She stopped at a small café in the first village on the way back, and asked for a cup of tea. It was cold and she was shivering, and the woman who served her let her have it for free when Gaëlle said she’d had the flu, and then she casually asked the woman about the camp, which was why she had stopped there, hoping for news more than tea.
“What happened to all the people at the detention camp?” she asked innocently, and the woman frowned at her immediately.
“You shouldn’t ask about that,” she said in a whisper. “They’re just Jews. They sent them away. They deported them last week. I hear they’ve started sending some of them to labor camps in the east. They’re deporting them from Paris too. Good riddance. All they’ve done is bring trouble down on us. I’m glad they’re gone. I hear they’re bringing in more soon, but they won’t keep them here long anymore. They put them on trains and shipped them out. I don’t know why they put that camp here anyway. There are too many of them, and they breed disease.” She walked away then when a soldier sauntered in and ordered a beer, and a minute later Gaëlle got up and thanked her, put her empty cup on the bar, and rode away.
She cried all the way home that day, and when she got back to her room, she opened the drawer and took out the little wisp of blue ribbon from the one she’d given Rebekah the summer before. It was all she had left of her, just that tiny shred of satin, the same color as her eyes. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she put it away in the drawer, and she prayed that her friend was safe, and they would find each other again one day. She didn’t know it, but it was a defining moment that would forever change her life.
Chapter 3
The days after the Feldmanns and the others disappeared from the detention camp were a blur. Gaëlle feigned a relapse of the flu, and stayed in bed for another week, where she thought of Rebekah day and night, continued to pray for her safety, and cried herself to sleep. She looked as though she’d been sick for a year by the time she got out of bed. And her mother was no better. She had developed terrible migraine headaches, and rarely got up anymore. She couldn’t cope with the collapse of her world as she knew it. She was terrified of the Germans, and everything she heard from Apolline, their housekeeper, when she brought her meals.
At her father’s insistence, Gaëlle went back to school. She had to prepare for her baccalaureate exam in June, but there seemed to be no point to it, since he wouldn’t let her go to university. And her brother Thomas said it was all different now anyway. Many of the professors, who had been Jewish, had disappeared and been sent away, along with the masses of Jews who were being picked up in all the cities and deported. They didn’t stay long in the detention camps anymore and were being sent to labor camps in Germany and the east. And all of the Jewish students had long since been removed from Gaëlle’s school as well. Only Christians were allowed to attend school. Jewish shops and businesses were closed, as their owners vanished. There was no pharmacy in their village now, and Gaëlle had to ride a long way to get medicine for her mother’s headaches, and the only remedies she could find for her were the old natural ones, which didn’t work anyway. Her mother was in pain all the time, and grew weak and pale from never going out. The doctor who came to see her said it was her nerves.
The commanding officer who had taken over the château offered to have her seen by one of the German doctors who was in the area to tend to their men, but Gaëlle’s father had refused. He wouldn’t let a German doctor touch her, no matter how obliging and seemingly well intentioned the commanding officer was. When he asked Gaëlle about her mother, she barely answered and scurried upstairs whenever he spoke to her. He left sweets and chocolates for them occasionally, and her mother said they only made her headache worse. Gaëlle couldn’t swallow them, remembering what had happened to Rebekah and her family. There had been no news of them, and Gaëlle didn’t expect to hear from her, and just hoped that they were all alive and well, and maybe even in a better place than the overcrowded detention camp where they had spent fifteen awful months, but she missed visiting her.
Gaëlle thought of her constantly and hoped to see her again soon, or hear where she’d gone. She passed her exams in June, and got decent grades, and in August Thomas came home for a visit, and told them tales of deportations in Paris, and horrific stories of some instances where they only took children. And the deportees were paraded through the streets, being marched to the railway stations with soldiers guarding them, as they dragged their belongings with them, and the men were frequently shot if they said anything impertinent to the soldiers, or tried to protect their wives and children. It made Gaëlle cry as she listened.
Thomas was relieved to see his friends again, and to be home for a few weeks. Like his parents and sister, he stayed out of the way of the soldiers, and sneaked out at night, despite warnings not to, to drink with his friends after curfew, and visit an old girlfriend of his in a nearby village. His father had cautioned him to be careful. No one could be trusted anymore, and the soldiers got rowdy at night and tormented the locals. But Thomas said he was used to it, and dealt with it all the time in Paris. They had all learned to live below the radar, and pass unnoticed. Gaëlle did that herself, keeping her eyes down, and going to her room in the attic whenever she came back to the château after doing errands for her parents. She was a quiet, good girl, and never caused them any trouble. And they still had no idea that she had spent fifteen months visiting Rebekah at the detention camp, and would have been horrified if they knew, but nothing bad had ever happened to her. The villages were still less dangerous than the cities, as long as one wasn’t a Jew. And her father made no trouble for the commanding officer either, and kept out of the way, always somewhere on the estate until after dark, helping the farmers and making sure the produce they grew was given to the Germans. He occasionally sneaked some fruit or lettuce or vegetables, and potatoes, which he took directly to their rooms upstairs, and they ate it as quickly as possible, so there was no evidence of what he’d stolen.