I was dragged first to the jail in Brioude, filled with noblewomen who blamed me for their imprisonment. One crowed, “At last, the Revolution bites the mother that rocked its cradle!”
“This is not the child I nourished,” I whispered.
I slept that night on a bale of straw with a baker’s wife who was imprisoned for her faith, then took upon myself the duties of cooking for everyone and serving the ladies who had rejoiced to see me brought low. My daughters saw to it that my linens were laundered, sewing secret messages to me into the hems. Then one night, Anastasie arranged to have herself smuggled into the prison for a visit.
I marveled at her audacity, even as she cried bitter tears. “I rode alone at night, then hid during the day. I had to see you, I had tell you . . . it is terrible news . . .”
Maman, Louise, and Grand-mère had all been arrested.
And by morning I would be sent to Paris to die.
FORTY-NINE
MARTHE
Chavaniac-Lafayette
June 1943
“I was hours from being loaded onto a German train bound for Auschwitz,” rasps a rail-thin Uriah Kohn, sitting by Madame Pinton’s hearth and eating soup. He’s been fighting with the Jewish militant resistance since his release, but now he’s taken the risk to come back and check on his children. “How did you get me out of the camp?”
“I can’t tell you,” I say.
“I didn’t give you up,” he assures me. “I would die first, after what you’ve done for my children.”
I believe him, but I still can’t risk telling him the role Travert played in getting the permit I forged to camp authorities.
People can’t talk if they don’t know, Marthe, Travert said. Catch a refugee, the Nazis have nothing. If they catch you, they can catch everyone you help, because forgers know all the real names . . .
Travert fears I’d break under torture, and I fear that he knows what he’s talking about. The Germans are furious with the French police for failing to meet their quotas in rounding up Jews, so I never ask how Travert decides who to warn or when to look the other way. I don’t want to know about the people he arrests, interrogates, or gives over to the Gestapo.
But I know it’s destroying him . . .
Last night I stayed at Travert’s house—a well-kept place with a deep farm sink and flower boxes and a feather bed in the loft. In the middle of the night, he cried out, cold sweat glistening on the hair of his arms. And when he caught his breath, he whispered, “I’m going to hell.”
Now I shake that memory away and take the letters Monsieur Kohn has written to the kids. In exchange, I give him a thick envelope. I’ve made him two different identities, complete with birth certificates and travel permits. It took less than ten minutes to make each stamp using my new method. How I want to slap myself for all the hours I wasted carving wood! “Here. Now you’re a whole new man.”
He thanks me and puts down his bowl on the hearth to inspect the papers. “These might be good enough to get to Switzerland . . .”
“Your children might be safer where they are. Gabriella has been with us since ’41, but Dr. Anglade is willing to say she’s had a relapse, or find some other medical reason to keep her longer.”
“There are other children in need of help,” Monsieur Kohn says, and I realize he wants something more. “Organizations like the ?uvre de Secours aux Enfants are smuggling them out of France. The OSE has doctors, passers, and forgers, but they need more.”
“I’ll do it.”
He startles, not having expected me to agree so easily. What he doesn’t know is that I’ve spent the past few months making papers for men who joined the Resistance to escape the STO. The Resistance is not just communists, Spaniards, and refugees in the woods anymore. Not just boys like Oscar with chalk. The Resistance is now everywhere in Auvergne. From the castle, we can actually hear the maquis training with heavy munitions in the forest, and two months ago, when it was my turn to go with the kids on their camping trip, I saw men in clogs and berets drilling—and one of those men was Sam.
Since then, I’ve made papers for him and his friends on the condition that Sam be the sole courier and the only person to know my identity. Now we exchange messages by stuffing them in the old stone mailbox of the house in the village that Madame Simon used to occupy. It’s not just the rightness of the cause or the cloak-and-dagger adrenaline of it all that keeps me going; it’s the addictive feeling of solving problems and doing something that matters for a change.