Shattered Crystals, Mia Amalia Kanner [cat reading book txt] 📗

days since I had been with Lea in Limoges. I thought about her constantly. There was no question in my mind or Sal’s that it had been right to give her to the care of the Underground. Still, I worried. How was she managing, wholly surrounded by strangers?

Marie Pouillard, a young French teacher with whom I had become friendly, was in the kitchen, sipping a cup of ersatz. “You must not think about her all the time,” she said. “You must find something to take your mind off this. She is among people who care for her. Try to concentrate on something else for a while.”

I sought refuge in the attic. I remembered the stack of nineteenth century magazines, and thought I might find another bundle of old journals, or perhaps some other artifacts to take my mind off Lea. I poked around for a while, found nothing, and went downstairs.

Madame Krakowski was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “The police were here again,” she said. “They searched for you. It did not occur to them that we have an attic. Your husband was not in the house.”

She led me to the kitchen, where Schlachter was pouring ersatz for Sal.

“It’s no use,” Sal said. “We’ve been counted in the census. They know we are here and they will keep coming.”

“They are after foreign Jews,” Schlachter said. “I heard that in Paris only French Jews have a chance of avoiding arrest.”

Madame Krakowski said, “You’re Alsatian, Schlachter, so you are safe, for the time being at least. I think my Swiss passport will protect me.” She looked at Sal and at me and said, “But the two of you must leave and go into hiding.”

“How? Where?” I asked. “Nobody has a place for us!”

“Go up into the mountains,” the directress said. “It’s summer, and the nights are mild. Maybe we will find a place before the summer ends.”

Sal stood. “We have no choice. If we let ourselves be arrested, we’ll be returned to Germany. I will not be taken!” he shouted, and pounded the table. “I beg your pardon, Madame, but you know that in Germany they will kill us.”

“The gendarmes are not likely to come twice in one day,” Madame Krakowski said. “However, nothing is certain. It would be best if you left now.”

I walked to the summerhouse and gathered clothes for us, a change of underwear, shirts and some sweaters. I thought it would be cold, especially at night. I brought our things to the kitchen. Schlachter filled a musette with bread and fruit. Sal took the clothing and rolled it up in two wool blankets. Then we walked out toward the mountains that rose behind Le Couret.

We climbed along a narrow path that followed the stream. Each time we came to a clearing, we looked down to make sure the main road was in sight. At dusk, we spread one of the blankets on the ground. Sal brought water from the mountain stream, and we ate a bit of bread. Then he cleared sticks and pebbles from the ground, spread the second blanket, and promptly fell asleep. Since Kristallnacht, Sal had slept in so many places, indoors and out, on beds, planks, bare floor, grass and earth that he was now able to sleep wherever he was.

That first night in the mountains, I envied his ability to fall asleep so easily. I slept fitfully, waking to the light of the crescent moon, thankful for Sal’s rhythmic, reassuring snoring. At least, Lea must have a bed. Oh, if only I could have foreseen the future, I would have sent her to America with Ruth and Eva. If I had done that, if I had acted differently, Lea would not be alone now, without family or friends. I should have let her go, but how could I have known that the police would search for us in this secluded bit of France?

Wondering how long life could go on like this, I must have drifted into sleep. When I opened my eyes, it was light. My neck and shoulders ached. Sal brought me cool mountain water in a cup Schlachter had packed for us. Reaching for it, I was startled by a noise.

“Sal, I heard someone,” I whispered.

He froze and listened. “No, it is nothing, an animal,” he said. “Listen. It’s a whoosh, whoosh. Those are not footsteps, not the sound of soldiers. Soldiers won’t come after us here.” He unwrapped the leftover bread. “Eat something.”

During the morning, we explored the forest to become familiar with the terrain. In the afternoon, I slept for an hour until Sal woke me and said, “It’s time.”

It was four o’clock when we started down the mountain. One and a half hours later, we crouched behind bushes close to the dirt road leading toward the village of La Jonchere. It felt as if we waited for a long time, but we were there only fifteen minutes when we heard the clear, high-pitched voices of children. They were singing an old French folk song, “Sur le Pons, D’Avignon, Ils fait bon, fait bon, fait bon.”

It was the agreed upon signal. It had been worked out while I was collecting our clothes from the summerhouse. Sal moved to the other side of the bushes. Peering through the leaves, I saw four young girls, apparently out for a carefree afternoon stroll. In reality, they were from Le Couret and were bringing us food.

One of the girls stopped and toyed with some leaves on the bush. “Hello, Sal, how are you?” she asked.

“We’re all right, thank you,” he said. He took the parcel from her and slipped back into the woods. We watched the girl run to catch up with her companions and stood there until we could no longer hear them singing. Then we carried the parcel up the mountain and ate.

The girls came three or four times a week with food. Most days, they also brought brief messages, mainly about life at Le Couret. “No one has come to take your place… Everyone pitches in… We miss your blackberry puree…”

Toward the end of August, they came with appalling news. “Many OSE homes were raided. Gendarmes came at night to Montintin and Masgellier. They took girls and boys. Even little ones, as young as Lea. We are all afraid.”

The next time the girls came, the news was no better. “Two policemen came looking for you again, and for Monsieur Schlachter, too, but he wasn’t here when they came.”

“The first step is to save the child,” the Underground had said in their message to us, and they had saved Lea. Now, a short while later, they were no longer able to save our Jewish children. I could not sleep, thinking of terrified children, suffering and dying of hunger and sickness. I remembered when the Underground began hiding our children who were nearing their sixteenth birthday. We heard then that some children were arrested and sent to Drancy, a transit camp near Paris. It was being used as a temporary collection site for Jews arrested all over France. That much we knew. We did not know where they went from there, but we knew they would never come back. The Nazis needed workers and probably took the young Jews to Germany for forced labor. We did not think they could survive in Germany. They would succumb to disease or starvation.

The mountain became our world. We learned every bend in its paths, the changing width of the stream, where I could rinse our clothes, where the air was calmest, where the ground was soft and we could sit. I became used to the sounds of the animals moving through the forest, although the noises continued to frighten me. There was always that split second before I realized it was not the footfalls of the gendarmes.

I was tired all the time. I could not get used to sleeping on the ground. I told Sal there must be alternatives, somewhere else to hide. There is always something that can be done. I remembered Le Couret’s only neighbor, the kind farmer who used to bring extra milk to the kitchen. “Pour les Enfants,” he always said. “For the children.”

We decided to risk showing ourselves to him and walked to his farm. Waiting at the edge of his field, we watched him plow until he reached us.

“We are living in the forest,” I said.

“If you could let us spend the nights in one of your old shacks, we would make sure not to come until after dark, and we would leave before dawn,” Sal said.

He did not answer immediately, but gazed past us into the forest. Finally, he spoke. “I suppose it would be alright if you slept in my tool shed.”

It made all the difference. I was not at all bothered by the hard floor of the shed. I had a roof over my head again. When we reached our shelter during a rainstorm two nights later, we found the farmer waiting for us. “You might as well sleep in the hayloft,” he said. “It is warmer there, and dryer.”

Then as the days stretched into weeks, as the leaves turned yellow, then brown, and fell from the trees, I became increasingly depressed.

“Look at us, Sal,” I said. “We live like animals, relieving ourselves in bushes, cleaning ourselves in the cold stream. Every day we hunt for berries and we know perfectly well that they are all gone. The farmer’s dog lives better than we do.”

The days became colder and each day the sun set earlier. “Until we can come up with something better,” Madame Krakowski had said when she suggested we hide in the mountains. She did not forget us, and continued to send food for us with Le Couret children. But they brought only food, and never any word that a place had been found for us.

I asked Sal how we could possibly survive in the mountains during the winter, and he had no answer for me. I felt our best chance was in Limoges. I imagined there must be some Jews left in the city who would help us. Was it not incumbent upon any Jew to welcome strangers?

“If they see us, Sal, if we appeal to them in person and tell them how we have been hiding, how desperate we are, they would not turn us out,” I said.

“What you say makes sense. We’ll go.”

Limoges was twenty miles away, a great distance for us to cover on foot. Yet there was no other way for us to get there. We considered covering the entire distance in one day but concluded it would be too taxing. The route was sparsely populated, and we would be sure to find a secluded spot where we could spend the night. We had a difficult journey ahead of us, but not as difficult as spending the winter in the forest.

We told the Le Couret children and the good farmer of our decision. On an October morning, we abandoned our two blankets in the hay loft. Sal crammed all our clothing into our musette and added a few pieces of bread. In my skirt pocket, I put six precious cubes of sugar that Madame Krakowski had sent after hearing about our plans. We could not risk carrying a package of food along the road. That would set us apart as refugees.

We were used to waking at dawn, and started out soon after the sun rose. We spoke little, concentrating on keeping a steady pace. Some youngsters skipped past us on their way to school. In mid-morning at the edge of a deserted stretch of road, we found a place to sit and shared a piece of bread. We rested for a quarter of an hour