The Secret of the Blue Trunk by Lise Dion

Author:Lise Dion [Dion, Lise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2013-02-16T05:00:00+00:00

Simone

As soon as we arrived at the camp, I realized she had unbelievable strength of character. She glared at the Germans in a way that would have made the most hardened of torturers quake in his boots. At the same time she was the embodiment of goodness, never indifferent to the fate of others. She shouldered the responsibility for our four stomachs. All day long, the only thing on her mind was our dietary survival and she would try to find small compensations to make our everyday life a little more pleasant.

Once, she managed to steal some pieces of cardboard from the kitchen, which she hid under her dress, one at a time. She then put them under our straw mattress to block the damp rising from the concrete.

Born in Trois-Rivières, Simone married a Breton, Léon Bocage. He was her Léon, as she used to say to us.

Léon had met Simone, a friend of his sister-in-law, on a trip to Montreal, where he had gone to visit his brother, Paul. The two Bocage brothers had inherited the family patisserie, in the village of Hédé, twenty-four kilometres from Rennes, in Brittany. Paul decided to let his brother have the business and settled in North America.

Simone was twenty-five when she met Léon. He was twenty-nine. In a few days, they became inseparable. Being single, unattached, she dropped everything to follow him to Europe.

They got married, and were working together in the family patisserie when they were arrested. Léon closed the shop on the day of his arrest. The Germans were aware of his reputation as a pastry cook and forced him to come and work in the kitchens of the German army’s headquarters in Rennes. Léon suspected that sooner or later Simone, still a Canadian citizen and therefore a British subject, was going to be arrested, too. The couple knew a lot about the war, thanks to all the customers who came into their shop. Before he left, Léon made Simone swear she would try everything to survive this war, and he promised he would do the same.

I could understand why Léon loved Simone because, since I met her, Simone had been my rock. I was in great need of her kindness and resourcefulness. I felt safe with her. She had become my older sister. I always sought her approval before carrying out anything at all. With her sense of humour she was often able to make the day’s events seem less alarming.

It took an awfully long while, though, before we could laugh again. The first few times we managed to smile were mainly Simone’s doing. To make fun of the soldiers, she would call them “those nice guys.” She had even come up with a code to warn of impending danger. Being a pastry cook, she decided that “charlotte russe” would be a really good password to alert us. But two words, that was much too long, and we unanimously chose “charlotte.”

Nearly every mattress had its code, in fact. As soon

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