The House of Izieu Read online

  “Surely we’re meant to try,” was her reply.

  In the meantime, their marriage was a fortress against the world, and the well of all comfort. They finished each other’s sentences, and anticipated each other’s needs. They shared pillows, blankets, and dreams. They lit candles on Friday night and said the prayers of their faith, but they didn’t really believe anymore. It was their culture and their people they honoured those nights. Memory. Ancestry. History.

  LANDAS, 1929

  THE SNOW SEEMED ETERNAL, infinite. Sabine stood at the window and watched as it swept across the garden, across the roof of the barn, and down to the smooth round pond at the bottom of the field. There was not a single footprint, not a single mark to show a human presence in the silvered landscape.

  But this snow-blanketed farm in Landas in the north of France was their first real home where they would raise children and chickens when the spring came. Miron had bought the farm in an estate sale with the last of their savings. Though he knew his father was rich, it was not until the family was forced to leave Russia that he understood the breadth and depth of that wealth, how far it stretched and how many lives were held in its grip. He had no desire to be one of those lives. Sabine, who had left home when she was only sixteen, had no quarrel with Miron’s decision. The farm was small and surprisingly cheap. They would work hard and be glad of their independence.

  That was the plan, Sabine thought.

  But when the last lick of snow finally melted, and they stood on the land they’d been so proud to own, their optimism melted too, because the land was entirely contaminated by chicken shit. Miron had a laboratory in Lille confirm what their noses already knew. It would take more than a year before they could grow so much as a single bean or raise one single chicken. They worked from dawn to dusk and fell into bed exhausted. All summer, they shovelled out the contaminated soil and raked in the new. In the autumn, they built a large and sturdy chicken coop and burned the wood of the old one on what was surely a sad day for the foxes in the neighbourhood.

  Slowly, the land began to mend its way back to health. Sabine grew radishes and tomatoes, feathery stalks of asparagus, and purple skinned garlic. She came to love the pale pink and white blossoms of the fruit trees in the spring when petals floated on the currents of the air like a thousand butterflies. Sometimes, she walked several miles to a neighbour’s farm with a basket of eggs just so she could see the blaze of scarlet that was his wheat field covered in poppies.

  Despite the long days and the exhausting work, Sabine realized she loved Miron even more than in their halcyon student days—his loping stride, his openhearted smile, his innate goodness. They had forged a life together and she wanted to make it even fuller. She wanted a child.

  A year passed and she felt a flutter of worry that there was no pregnancy, but there was so much to do and the farm seemed knee-deep in yellow chicks that needed to be fed. She was convinced that she could alter fate with the sheer power of her desire, so she kept on trying to conceive a child.

  A second year and the flutter became a permanent crease in her brow. Month by month, slowly and insidiously, her sadness deepened. Why couldn’t she do what every other ordinary woman could do with ridiculous ease? How was it possible to feel such grief over a child that never was? She refused to let Miron see her cry, but her tears were falling nonetheless, salty tears, tinted green for bitterness, falling drop by drop deep inside her, like the slow dripping of a faulty tap, eroding her confidence and turning her dreams to rust.

  Many nights, she would touch Miron’s face in the darkness. She would open his pyjama top and feel his chest with her eyes closed, his muscles and ribs, feel his words as he spoke them, trying to comfort her. She would lie in his arms and try to be grateful for what she already had.

  But the pain grew worse. By the end of the third year, she felt there must be a block of ice inside her womb that not even the fire of her longing could melt. Or perhaps her longing was so great that her womb had become an inferno, a whirl of hot white sparks. She began to turn away from Miron. She was unlovable. She was flawed in some fundamental, profound way. She hated the body that betrayed her. She did not want to abandon herself to him, to float in a sea of sex, only to crash into the jagged rocks that lurked just below the surface of pleasure, reminding her that her body had failed, again and again.

  Slowly, the Sabine that Miron loved began to disappear. She became thinner and she laughed less. She seldom touched him. She often complained of headaches and an indefinable ache in her chest. She left plates and dishes on the table with crusts of bread and bits of fruit, flies gathering on the rims. The chicks she used to love to scoop up in both hands wandered about, unnoticed. Her wavy brown hair grew dull. The wide, intelligent eyes that used to light up when Miron walked into a room seemed to dim. She did not sleep, but wandered the farmhouse at night in a white nightgown that made her seem as insubstantial as a ghost.

  Neither did she seem to notice or care that the world was changing around them. There was nasty trouble brewing in Germany, a lawlessness that portended evil. Synagogues and books were burning, and every Jew in Europe could smell danger in that smoke. Miron read the newspaper aloud to her over a breakfast she didn’t eat. Her expression was unreadable. She didn’t even seem to blink.

  One night as she drifted aimlessly from one room to another in the farmhouse, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror and almost cried aloud at the stranger she saw there, for surely that haggard, haunted face couldn’t be hers? She was shocked by the physical changes her grief had wrought, and slowly raised her hand to the glass to trace the hollows under her eyes and the paleness of her skin.

  She heard Miron approach her but couldn’t look away from her reflection. She saw his face appear beside hers in the mirror and saw, too, the sadness she’d painted upon it by her refusal to love him. He had a dark blue shadow over his jaw and a way of narrowing his eyes that made his gaze intense. He circled his arms around her and in the dark he whispered. “You broke your promise to your father and to me. Come back to me Sabine. I love you, but if I can’t make you happy, just me, I’ll go.”

  He stared at her dark, beautiful mouth. He was going to kiss her. She knew it, and she wanted him to, so much. A truth had been glimpsed, if only for a moment, like a door opening and closing.

  After that night, Sabine let go of her dream. She just let go and felt a lightness she hadn’t experienced in years. It sounded simple and incredible, and probably would not even have been possible without suffering the years rimmed with hurt, but letting go allowed her to breathe deeper, without the stranglehold of an unfulfilled desire. She knew she was letting go of something dear, but Miron had forced her to realize she had risked something even dearer. With Miron by her side, she knew she was strong enough to carry her sorrow with dignity and step back into life.

  The world came back to her in bits and pieces, not in a rush. One pale morning filled with birdsong, she found herself smiling. On another day, her skirt brushed against a clump of lavender, releasing an aroma that filled her with delight. She ate two apples, one after the other, letting the juice run down her chin, thinking she had never tasted anything so good. She baked a cake for Miron, which he declared was delicious, but when she caught him throwing bits of it behind him to the rooster, she laughed out loud.

  Sabine knew she was changed and still changing. Her depression had driven her back into herself, forcing her to examine what was important to her and what was not. She had a will to create, if not a child, then the will to create meaning and purpose in her life. Her tools were her education, her mind and her heart. From these she built her own ethical code, as if she were building a new house to inhabit, viewing the world through its windows. Her faith was in people, and if she could not bear the cruel, the careless, and the powerful, then she would seek out the good and the vulnerable. The important thing was to seize the bright moments and let them guid
e her through the darkness.

  And there could be no doubt that the darkness was gathering. One night, Sabine and Miron went to the movies and saw a newsreel from Berlin that left them shaken: lines of men marching to triumphant music, arms extended in salutes to madness.

  Taking her hand, Miron swore to keep her safe, and for a very long time he kept his word.

  LANDAS TO MONTPELLIER, 1939

  ALL THAT EXHAUSTING WORK to restore the ruined land, slogging shovel after shovel full of fresh soil with blistered hands, all the doubt suffered, wondering whether they would ever succeed, and then, slowly, month by month, watching the green tip of a plant burst through the earth, or hearing the clucking of the first healthy brood of chickens, had all come down to this one unalterable fact: the farm was six kilometres from the Belgian border, behind a Maginot line that was about as effective against a German advance as a strand of chicken wire.

  In July, Sabine and Miron were granted French nationality. Under a murky sky on an overcast September day, war was declared. They would have to leave. It made no difference that the farm had become the leading producer of eggs and poultry in the district, or that Miron had won prizes for his Blue Hollands, White Leghorns, and Red Rhode Islands at the agricultural exposition of 1939. For thousands of years, their Jewish ancestors had known when it was time to uproot, move on, and start again, and so Sabine and Miron stood hand in hand in their garden to say goodbye to their home of ten years.

  The farmhouse was so rooted in Sabine’s heart that even the things that used to annoy her, like the slope of the kitchen floor, or the tap in the bathroom that always leaked a little, or the crack in the upper pane of the bedroom window that Miron was always too busy to fix, now seemed endearing, as familiar to her as her own hands or the curve of her brow. Had she actually complained when the winter wind had rattled the windows? Had she really been so bleary-eyed from lack of sleep one morning that she had stood in the yard and cursed every feather of every chicken she had ever seen?

  “It does no good to cry over things you can’t control,” Miron said stoically, but the last night in Landas, Sabine did just that. She wept for all the birds that had sung to her in the mornings, for the purple spears of lavender whose scent had helped bring her back to life, and for the ghost of the unborn child that had followed in her footsteps as she had wandered the house night after night.

  Then she packed her bags and went to train as a nurse for the Red Cross in a military hospital in Lille, while Miron put the farm up for sale.

  The smell of the hospital, a mix of antiseptic, blood, and burned flesh became for Sabine the smell of war. It clung to her clothes and her hair, and no matter how much she scrubbed she could not eradicate it. Miron had rented a small apartment for them in Lille, and at night she opened all the windows, welcoming in the winter air because she preferred shivering in the cold to feeling the nausea triggered by that pervasive odour of pain and beckoning death. When it inevitably snowed and the water in their taps turned to ice, Miron finally closed all the windows and gave her a bottle of lavender perfume.

  “Here,” he said. “Dab a bit of this under your nose and let me thaw out.”

  Sabine smiled and thanked him and did not tell him that no perfume, even if she bathed in it, could block out the smell of those rows upon rows of broken men who cried out to her day after day.

  She had been at the hospital for several months, when a critically wounded man cried out to her. “Madame,” he pleaded. “I’m dying. I must have the blessing of a priest.”

  Sabine ran for the director, a nun from Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.

  “This man will die before the priest can get here,” the nun said. “We must do the best we can. Are you a good Catholic?”

  “No, Sister. I’m a Jew.”

  Surprise flashed in her eyes, but only for a moment. She traced the sign of the cross on the man’s forehead, and then reached for Sabine’s hand. “Pray with me,” she said. “You say your prayers and I’ll say mine and together we’ll get this poor man into somebody’s heaven.”

  The nun never spoke of Sabine’s heritage again until May of 1940 when the Germans began pushing into France, the Maginot line leaking like a sieve. “My dear, Sabine,” she whispered. “People in Paris are beginning to panic and soon the roads and trains to the South will be overflowing. I hate to lose you, but I fear a dark time for your people. Go. My prayers go with you.”

  The two women embraced and Sabine did not tell her friend that Miron had already bought a small farm in Montpellier and was waiting for her there. They did not need to be told what was coming. But to go with the blessings of a Catholic nun? That much surprised her.

  MONTPELLIER, 1940

  THE FARM IN THE SUBURBS of the city had a pigsty, but no pigs, and a chicken coop with two scrawny and lonely looking chickens that seemed better fit for stewing than for laying eggs.

  “Leave all of this to me,” Miron said, already busy setting up his incubators. “In a few weeks, you won’t recognize the place.”

  There was a great deal that Sabine didn’t recognize. In Montpellier, the air was hot and murky, as if a storm were brewing, and the hot wind carried bits of sand and the smell of the tide. The light was bright yellow and its glare often left her feeling dizzy. At night she dreamed of rain and the drenched fields that had surrounded Landas.

  Thousands had fled to the South hoping to escape the German advance, and there was a sense of unease and tension in the city. Most accommodations were overcrowded and the trains were packed. People of all classes and nationalities were on the move, adrift, bereft, and desperate. When France was inevitably defeated, and the state divided into Occupied and Unoccupied Zones, there was a great sigh of relief that Montpellier would not be ruled or patrolled by Germans. But that relief evaporated as quickly as the summer rain of Sabine’s dreams. The rule of Vichy, headed by the old war hero, Pétain, propped up by leaders of the conservative right wing, smacked of the kind of blind nationalism that Sabine had smelled in Poland and Berlin. Work, Family, Fatherland were code words for collaboration and conservatism. Women were expected to stay home and make babies to replace the fallen soldiers. Foreigners of all backgrounds, Jews especially, were suspect, potential betrayers of the holy state. It was a grand hypocrisy, that morality, but it had to be borne.

  Sabine reported for duty with the Red Cross at Montpellier and was placed at the military hospital of Lauwe. There, with one other nurse, she was responsible for the care of forty men, some French, some Algerians, and some Senegalese, packed into two rooms of twenty beds each. She did her best to keep the men comfortable and keep up their spirits. She was especially fond of the Senegalese, who had lilting, lyrical voices and sometimes kissed her hand when she left for the day.

  Still, the work was discouraging. For several months, she watched the life in these skeletal figures ebb and flow. The lack of medicine meant that many died needlessly. Their weakened state offered little resistance to any infection. Sabine often spoke to Miron about how tragic it was for these men to have escaped the strafing of machine guns, only to be wiped out by gangrene or typhoid in their hospital beds.

  It was almost with relief that she received her letter of dismissal from the hospital’s director, Dr. Meunier. The word Jew did not appear in the letter. Meunier simply said he was obliged to let her go, with regret, but since the only other Jew on staff received the same letter on the same day, the implicit message was clear.

  “What will you do now?” Miron asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s clear no hospital will hire me.”

  “But the Red Cross hasn’t dismissed you. Surely they need you.”

  So Sabine went back to the Red Cross and was directed to the office of the magistrate, or préfecture, of the département of Hérault. A social worker in that office led her into a small meeting room, gestured her to a chair, and shuffled some papers on his desk, studying he
r intently all the while.

  Sabine was suspicious of any form of officialdom, but this fidgeting young man lacked the usual haughty manner of Vichy rule. He couldn’t be more than twenty, she thought, and the steel-rimmed glasses balancing on the end of his pug nose, made him look even younger. He did not seem to be trying to intimidate her; rather, he seemed to be trying to read her character from her face, her clothes, and her demeanour. She stared back at him and decided that if he was going to refuse her employment just because she was Jewish, this time she would force the true reason to be spoken aloud.

  Finally, the young man cleared his throat and leaned toward her. “I am Jean Fridrici. Tell me, Madame Zlatin, have you ever heard of the camp at Agde?”

  “Of course.”

  Everyone who was honest had heard of the camp at Agde. Formerly a camp for Spanish refugees from the Civil War, it now housed refugees from all over Europe, Jews for the most part. But Sabine was a naturalized French Jew, so far untouched by Vichy. Surely this man was not threatening to send her there?

  “And have you also heard of a French Jewish humanitarian organization for the care of children, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants?”

  Now Sabine was truly surprised and could not hide that surprise from her voice. “The OSE? Yes. Oh, please, if I could help the children, I’d be truly grateful.”

  The young man sat up straight and smiled at her. “I’d hoped you’d say that. But you might not thank me. The camp is some fifty kilometres from Montpellier, next to the sea, and a tiresome journey. Conditions at the camp are not pleasant. If you are willing to make the journey, this office has the authority to allow the release of four or five children under the age of ten on each visit. You will have to work with OSE to find placements for them. There are a number of children’s homes, some private families, and some orphanages that will help.”