“May I show them to you?” Gaëlle asked politely, and the woman nodded, looking slightly less impatient, and suddenly intrigued. Paris had been liberated eight weeks before, and it was just possible the story might be true. Gaëlle carefully unwrapped one of the small Renoirs and laid it delicately on the desk as the older woman stared at it in disbelief. The second one was a Degas. The third a Monet. And then she picked up the phone and asked someone else to come in. He arrived a few minutes later. They were all there, all forty-nine paintings, just as Gaëlle had tried to explain. The woman turned to Gaëlle in amazement, as the man examined the paintings. He was one of their experts on forgeries, and he was staring at what she’d brought in astonishment.
“They’re all real. There’s no question of it,” he said, and the older woman turned to Gaëlle again.
“Do you know anything about the provenance? Where they came from? Who owned them? Who the Germans took them from?”
“No, I don’t,” Gaëlle said honestly. “All I know is that these two German officers wanted to stop them from being sent to Germany. Other officers had stolen them from museums, and maybe from Jewish families, I don’t know, and the commanding officer asked me to bring them to you after the war ended. He smuggled them to me, in loaves of bread. I hid them, and now I’ve brought them to you, as I promised I would.” She gave her the name of the commandant and explained that he and his officers had taken over her family’s château during the Occupation.
“Was he a friend of yours?” the female curator asked, looking for an explanation for the short hair that no French woman would have wanted to wear by choice.
“No, just the commanding officer for our district. I was very surprised when he asked me to do it,” she said simply. She had nothing to hide.
The woman had another thought then, still suspicious of how forty-nine extraordinary paintings had wound up in their hands, delivered by a young girl out of three suitcases. “Are you trying to sell them to us?” Maybe it was a scam of some kind. And Gaëlle looked shocked.
“Of course not. I’m returning them to you. I don’t know who they came from originally, but he said you would.”
“I’m not sure we do. But eventually we can find out. Would you give us your name too?” she asked, more pleasantly than she had before. By some extraordinary stroke of luck, this was legitimate, and the girl had brought masterpieces to the Louvre that a German officer had prevented from being taken out of France. It was a miracle.
“Certainly.” Gaëlle wrote her name down, and the name of her hotel, and her address at the château. “I don’t know where I’ll be. Both of my parents died, and my brother, and I came to Paris to find a job. I don’t know how long I’ll be at the hotel, but you can write to me at home, if you want to. Eventually they’ll send it to me.” She could ask the farmer to forward her mail once she had a permanent address. But she wasn’t expecting to hear from anyone.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” the woman said, shaking her hand. “These are very unusual circumstances.”
“Most things are, in a war,” Gaëlle said quietly. “I’m just glad you got them back.”
“That was very honorable of the two officers, and of you to bring them to us.” She could have sold them just as easily. Gaëlle nodded. She couldn’t imagine doing other than what she’d promised the commandant. And then the woman thought of something else, and wrote a name and address down on a card.
“What’s that?” Gaëlle asked when she looked at what she’d written.
“Maybe a job,” she said, and smiled at her. She had children Gaëlle’s age, and the poor thing looked so lost and was so young, and after Gaëlle was gone, she turned to the girl at the desk. “The next time someone shows up and tells you they have forty-nine masterpieces in a suitcase, don’t try to get rid of the person. Call me immediately.” Her voice was tart as she said it.
“Of course,” the girl said nervously. But who could have ever dreamed they were real and it would turn out like this? And Gaëlle was smiling when she left. She thought the commandant would be pleased. It had gone well. The paintings were back where they belonged, in a museum, and she hoped the others, from private homes and families, would be returned soon.
—
After the Louvre, Gaëlle went to another address she had gotten from her hotel that morning. It was the Red Cross office. The office was crowded with people when she walked in, all trying to locate relatives in Europe. She had to wait two hours to see someone, but other than the paintings, this was the most important thing she had to do. She had waited two and a half years for this, and she wanted answers now.
She explained to the woman who met with her who she was trying to trace. She gave her the names of the entire Feldmann family, the date when they had been first sent to the camp, and when they had been deported to Germany, or somewhere else.
The woman made careful notes and looked at Gaëlle sympathetically, and spoke to her in a kind voice.
“You realize, don’t you, that it’s possible that none of the Feldmanns are still alive. Very few people survived the camps. If we’re lucky, we may find one or two of them, but we may not.” The camps had been liberated one by one in recent weeks, since the first camp at Majdanek was liberated by the Soviets in July, and the stories about them were shocking, inhumane, and upsetting beyond belief. The photographs Gaëlle had seen of them and the ravaged survivors made her cry each time they liberated another camp.