Chapters 33-34 Summary
Paris, 1942
For ten minutes after the doctor left, Jules and Geneviève move about the house frantically, the girl following behind them “like a worried puppy.” They finally decide they must keep Rachel where she is, and Geneviève collapses into a chair and cries as Jules attempts to comfort her. The girl is afraid because Jules explains that she must be prepared to crawl into one of the large potato sacks in the cellar and become invisible. Just as she realizes what this means—that the Germans are coming—the dog begins to bark and Jules signals her to go to the cellar. In hiding, she hears the pounding feet and recognizes the sound from her time in Paris. The Germans have come to take her and Rachel.
Above her, she hears the men asking about Rachel and then hears her friend’s “thin scream” from the top floor as they take her out of the house. Now she sees a light in the cellar. Jules and Geneviève are still pleading for Rachel’s life and assure them that she arrived here alone. Hidden in the potato sack, the girl swears she will never let them take her. The officer says they must search the rest of the house and then the old couple will have to follow the soldiers to the Kommandantur. Jules is stunned, but the soldier reminds him they were hiding a Jew in their house and they should not be surprised at being questioned. In a reasonable voice, Geneviève tells them they were not hiding anyone, reminding him that Rachel was in plain sight. They felt the need to help a little girl, Jewish or not, and they sent for a doctor—a very public action. There was no hiding involved, and the soldier agrees.
The search in the cellar continues, and potatoes are being moved all around the girl until Geneviève offers the men some wine and paté and they begin to enjoy the unexpected feast. The girl waits until the house is silent, and then she wonders if the old couple was taken with Rachel. Eventually she hears stifled sobs and the cellar door opens; Jules calls her quietly to come back upstairs. Geneviève has been crushed by the knowledge of what will happen to Rachel, and it has broken her. The girl is frightened again. The woman clasps the young hands in her own weathered ones and tells her how brave she had been. The girl smiles, a “beautiful, courageous” smile which touches the hearts of the old couple. She tells them her name is no longer Sirka, for that was her baby name. Now she squares her shoulders and lifts her chin and tells them her name is Sarah Starzynski.
Paris, 2002
After checking on the progress of their apartment, Julia walks just down the street and sees the plaque commemorating the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup. She knows Sarah must have started her journey from this place nearly sixty years ago. If she is still alive she would be seventy, but Julia is sure she could not have survived the horrors of those tragic events. This morning she and Guillaume visit Drancy, the final deportation camp for the children of the roundup and from which more than sixty trains left for Poland.
They have an appointment with the curator of the tiny museum, and they look at maps, photographs, and artifacts from the camp. Julia sees the yellow stars for the first time, enclosed behind glass. It is unfathomable to her, but people are obviously living in the camp. It is a huge U-shaped concrete building, modern for...
(This entire section contains 1101 words.)
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the 1930s, which now houses four hundred families in tiny apartments. Guillaume is obviously moved, as this is the site from which his entire family had been deported. Julia asks the curator if these people know the history of the place in which they are now living. Sadly, he says, they are mostly young and they neither know nor care. As they leave the camp, Julia can only think about the four thousand children who arrived here in 1942, “parentless, stinking, sick, and ravenous.” She wonders if a terrified and lonely Sarah had been here and if she had left in a wagon full of strangers bound for certain death.
Now Julia picks up Bamber for their afternoon appointment, and he is quick to see the anguish on her face even behind her sunglasses. Her conversation with Bertrand last night had been more horrible than she had anticipated. For him there was no baby; it was just a seed, a nothing, and he did not want it. As he talked, his voice cracked and he seemed old. If she decided to keep it, he told her, that would be the end of their marriage. All she could do was stare at him, appalled, as he talked about turning fifty and being horribly dissatisfied with the face he sees in the mirror. He refuses to be seventy years old with a child who is twenty, and he tells her many times that he cannot and will not have this child. He is adamant: if she has it, it will “kill him.”
She tells Bamber nothing of this, but he offers to listen if she needs him. As she drives, Julia knows she has to talk to someone soon. She misses her sister, Charla, but it is too early there to call her. She is so distracted she misses her exit. This camp is nearly deserted. It is a “sad, empty place.” It was situated in a place where everyone who was deported had to walk through town to get to the train station. The people there had to have known, had to have seen the groups of people trudging past their windows and doorstops. Perhaps some of them were still living and remembered.
Ironically, the train station is now a day-care center. As she and Bamber stop to look, a young woman steps out to ask if they need help. Julia explains her reason for being there and asks if the woman knows anything about the internment camp. She does not, despite the commemorative plaque above the door which relates what happened here and asks each reader to “never forget.” The young woman shrugs and smiles apologetically, saying neither she nor anyone else she knows ever even noticed the plaque before now. Julia looks at the rails hidden beneath the overgrown weeds and grass and finds it difficult to breathe. On these tracks, Sarah Starzynski’s parents had been taken away to die.
