Anne Frank and Me Page 11

  “It won’t be,” Mimi assured her. “Monique is loathsome. I can assure you, you won’t see her getting skinny, because she wines and dines with the enemy. And her best friend, Simone, is pregnant by one of the Boche.”

  Nicole made a face of disgust. “Now, that is loathsome.”

  “How can André be with her?” Liz-Bette asked.

  Mimi rolled her eyes. “He claims to love her for her pure artistic spirit. Personally, I think it’s because she looks like Hedy Lamarr.”

  Liz-Bette sniffed. “That is very shallow.”

  “But Jacques says André is a hero,” Nicole protested.

  “My twin is supremely juvenile. I don’t know whom he worships more, André or your father.”

  Nicole used her handkerchief to rub out the line on the back of her leg. “It’s more than that. Jacques said that last week André was ordered to pick up some Polish Jews. He went to their apartment and told them he was coming back for them in fifteen minutes, so that they’d have time to get away. And they did.”

  “That’s heroic,” Liz-Bette decreed.

  Mimi shrugged. “Perhaps. But it would be more heroic if he quit the police and refused to work with the wretched Hun pigs altogether.”

  “He’d just be sent to Germany to work for the wretched Hun pigs anyway,” Nicole pointed out.

  Of all the edicts the Nazis had implemented in France, none were as hated by most French people as the STO, the Service du Travail Obligatoire. Under it, the Nazis were now drafting French young men to work on German soil in place of soldiers who were fighting the Allies.

  Mimi recapped the eyebrow pencil. “Some things are worth fighting for, Nicole.”

  Liz-Bette nervously twisted the end of one blond braid. “What if we got taken away on a big bus before André could warn us?”

  Mimi and Nicole traded looks. “That will never happen to a magnificent French beauty like you, Liz-Bette,” Mimi finally said. “There. All done. You are the epitome of Parisian chic.”

  Liz-Bette jumped down and paraded around the room like a runway model while Mimi and Nicole oohed and aahed dramatically. That made Liz-Bette giggle, which made Nicole and Mimi laugh, too. Mme. Bernhardt ran into the living room.

  “What is that noise?” she demanded. Exclamation points of anxiety were etched between her eyes.

  “Nothing, Maman,” Nicole assured her. “We were just laughing.”

  “Nicole, call me the instant your father—”

  The front door opened and Dr. Bernhardt wearily entered the flat. “Papa!” Liz-Bette ran to hug him.

  He kissed the top of her head. “Hello, little one.” He hung up his hat but kept his coat on against the cold.

  “Mimi, I’m afraid I must ask you to leave,” Mme. Bernhardt said. “We have family business to take care of.”

  “But Mimi is practically a member of the family,” Liz-Bette protested. “In fact, why don’t we exchange her for Nicole?”

  “I am in no mood for your foolishness, young lady,” Mme. Bernhardt snapped. “Please forgive my rudeness, Mimi.”

  “It’s all right. I have to leave anyway.” Mimi put on her beret, embraced Nicole, and slipped out the front door.

  As soon as she was gone, Mme. Bernhardt turned to her daughters. “Girls, sit down.” Her tone was so abrupt that Nicole was taken aback.

  “Renée?” Dr. Bernhardt asked.

  “Sit!”

  Nicole and Liz-Bette took seats on the couch. Mme. Bernhardt locked eyes with her husband. “It is about your so-called upstairs office.”

  He paled. “Let the children go to their rooms.”

  “There is no time for them to be children now, you have seen to that.” She pulled something from her apron and held out her hand. Nicole stretched to see what she had. Bullets. Her mother was holding bullets. Mme. Bernhardt forced them into her husband’s hand. “You use bullets now for medical writing?” She extracted something else from her pocket—it looked to Nicole like a clock, except that there were wires extending from it. “And this? A timer for a bomb?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Bernhardt said.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Mme. Bernhardt smashed the timer to the floor, where it shattered into a million pieces.

  “I didn’t want you to worry, Renée.”

  Mme. Bernhardt laughed bitterly. “Why should I worry? Just because you are making bombs over the heads of our children?”

  “Renée, please—”

  “Just because you have taken the one place, the only place that these children can feel safe, and you have turned it into a bomb factory?”

  “Perhaps I should have told you sooner—”

  “Perhaps?”

  “Yes. You are right,” Dr. Bernhardt agreed. “Every single day I planned to tell you. But I kept putting it off.” He removed his glasses, put them in his pocket, then looked at his wife again. “I work in the Resistance, Renée. With Solidarity.”

  Nicole gasped as all the color drained from her mother’s face. “Jean, Solidarity? They are Reds. Communists!”

  “Not all of them. I am not. It’s very important work—”

  “Important enough to risk your children’s lives?”

  “I have to do this, Renée—”

  “Do you? You foolish man!” Nicole’s stomach lurched. She had never, ever heard her mother speak this way to their father. “A scrawny band of underfed Jews and Communists trying to defeat Hitler? He crushed the entire French army in five weeks, Jean. Five weeks!”

  “I cannot lie down and die. I won’t.”

  “So you make bombs?” Mme. Bernhardt’s tone was scathing. “And what happens when your bombs go off and kill some Nazis, eh? There are reprisals. You see the posters. For every Nazi you kill, they will shoot one hundred Jews.”

  “They will shoot one hundred Jews anyway, Renée. And one hundred more, and one hundred more, until there are no more Jews—”

  “Foreign Jews! They are taking only foreign Jews.”

  Dr. Bernhardt looked at his wife with more sadness than anger. “You do not mean this, Renée.”

  She set her chin defiantly. “I do mean it. We are French. They will not take French Jews who do not bother them.”

  “Renée, listen to me—”

  “No. I will not listen. Do you realize how foolish you are? By night you shoot Nazis. By day you are a doctor for a Jewish hospital where the Nazis find Jews to shoot in reprisal for who you shot the night before.” Mme. Bernhardt threw her hands in the air. “Do you not see the lunacy of this?”

  Nicole watched her father’s shoulders sag. For a long moment, he didn’t speak. Then, finally, he said, “In a war, many things happen which do not make perfect sense, Renée. Perhaps I am foolish. But I must do it. Please try to understand—”

  “No. What I care about is my family,” she declared. “And surviving. Surviving!”

  “It’s going to get worse, Renée. We can’t just—”

  “We can,” she insisted. “My family has lived in Paris for four generations. My father was wounded at Verdun in ‘17. You are a famous doctor. We are French. And if we are careful, we can survive until the Allies come.”

  Nicole had never seen her father look as sad as he did at that moment, when he tenderly touched her mother’s cheek. “My darling wife. I wish it were so simple. But it is not.” He turned to his daughters. “You must listen carefully to what I am about to say. We may have to go into hiding.”

  Liz-Bette shook her head violently, as if she could will it not to be true. Something tickled the edge of Nicole’s mind. What was it? Something that someone had said about her father. But who? And where? Yes! She had it. It was that Gestapo inspector, the one she’d met at the UGIF home. He had said it would be a terrible idea if Dr. Bernhardt were to disappear. And now—

  “If we must go into hiding, we must make everyone believe we have been deported,” her father continued.

  Nicole was startled. “Even Jacques and Mimi?”

  Her father hes
itated. “Invite Jacques to my office at the hospital. They may be the ones to help us, if they are willing. But they must never know that I am with Solidarity. No one must know. Do you understand, Liz-Bette?”

  Liz-Bette nodded, her lower lip trembling. Nicole was still desperately trying to reconstruct the conversation at the UGIF home. Hadn’t the inspector said something about their friends, some kind of threat? Oh, God. Did the lousy Hun already suspect that her father might be in the underground? Was he having their flat watched even now? If they were to disappear, what might he do to Jacques and Mimi?

  “All of you, listen to me,” her mother commanded. “Stop this nonsense. We are not hiding like rats in a sewer. It is out of the question.”

  Dr. Bernhardt met her gaze. “We will do what we have to do. Now, if my unit gets word to me that I have been denounced, or if I am taken—”

  “This is insane, Jean,” Mme. Bernhardt cried. “For God’s sake, all you have to do is stop!”

  “That I cannot do.”

  “Even if it means your life?”

  Nicole felt as if she could choke on the silence, waiting for her father’s answer. He said nothing, which was the most painful answer of all.

  “I don’t want to live without you,” her mother told him.

  Her father—or someone who looked like her father—pointed to the front door. “If someone should come and say this code word—Nightbird—the code word is Nightbird. Repeat it.” He looked sharply at his daughters.

  “Nightbird,” Nicole and Liz-Bette repeated.

  “If that should happen, you must leave here instantly You will walk to seventeen, rue Saint Andre des Arts in the sixth district, near the Saint-Michel metro—”

  “No, Papa!” Liz-Bette ran to him.

  He held her away from him roughly, so he could see her face. “Repeat the address for me.”

  “You’re scaring me, Papa.”

  “Repeat the address. Now!”

  Nicole joined Liz-Bette and linked arms with her sister. “It’s all right, Liz-Bette. Say the address with me. Seventeen—”

  “Rue Saint André des Arts,” Liz-Bette joined in softly.

  “You will see a man named Luçon,” Dr. Bernhardt instructed. “Say his name.”

  “Luçon.”

  Dr. Bernhardt turned to his wife. She was at the window, gazing into the Paris night. “Please, Renée,” he said quietly. “I am begging you. Seventeen ... seventeen...”

  Nicole held her breath. Finally, her mother’s lips moved, in the softest whisper. “Seventeen, rue Saint André des Arts.”

  Relief flooded her father’s face. “Luçon.”

  “Luçon.”

  “He will arrange for your hiding. If I can, I will join you there. You children must memorize the address, in case you are separated from your mother. You will leave immediately. Wear as many layers of clothes as you can. Do not wear the star. Do not carry anything. Make sure you are not followed. Do not tell anyone where you are going—”

  Liz-Bette looked up at the stranger who now inhabited her father’s body. “I don’t want to leave you, Papa.”

  He looked down at her. And finally, it was her beloved father who answered. “I don’t want to leave you, either, little one.”

  Mme. Bernhardt came to her husband. “If we live through this, Jean, I will be mad at you for the rest of our lives.”

  Dr. Bernhardt smiled sadly. “When we live through this, Renée, I won’t blame you.” With one arm wrapped around Liz-Bette, he held the other out to his wife. She embraced him. Nicole put her arms around all of them.

  There was nothing more to say.

  twenty-two

  NOTES FROM GIRL X

  20 April 1943

  To the people of Paris,

  Happy birthday to me. This is quite a boring way for Girl X to spend her sixteenth birthday, don’t you think? For it is the exact same way she spent the day before and the day before that and the day before that. At least J and M have promised to bring birthday presents when they come over later. In any case, here is how one Jewish girl whose parents will no longer send her to school uses her time:

  9:00 A.M. Wake up after sleeping as long as possible. The warmest place in our apartment is my bed, and when I am sleeping I can dream of food.

  9:20 A.M. Breakfast. Today, Viandox, that horrid substitute for coffee. Dried bread from yesterday.

  10:00 A.M.-1:00 P.M. Studies with Maman. History, English, mathematics, literature, science, and sociology. I dread mathematics. Maman is a mathematics wizard and loves to torture me. What use could I possibly ever have for all these equations? English is enjoyable because Maman never learned it so we are all studying together. LB picks it up fastest. The only good thing about not going to school is that I do not have to study German.

  1:00 P.M.-1:30 P.M. Midday meal. Today: rutabaga. Yesterday: rutabaga. The day before yesterday: surprise! Rutabaga and vermicelli.

  1:30 P.M.—2:45 P.M. Jewish studies.

  2:45 P.M.-4:00 P.M. Maman shops with our ration cards. Usually this is when I write these notes. Sometimes LB and I play chess. I like the game very much. You use your wits to play at war, but no one gets deported or killed.

  4:00 P.M.—5:00 P.M. J and M come to visit. Bliss! Especially when M leaves so J and I can be alone. The minutes are crawling by right now as I wait for him. Lately I’ve been longing for more than just kisses. Our love is eternal, so how can it be wrong for us to allow a physical expression of it? Why must it be “You can touch this part of my body, but that part is forbidden”? Who makes such ridiculous rules? Maman is so old fashioned about these things. Here is what she told me about why I should remain a virgin: “If there are two identical sweaters in a shop window, and one is perfect and untouched, but the other is wrinkly and used, which sweater would you buy?”

  LB was eavesdropping and she blurted out, “N is not a sweater!” I loved her very much at that moment.

  5:00 P.M.-7:00 P.M. Two hours spent missing and waiting for Papa to come home. Sometimes he does, sometimes he does not. I do not want to say more.

  7:00 P.M.—8:00 P.M. Dinner. Tonight will be a birthday feast! Roast potatoes, carrots, and some dandelion greens that Maman was able to secure on the black market.

  8:00 P.M. Forbidden radio, volume very low, if the electricity is operating, if the Boche are not jamming the BBC, and if our idiot concierge is not poking around our building looking for someone to denounce. In case you do not have a radio, the BBC reported that the Russians have retaken quite a bit of territory, and that American planes bombed Bremen. Sixteen B-17s were lost.

  8:30 P.M. Bed. I am never sleepy but the warmth of my bed calls to me so I bring a book or my journal and—

  Hold on. I’ll be back. J and M are here!

  Hello, I’m back. I had such a wonderful time. M brought me a record of the Andrews Sisters, very jazzy. brought me a new journal he found on the black market. It is so beautiful, with a thick leather cover and paper so creamy that you can practically taste it. Do you see why I love J so? If I close my eyes, I can still feel his lips on mine, my body pressed to his. Tonight I felt so passionately in love with him that I thought I would die with desire. He whispered in my ear that he wanted to make love to me. It is the first time he said the words.

  Love is freedom. It is something the Boche can never take from me.

  twenty-three

  NOTES FROM GIRL X

  10 September 1943

  To the people of Paris,

  Dear reader, if you are reading this and are not a collabo idiot, please put this under the door of someone who is. Thank you.

  Hello, Collabo Idiot! I am a Jewish girl forbidden now by my parents to leave our home, but still you cannot silence my voice. I hear there are wanted posters plastered everywhere, seeking the culprit who threw a grenade into the headquarters of your collabo friend Jacques Doriot’s PPF party and wounded fifteen people. They have already shot many innocents in reprisal and say they will randomly kill more ea
ch day until the culprit is apprehended. Does that fill you with joy? I also hear there is V for-victory graffiti everywhere, even on the wanted posters. Here is one more for good measure!

  Hear me, Collabo Idiot. Your Boche masters have lost their ally Italy. The Allied invasion of Europe will come. You will not win. Yes, you denounce Jews in exchange for extra rations. Yes, you eat while we starve. Yes, you laugh in the sun while we cower in the shadows. But not forever. The righteous shall triumph. Long live France!

  twenty-four

  31 December 1943

  Maman?“ Nicole asked. ”Are you awake? I brought you some leek soup.“ She set the soup on the night table by her parents’ bed. Other than a few detestable rutabaga, those leeks were the last food left in the flat, and they had no more ration coupons. Tomorrow was New Year’s; that meant the shops would be closed. Unless her father brought home food from the hospital—an unlikely possibility—they would be living on air for the next thirty-six hours.

  At least the Rothschild Hospital was still permitted to function, Nicole thought. But that was only so that sick and injured Jews wouldn’t have to be brought to other hospitals.

  “Maman?” Nicole whispered again. Her mother’s eyes barely opened. She, who never got sick, had been ill for days. Dr. Bernhardt had assured them it was influenza and not tuberculosis. But so far as Nicole could tell, her mother didn’t seem to be improving.

  “I made soup for you. I’ll fix the pillows so you can sit up and eat,” Nicole offered.

  “I am not hungry.”

  “But you must eat. Papa says—”

  “Yes, I am well aware of what Papa says. You girls quote him so much you would think he was Maimonides.”

  Nicole grinned. That remark had sounded like Maman’s normal self. “Maimonides was also a doctor, you know. Papa and I have been studying The Guide for the Perplexed.”