltrators; their footprints in the dusty path had been erased by the wind, the sand whipped up into feverish cones. In Eretz Israel, he knew the Arab villages and terrain in his area, knew the contours of the rocks and the shadows in dry wadis. When he was a child, neighbors had been united by the shared hardships and occasional joys of agricultural life. His father had taken him along on visits to Arab friends—until they turned into enemies. But how did one track here? From the window, Uzi glimpsed the adjacent house. A child could be hidden in there and Hilda would have no idea.
Deciphering her own notes, Hilda described to Uzi a few cases he should target, and he wrote down the details in his notebook. “What about the young ones?” he asked.
“It’s our priority to keep siblings together; we don’t want to separate them from their only living relatives. That said, we can’t handle kids who are too young to care for themselves. Also, as you are well aware, getting out of France is the easy part. Entering Palestine is dangerous.” Her eyes locked with Uzi’s. He knew she was referring to the clandestine landings of immigrant boats. He’d helped evacuate the refugees from the beaches on dark nights, which was why the Youth Aliyah operation was populated with Haganah members. Hilda continued, “We focus on rescuing older children so we can salvage what’s left of their stolen childhood—and before they are lost to our people.” She paused. “Ready to go out and ask questions?”
“Except I don’t speak French.”
She lifted a stack of flash cards like the ones he had used in English class.
He mouthed words as he wrote down the translation of each: Enfant juif. Je suis de Palestine. Puis-je payer vos dépenses?
“‘May I pay your expenses?’” he read.
“You’ll be surprised how well money works.”
Uzi shifted in his seat. “Is it ethical?” In the kibbutz, he had been spared the repugnant task of handling money. The secretariat purchased everything, even the underwear that the laundry shed distributed weekly according to size, since no clothes were personal property. Now he was about to buy children the way Miriam had done the day before.
“Are you asking me whether it’s ethical to reimburse the children’s protectors for the cost of their upkeep when this country was starving? Money demonstrates our deepest gratitude for what they have done.” She pointed to the next card. “Parents. It’s spelled like in English. Pronounced differently, and it means any relative. If you say you’re the child’s parent, it might mean that you are her relative.”
“But that is a lie.”
“Not in the grand scheme of things. We are all the family these children have left.”
“What do I do if a child is happily living with a Christian family? If he or she is loved?”
“Try to persuade this family. The mood in France today weighs heavily toward national identity and reviving France through the next generation. One’s family comes second, and many people can understand that—with some persuasion.” She withdrew money from the sideboard drawer and counted bills. “If you don’t take that child, another organization will. They might even kidnap her. What will they do? Place her in an orphanage. The question is only which organization and what it ultimately offers to a growing kid. So, yes, it’s either us or them, and Eretz Israel is the best future.”
“Kidnap?”
“A couple of weeks ago, a father, a camp survivor, whose twelve-year-old had refused to leave her new Christian family, kidnapped her to Palestine. He and his wife were crushed over the loss of their two other children. They weren’t about to give up on this one. Can you blame them?”
“I hope I’m not expected to help in such an operation,” Uzi stated. “In the first wave that arrived last year, each child was an orphan. The entire kibbutz movement is mobilized to absorb displaced kids who need a home.”
“But all the children live in separate children’s houses.”
“By age group, but they spend time with their parents every evening. It’s no different from city parents who work, except that on the kibbutz, my mother never has to cook. She has more time for her children. At night, parents rotate sleeping in the children’s house.”
“How did that work for you growing up?”
He chuckled. “I felt bad for city children who didn’t have their own house with a classroom and recreation areas.” He added, “My girlfriend and I still have dinner with our parents in the common dining room. And my classmates are forever my siblings.”
