The Spiral Shell by Sandell Morse

Author:Sandell Morse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schaffner Press, Inc.
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

On the other side of the Place de la Bridolle, the white wooden door of la colonie shone beneath a street lamp. Was that the door? Or was it the door around the corner on rue de la République? Did he come in the day or in the night, Amédée Duhaut, the friendly gendarme who warned of roundups? No German soldiers bivouacked in this village. They were in Brive, coming only when they were off duty to stroll the quiet streets, or on duty to make arrests. Before a roundup, they sent their paperwork on ahead, and French police made the arrests. Why did Duhaut take on this task? He was not from this village, Monsieur Le Hech had told me earlier. He had no relatives here. This was his wartime posting. After the war, he left as inconspicuously as he’d arrived. Yet, on days when he saw those orders, Duhaut slipped away from the gendarmerie and walked the quiet streets of Beaulieu sur Dordogne to la colonie. He knocked. Sitting at this window, I pictured him, a man of average height, wearing a blue uniform, his badge glinting, his step slow and steady. Madame Gordin answered the door. “You must go away,” Duhaut said. “The Germans will come.”

In those days of German occupation, anti-Semitic propaganda filled the airwaves, and in newspapers cartoons depicted Jews as short, bulbous men with claw-like fingers, thick lips, and droopy ears. Printed flyers featured French priests dressed in their robes and collars calling Jews Christ-killers. Yet here in Beaulieu sur Dordogne, Jewish children and their caretakers lived among the villagers. “Tout le monde knew this was a Jewish house,” Monsieur Le Hech had said. Everyone knew.

I thought of Germaine riding her bicycle to Brive and bringing meat to Josette, her sister. The butcher liked her, she’d said to me, and he gave her extra meat. On a road between Beaulieu sur Dordogne and Brive, a gendarme asked for her papers. He read her last name, Rousso, an Italian name. He accused Germaine of being a spy and arrested her. Madame Gordin arrived at the gendarmerie. “She is a chieftain with the Scouts,” Madame said. “She takes care of children.” Germaine went free. The only time police had arrested her, she had been mistaken for an Italian spy — not a Jew.

I imagined the villagers walking to prayer all those years ago. A priest would have been standing outside the opened, massive door of the Abbey of Saint Peter, welcoming his parishioners with la colonie in plain view. Had this priest preached a Catholicism similar to the type Archbishop Jules Gerard Saliège preached in Toulouse? Saliège had read a pastoral letter to all Catholics, proclaiming: “The Jews are men; the Jewesses are women. The foreigners are men and women. One may not do anything one wishes to these men, to these women, to these fathers and mothers. They are part of the human race; they are our brothers, like so many others. A Christian cannot forget this.

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