Small Acts of Defiance by Michelle Wright

Author:Michelle Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

1942

19

THE NEW YEAR brought freezing temperatures and heavy snow that stuck to the pavements and turned them slick with ice. Despite her regular visits to the police in the weeks since his arrest, Simone had received no further news of Samuel. Through his former colleagues, she learned that over seven hundred men had been arrested. They’d been taken to the École Militaire, not far from the Eiffel Tower, at the end of the Champ de Mars. They’d spent only a short time there before being put onto trains heading north.

In the first days of January, news finally arrived in the form of a printed card stating that Samuel was being held in a camp called Royallieu, just outside of Compiègne, about eighty kilometers from Paris. There was no indication of how long he’d be detained. The director at the Rothschild Hospital had heard that many of the men were ill and some had died. Cases of typhus were widespread and the older men especially were not coping with the cold and filth, the lack of adequate food. Several of Simone’s colleagues were in the same situation as her. Their husbands, fathers, brothers—doctors, professors, lawyers, intellectuals, journalists—had been rounded up on the same day. When Simone and her colleagues found themselves together in an empty corridor of the hospital or in the silence of a stairwell, their whispered exchanges were almost always the same.

“Any news?”

“None. And you?”

In the absence of facts, they traded in rumors, fears, unfounded optimism. Those who were unaffected personally by the disappearances did their best to support their colleagues in any way they could. At lunch, a fellow doctor gave Simone the small quantity of coffee she’d managed to buy and insisted she keep it for herself. A nurse gave her honey from her parents’ beehives. When Simone spoke with Aline and Lucie she admitted that though she was grateful for their gestures, her colleagues’ pity only made her fear the worst for Samuel.

* * *

Despite the cold, Lucie tried to get out for a walk most afternoons, but spent the rest of her days in her room illustrating tracts. She only went downstairs to the main apartment when it was time to help Yvonne prepare dinner.

On the first Saturday of February, when she returned from queuing at the bakery for their daily ration of bread, Aline was waiting outside the door to her room. Once they were inside, she asked Lucie if she’d heard the latest news.

“No,” Lucie replied. “What’s happened?”

“The curfew for Jewish people has been tightened. We’re not allowed out between eight at night and six in the morning.”

“You can’t keep coming here in the evening then,” said Lucie. “It’s too dangerous for you.”

“It’s no more dangerous now than it’s always been,” said Aline. “Why would I stop?”

“Because they could arrest you.”

“They can arrest me whenever they want,” Aline replied.

Lucie knew her friend was right, yet she worried about the risks she was taking. “I’m just scared for you,” she said. “Especially given your involvement with Robert.

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