Vénissieux Camp
August 28, 1942
Fajgla Baumel was about to take a walk outside around the barracks with her son, Jean, when Raquel, one of the social workers, approached. Fajgla had heard what was going on. The social workers were taking children to the mess hall after the mothers signed paperwork rescinding their parental rights. Fajgla had arrived with a group of families from Saint-Sauveur-de-Montagut, and all the mothers from that group had stuck together to help one another.
“You already know what I’m coming to ask you?” Raquel asked.
Fajgla took a deep breath and dropped her head. She closed her eyes and wished the presence of the social worker away, as if the woman were a bad dream.
But Raquel was still there, and she went on. “We have to take the children for their own safety. We don’t know what the Nazis are capable of doing to them.”
“So then if you don’t know, why do you want to separate us from our children? They’re all we have left. First the government took our livelihood, since we’re just animals to them. Then we had to leave everything and flee to a foreign country, where we’ve been treated like a plague. When we thought things might get better, the Nazis came to France and took our husbands away. Now they’ve taken our freedom, and all that’s left are our children. If you take them, we’ll have nothing—my soul goes with my son.”
“We’re not taking them from you. You’ll have to sign Jean over voluntarily. It will just be for a time, until you can return for him. Then we’ll reunite all the parents who return with their children.”
Fajgla snorted. “Return? I don’t see that happening for any of us. I’ve got family in Poland. They’ve told me what’s going on with Jews up there. They’re worked to death and those that can’t work are just . . .” Fajgla swallowed.
Raquel looked at the child playing nearby. There was hardly any light in the barracks. Even though it was still daytime, the sky was dark with threatening clouds. It was fitting that the sun refused to shine on a grim day like that.
“So that’s even more reason for you to allow your son a chance to survive, don’t you think?”
“Survive? What for? Is a world like this worth living in?”
Raquel did not know how to respond. She had been trained on how to speak with the mothers, but she herself wondered the same thing every night when she returned home. The Nazis had stolen much more than people’s freedom—they had taken all their hope.
“Sometimes we must hold on to whatever life offers us, no matter how small. Every day that your son lives, he’s one day closer to surviving the war and this monstrous regime.”
Raquel’s words did little to comfort Fajgla, but the mother knew that the social worker was right. Taking Jean with her on the train would be condemning him to death. She could not do that.
Fajgla took the paperwork, filled it out, and signed without even reading carefully.
Raquel put it in her folder and asked, “Do you want to say goodbye to Jean?”
Tears were pouring out of Fajgla’s dark eyes and spilling down her face, but she shook her head.
“I can’t. I don’t want him to see me like this. I don’t want this to be the way he remembers me.”
“I understand,” Raquel said.
She took Jean by the hand, and he followed her willingly. When the boy turned back to look at his mother, Fajgla had stepped back into the shadows.
Once she left Jean in the mess hall, Raquel broke down in tears. Jean was the fourth child she had led away from their mother. Her sense of guilt grew by the moment. She knew that she was saving lives, but she was destroying others in the process.
* * *
Georges Garel tried to get the mother to see things rationally, but she clung to her daughter as if Georges were trying to kidnap the girl.
“Give her a chance, please,” he repeated patiently. “Léah deserves to live.”
Léah’s mother studied the man in front of her with confused eyes, incapable of understanding, while the girl, sitting on the floor, clung to her mother’s skirt and cried in terror.
“Do you know what you’re asking of me?”
“Yes, I’m asking you to make the most difficult choice in the world. But if she goes with you, she’ll have zero chance of survival. Do you understand?”
The woman started moaning and beating her chest.
“This is infamy! By God, how can you ask me to do this? You’re stealing our children! God can’t be allowing something this terrible!”
“God is giving you a chance. Léah has to survive. If she does not, then the Nazis have won. Don’t you see that?”
“They’ve already won if we have to give up our children.”
Georges did not know what to say. The woman was pulling her hair out and crying bitterly.
“Look, right here, Léah’s father already filled out the paperwork and signed. We only need your signature.” Georges held the paper out for her. Those words got through to the mother.
“Her father signed?” she asked in disbelief.
“Yes, right here,” he said and pointed.
That was her husband’s signature all right. Everything changed in an instant. She dried her tears and signed.
Léah was thirteen but did not want to leave her mother. They were very close and did everything together. They talked for hours on end, laughing and crying, dreaming about the future, creating a world in which Léah would study and become a nurse.
“My daughter, go now,” her mother begged.
“No, Mom, don’t make me leave!”
“For God’s sake, go now before my heart breaks in two.”
The mother kissed her daughter’s cheeks and tasted her salty tears. She held Léah’s face in her hands for a brief second, that beautiful face she loved so dearly. She looked at Léah’s big brown eyes and long brown hair one last time—her precious doll, whom she would never see again.
“Mom, please,” Léah pleaded, but Georges took her by the hand and pulled her back.
As soon as they were out the door, the mother let out a long, desperate wail. Léah heard her as they crossed the yard to the mess hall. It had begun to rain. The sky was weeping all the tears of those ravaged souls while time crept on toward the terrible sentence looming over the camp’s refugees.
The number of children in the mess hall was growing. Most were crying. The older ones tried to console and distract the younger ones, but their efforts were in vain. Fear and suffering were contagious. Thunder began to rumble, muffling the wailing of the mothers who cried like the mothers centuries before in Bethlehem. They, too, had lost their children to a cruel tyrant. That one had sought to snuff out the life of the Messiah promised to humanity and announced by a star in the sky. History’s sad song repeated itself: mothers paying the cost of the evil actions of angry men.