The misery and squalor resemble a natural disaster in some distant Third World country. Yet this is in the heart of Paris, and the cataclysm was manmade, meticulously planned, flawlessly executed. No detail, however trivial, was overlooked: The electricity and water were turned off in the empty apartments, pets left in the care of the concierge. But less thought was spared for their owners. Despite the zeal in rounding them up, the provision made for them is woefully inadequate. Worse than inadequate, inhumane. For all these people, there is no bedding, no food, no water. A single standpipe dispenses a trickle for which people have to queue for hours. All the toilets with windows have been barred, the remaining are clogged up, and the stench funnels outward, fetid, nauseating, unbearable. People relieve themselves against the wall or sit in their own ordure. An elderly man shields his wife with his coat as she defecates, tears of humiliation running down her face.

The vélodrome’s glass roof, painted blue for the air raids, is like a giant bell jar that traps the smell, the heat, the clamoring voices. In a constant relay the buses release their human cargo into this gloomy, panting darkness. By one o’clock the next day, it is over. The largest single roundup of Jews in Paris, in the works for three months under the innocent name of Opération Vent Printanier, has caught almost thirteen thousand people in its net, and of the seven thousand or so blown into the stadium by that Spring Breeze, more than half are children.

They run up and down the sloping embankment or curl up on the floor, while the adults huddle on tiers of narrow benches and retrieve from their abject bundles what meager sustenance they can, a handful of biscottes, perhaps, dry as dust on the tongue. In the welter of objects, their hands encounter something, a beloved memento they could not bear to leave behind, a grandmother’s garnet brooch, or a wedding scroll, and for a moment it reminds them of the life they have lived, the person they used to be. But they are now part of a suffering mass, stripped of country, of home, of every trace of individuality. Wryly they think they would have done better to bring something more useful than that heirloom brooch, an ordinary tin cup perhaps, as a receptacle for water.

At first they approach their captors and loudly demand milk for their infants, medicine for an old man’s seizures. But they are ordered back to their seats, sometimes politely, sometimes brutally. In any case, with indifference. Worn out by supplication, they relapse into a helpless stupor. All they can do is continue waiting, without knowing what it is they await. Suddenly in these joyless surroundings those nearby hear an unmistakable sound, a child’s squeal of laughter. A boy of four blows his toy whistle and tugs at a gendarme’s leg. The man growls like a bear and chases him up the steps, the boy laughs, the man smiles, and for a moment it seems as if everything hangs in the balance, that the day dividing them into hunter and hunted will also turn out to be only a game. But the moment passes and things are as they were, unreal and yet all too real.

Guards are massed by the double doors into the arena, and desperate women crowd around them, pleading for a chance to run to the épicerie across the street to buy milk for their children or a loaf of bread, but they are rebuffed. On the other side of the doors, people who have seen the buses arriving full and leaving empty, have heard the desperate cries of the captives within, have smelled the nauseating smells escaping from the stadium, gather outside with food, water, offers of help. But the two sides are kept apart by the guards, sullen at being caught in the middle.

Several doctors volunteer their services, but only two are allowed in at a time to tend to all those in extremity, like the woman giving birth, her excruciating screams audible even to the factory workers in a neighboring building; the children suffering from measles, dysentery, impetigo, quarantined and crying in the stalls for which sporting patrons had once paid a premium; the man beating his head against the concrete floor till his skull is misshapen with welts and contusions. In the face of so much suffering, doctors and nurses offer what comfort they can, toiling heroically with little support and less equipment. But nobody can do anything about the panic that spreads through the stadium like an epidemic.

In the enveloping chaos, one couple seems set apart from the rest, something holy about them, Joseph and Mary in this strange stable without a wisp of straw where she can lay her head. They had not thought to bring candles or matches, but they observe the Sabbath together and it seems astounding that after the black Thursday they have lived through, they can still move their lips in prayer. Against her rounded belly, the little boy with the whistle sleeps the innocent sleep of childhood. The mother looks down at him with wondrous love, then gives a slight nod perceptible only to her husband’s fixed and anxious gaze. He kisses the sleeping boy, then takes a pillow and presses it over his son’s face. The little legs that were running a few hours before kick with all their might, and the woman whispers over and over, “Doucement, doucement,” and as if he hears her, the boy kicks slower and slower until he stops and the man finally lifts the pillow and gathers in his arms his pregnant wife, his dead son. Then he takes out a shard of glass secreted in his sleeve. Quickly, before he can change his mind, he slices his wife’s wrists, cuts open his own veins. Their mingled blood spurts on the child, soaks through the pillow, drips on the people below. They look up to remonstrate, but when they see what has happened, their loud shrieks summon the guards. By the time they reach him, the man has already bled to death, but a nun scrambles up the crowded bleachers, tears her veil into strips for a tourniquet, and manages to staunch the woman’s flow. Gradually her eyelids flutter open. As consciousness returns, she breaks into an anguished howl, and all who hear it think it would have been more merciful to let her die.

How long does this go on? Five days? Six days? An eternity. Those who are marked for death feel the premonitory moth wings of darkness brush their face and look around them with bitter recognition.

There is a stir among the gendarmes as the double doors open, and from the way they snap to attention, it’s obviously a visit by an officer of the highest rank. The prisoners barely look up. Official visitors have come and gone before, bringing not the slightest improvement in their condition, nor the remotest possibility of being freed. This time it is SS Obersturmführer Röthke himself who has come to take stock of what he calls his little “birdcage.”

He looks around with a proprietary air at the prisoners and guards alike, and for a moment the gendarmes feel a kinship with the crowd that erupts in spontaneous hissing, the sound of a pressure cooker releasing steam. As the wave of helpless fury builds, a young man shakes off his wife’s restraining hand and jumps over the handrail to rush at the officer looking down distastefully at the dust marring his boots’ mirrored shine. Before he can get close, the young man is clubbed over the head with a rifle butt and drops to his knees like a felled ox. With a superhuman effort he struggles to his feet and continues to stagger blindly forward. Röthke watches impassively as he is clubbed again till he crumples over and lies still, then gestures that the man should be attended to, and points out a few other people, a woman going into fits, an old man vomiting blood. They are carried out on stretchers, and the hush that suddenly descends on the stadium is almost palpable. What an exquisite refinement of cruelty, to leaven it with a small, unexpected touch of kindness.

But the gendarmes know it is not kindness but mockery. The Rothschild hospital with its barbed-wire walls is no place of refuge. They have seen it emptied of its patients, no one is spared, not the woman attached to a saline drip, nor the young boy on whose fractured leg the plaster has not yet dried. They are needed to fill the trains. Word has been going around the prefecture that the Germans are dissatisfied with the numbers. Fewer than thirteen thousand rounded up! They had budgeted for thousands more, though where would they have put them, the stadium already inadequate, and the situation not much better at Drancy. Anyway, if the Boche are upset the trains will run half empty, it means the next convoys are ready to leave. But where will the trains take them, asks one of the gendarmes. Another shrugs, out of France, that’s all he knows.

Röthke turns to leave and a girl’s voice calls after him, “Monsieur, s’il vous plaît.” Strange as it seems, at the sound of that childish appeal he has a strong urge to justify himself. Ridiculous! He’s not on trial, why should he feel defensive? His hatred of Jews is powerful, unquestionable, yet he wants her to know it was not his idea to take the children, he was shocked when Pétain’s prime minister proposed it. But no use going into that now, Berlin has given the green light, and the Jewish problem is moving toward its final solution. He hurries out of the stadium, but even when he is out of earshot, Liliane continues to scream, it’s unfair to punish her sister, she’s always been a good girl.

Her daughter’s outburst startles Clara, who has been too absorbed in nursing Gilberte to notice Liliane’s mutinous rage. Suddenly Clara is struck by an idea so audacious that it takes her breath away. She looks again at the two girls, one deathly pale, the other red with anger, and makes up her mind before it is too late, before their names are called on the crackling speakers and like the others they have to file out of the stadium to the waiting transports. “Go to the door,” she whispers, “try to slip out.” She arranges her shawl around the child, hiding the yellow star. Lilou looks questioningly at Gigi, from whom she has never been apart in her whole life, not even for an hour. But Gilberte’s eyes are turned up in her head, she is moaning as the fever squeezes her body in its relentless grip.

Lilou runs down the steps and skulks near the entrance. Clara’s eyes never leave that little figure plastered against the wall, trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible. A couple of times she is chased away by the guards. But then there is a change of shift, and the new guard lets her stay, it won’t do any harm to let the child get a breath of air, the stench inside is enough to make even grown men gag. Liliane waits patiently, but there is no way out of the place without being seen.

Two nuns kneeling over a palsied man speak to him in soothing voices, but it’s clear there’s nothing more to be done. Slowly they rise to their feet and move toward the entrance. In a moment, they will go past the child waiting by the double doors. Quickly Lilou slips between the nuns; their voluminous skirts swallow her up and sweep her outside the door. The guard sees her leave, but instead of blowing his whistle, he looks away.

Out on the sidewalk, Liliane hesitates. A woman at the épicerie across the street beckons, hands her a sweet roll. “Run,” she whispers, “run.” Uncertainly, Liliane crouches in the doorway and licks the powdered sugar with the tip of her tongue. Where should she go?

Clara slumps with relief once Lilou is safely outside. But her relief is mingled with despair as she looks down at Gigi, for whom the end cannot be far. Difficult to say who is suffering more intensely, the child in pain or the mother who watches with helpless anguish and prays for death to come.

By the arbitrariness of chance, its random errors, Clara was mistakenly seized, for this one raid at least the rules were changed to exclude French Jews; and since she was married to an “Aryan,” Clara should have been doubly exempt. As a decorated veteran, Samy Fenster was likewise exempt. So was the woman in the fur coat, whose husband had volunteered for the labor camps in Germany. Yet they were all caught up in the net that night. How could Tulard’s dossiers prove so fallible, how could there be so many mistakes? Yet to fixate on how some people were moved from one column to another as if it were a simple failure of bookkeeping is to lose sight of a graver error, that it was—all of it—a failure of humanity.

But Clara has no time to waste on questions about how she came here, or where she is headed. She is at the threshold where all falseness falls away, there is time only for essential truths. She knows that one child must die; but the other must live.

Clara turns back to the child in her arms, whose breathing is labored, her face twisted into a ghastly mask of pain as she gathers her strength for the great crossing. A sudden current of air fills that airless space and the child’s eyes flutter open. She sees a shadow hovering over her, feels a hand on her burning forehead smoothing back the curls plastered to her brow. She says, “Papa?” Clara turns her head around. “Bernard!” He has come for them, she always knew he would. “Help her,” she says. “I’m here,” he says, “I’m here.”

Together they will their child to die. Yet Gilberte wrestles death for a while longer. After a final struggle for breath, she succumbs at last, her face now smooth, her body still. Clara closes her daughter’s eyes, kisses those closed lids, and knows that never in this life will she see either of her girls again. Her wordless keening goes on and on and on until it seems to fill the stadium and overflow into the city and into the world, gathering into that river of lamentation the voice of every mother who has lost her child.