Rachel
Rachel’s fear had a taste, a thickness in the back of the throat, and a feeling, too, formed as a knot of sickening dread tight in her stomach. The urge to grab the child and run was strong. The need to understand what was happening, why it was happening, was stronger.
She locked eyes with the little girl and felt a twist of grief. Whatever she’d witnessed had changed her forever. Rachel opened her mouth to say something. The words stuck in her throat, and something cold moved up her spine. Defeat, the sense of powerlessness. The world, her world, which she’d thought was so solid and safe, was made of straw.
The absence of calm created a sinister milieu that was nearly tangible. And the heat. So hot. The scents. The tinny smell of blood. The sounds. The shrieks. There were two of them. One, a collection of racial slurs tangling together. The other climbing up Rachel’s throat.
And then, there was this tiny, small, terrified little girl. Rachel knew her. Naomi Wozniak. A sweet child of seven. She lived with her parents above their bakery. The one being targeted by the mob a half block away. More foul words. More bricks and rocks hurled into the air. More shattering glass. The destruction of a single business seemed to be the goal. The life’s work of an honorable family destroyed out of hate.
Rachel knew why.
The Wozniaks were fellow Jewish immigrants who’d lifted themselves up to this bourgeois neighborhood. Unlike her family, they were religious. They owned a kosher bakery, the only one for three blocks in any direction. The one that was now being vandalized by German thugs. She glanced toward the madness and noted a familiar face among the looters. A French boy from the neighborhood and beside him, two more. That they were a part of this made the situation even more insane.
Rachel leaned in toward the child, careful to keep her voice soft, her touch light. “Where are your parents, Naomi?”
The girl shook her head, seemingly unable to respond. It didn’t matter. The truth rode on the feral wind. It sounded in the angry shouts, the shattering of glass, the throwing of bricks and rocks. Rachel shuddered. There was something animalistic in the mob’s behavior. “They are in the bakery?”
“Yes.” The word was hardly audible.
“Rachel.” She glanced up and straight into Camille’s face. She’d forgotten about her friend. “The child shouldn’t be on the streets. We need to get her away from here, before—”
“—curfew. I know.” Rachel refocused on Naomi. She recognized something in the depth of that gaze, something from her own inner thoughts. The vast, horrible knowledge that the world was a hard, mean place for them. That their neighbors, people they’d once trusted, wanted to do them harm.
“Naomi, are your parents...are they...injured?” Rachel asked the question carefully, not knowing how to put her greatest fear into words.
“They...they’re...in...the shop,” she said, shaking her head. “I ran. I wasn’t supposed to leave our hiding place. I was supposed to stay. But I ran. They shouted at me to come back. I ran anyway.” She dipped her head, her voice barely above a whisper. She was shaking with fear and shame, but Rachel could feel only relief. Naomi’s parents were still alive.
“I would have run, too.” Aware of a bubbling anger stoking her courage, she stood and took the child’s hand. Camille moved in beside her, clearly prepared to enter the fray with them.
“You don’t have to do this,” Rachel told her. “This isn’t your fight.”
“It isn’t yours, either.”
There she was wrong. This was Rachel’s fight. An injustice against one Jew was an injustice against all of them. Or perhaps, Rachel thought, Camille did understand. She was standing firm with Rachel. The very embodiment of her father’s words. Our neighbors...they will protect us from the Nazis. Rachel’s mind went quiet, her thoughts no longer scattered. They needed to get the child off the streets. She and Camille, together.
She looked to her friend, and there in her eyes was a loyalty Rachel knew was real. Words weren’t necessary. A nod, that was all it took for them to become a single unit.
“We’ll take her to my parents’ apartment,” Rachel said.
Camille spoke to the child in a low, calming tone. “It’s going to be all right, Naomi.”
There was something safe and decent about Camille Lacroix, in the way she leaned toward the little girl, her gaze soft but steady. They managed to propel the child forward, but her fear worked against them, and their progress was slow. She stumbled, nearly taking Rachel and Camille down with her.
Camille recovered first, dragging Naomi to her feet with a gentleness that was at odds with the violence surrounding them. They crossed the street, quickly, silently, and entered the apartment building with Rachel leading the way. Camille shut the door behind them, and all sound suddenly stopped, the silence as jarring as the shouting had been.
“Which way?” Camille asked.
“Up.” When Naomi blanched, Rachel stooped down. “It’s all right. I’ll carry you.” She picked up the child and led the way to the third floor, climbing the stairs as quickly as possible with Naomi’s additional weight in her arms.
At the landing, Rachel set the girl back on her feet. At the same moment, the door to her parents’ apartment swung open and out rushed her mother, clearly anticipating their arrival. Still, Rachel lifted her eyebrows. “How did you know we were coming?”
“We saw you cross the street.” Before Rachel could respond, Ilka Berman dropped to her knees. “Oh, my dear sweet child. You must be so frightened. Come to me.” She opened her arms in invitation.
The little girl accepted with no hesitation. Once in the shelter of the motherly embrace, the child broke into loud, agonizing sobs. Helpless in the face of all that sorrow, Rachel found herself frozen in indecision.
Not so her mother.
“That’s it,” she soothed in Yiddish. “There, now. Let it out, bubelah. That’s right. Let it all out.”
Rachel watched, feeling disconnected, distant, as if she was looking through a wall of frozen water. Her mother, like Camille, seemed to know what she was doing. Her words and kindness made it easier for the traumatized child to give into her fear and grief.
With Naomi’s sobs slowing, her mother looked up and smiled at Camille. “You must be Rachel’s friend.”
Rachel made the introductions, but it was her mother who invited Camille into their home in her accented, broken French.
“I can’t. Curfew approaches.” She didn’t need to say more. The consequences for being on the streets after 8:00 p.m. were steep—arrest and possibly worse. “I’ll come back another time.”
“Are you certain you don’t want to wait a few more minutes?”
“Very.” Her eyes swept to Rachel then, held steady, a host of meaning in her gaze. “We should walk to work together in the morning.”
“I’ll be fine.” Was that true? Was tonight an isolated event, or was this frenzied vandalism only the beginning of what Jews living in Paris could expect?
“Rachel.” Camille’s voice flowed over her like a soft breeze. “It’s not safe to be out on the streets alone.”
Something in the way she said the words, or rather the ones she didn’t say, had Rachel speaking harsher than she’d meant. “And yet you are about to head out into the fray right now.”
“Yes, well, I’m not a...a...”
“A Jew.”
Camille winced. “Please, Rachel. I’m not trying to insult you. It’s just...” She reached out, briefly touched her sleeve, let her hand drop. “There is solidarity in numbers.”
She was right. “Yes, we will walk to work together.” Then, as Camille made to go, she added, “Be careful getting home.”
“Always.” They didn’t hug. They weren’t that kind of friends, but Rachel watched until Camille was gone before following her mother and Naomi into the apartment.
The rest of her family stood at the row of windows overlooking Rue Rochechouart, their necks craned identically to the left, presumably to watch the activity down the block.
Rachel took up position next to Basia. From this vantage point, she could see only silhouettes. There was Camille’s, melding into the shadows, unnoticed by the mob. Rachel could feel their frenzy, their hate. Eventually, blessedly, the crowd seemed to lose interest in their evil, twisted game. The shouts became murmurs. Stones were set down. And people began slithering away like snakes into their holes.
The vandalism was over. The horror, Rachel sensed, was only just beginning. Was this to be their fate as Jews in German-occupied Paris? The police had never shown up. Their neighbors had stayed inside their homes. Where were the good people of France? And where were Naomi’s parents?
As if hearing her question, the couple emerged from the bakery. They ignored the destruction in favor of twisting to the left, the right, frantically searching. It dawned on her why. They were looking for Naomi. Her hand flew to her mouth. “We need to let them know we have her. They will want to know she’s safe.”
She moved to the door. Her father stopped her with a hand to her arm. “No, hertzeleh. I’ll go.”
Rachel saw the emotion in him. Tears were in his eyes. Unshed, but there. Rachel had never seen her father cry. He wasn’t crying now, but she could tell it cost him to maintain his composure. In the next minute, he was gone, reappearing outside the building, arms flailing as he tried to gain the Wozniaks’ attention. Rachel saw the exact moment when the couple understood their daughter was safe. Relief slumped their shoulders. And then, her mother was outside on the sidewalk, too, Naomi’s hand in hers. The child’s parents saw her at the same moment, their heads lifting in tandem.
Their smiles widened.
Again, Naomi was running. This time, toward her parents.
Even as she watched the happy reunion, Rachel couldn’t prevent images from earlier in the night. They flashed in her mind. So much violence. The hatred in the men’s eyes had been on a new level, one she would have not thought possible before this evening. If any of them had looked in her direction, and seen her and Camille with the child, would they have directed their anger toward them? Would bricks have been thrown at their heads?
Bile suddenly rose in her throat, tasting like acid on her tongue. She tried to swallow it down, tried to remind herself that they hadn’t seen her and Camille. Her stomach rebelled anyway. Hand over her mouth, she ran to the bathroom, slammed the door behind her, and sank to her knees. Alone, she let the sickness come, let it empty the meager contents of her stomach.
When she was done, she noticed that her cheeks were wet. What was that sound? Sobbing. Her own. She tried to stand, couldn’t, so she just sat, right there on the tile floor. Hands shaking, she squeezed her eyes shut and willed her breath to slow. She still felt sick. Tears slipped down her cheeks. She wiped at them, over and over.
“Rachel,” her mother called through the door. “Are you all right, ketsl?”
Somehow, she managed to find her voice. “I—I’m fine. I just need a minute.”
It took longer than a minute for the nausea to subside, closer to five. Finally, she rubbed at the sting of emotion still burning behind her lids and, gaining her feet, left the bathroom. Her mother was waiting in the hallway when she emerged, and as she’d done with Naomi, she opened her arms in silent invitation. Rachel rushed into the offered embrace. Too exhausted to cry, she clung, enjoying the feel of their shared heartbeats.
After a moment, her mother stepped back and cupped her cheeks between her warm palms. “You will want your dinner now.”
Rachel wasn’t sure she could eat, but her mother looked so hopeful, as if the simple chore of feeding her child brought her some semblance of peace. “Yes.” She swallowed. “I... Yes.”
Later, when she was alone in her room, Rachel pulled out her journal and flipped to a blank page. She took accounting classes because everyone told her she had a head for numbers. And perhaps she did. She certainly liked it when columns added up, and her father was so proud of her. Lately, though, in ways she couldn’t fully explain, things had begun to change in her heart, and she craved a different future than the one her parents wanted for her.
The world—her world—had teetered off its axis, throwing all she knew into confusion. Nothing was certain anymore. A bright future was no longer guaranteed for Jews living in a German-occupied city.
Rachel woke at night, sometimes from haunted dreams, and always with an inexplicable tug at her soul. She desired a different fate. A world without fear. Trying to capture that feeling, she’d begun putting her thoughts in a journal. She could spend an entire evening trying to put her feelings on the page. Some nights she would agonize over a single sentence for hours.
Other nights, the words flowed. Words upon words poured from mind to pen to page. She wrote it all down, every bit of thought swirling in her head, no matter how ugly or raw or terrifyingly wistful. And when she finally shut the book, it was with a sense of relief, always, to know that she’d found a small piece of solace in the act of writing.
Cathartic, but nothing could erase what Rachel now knew to be true. The sense of safety she’d known all her life was dissolving, slipping from her grasp like water through splayed fingers. And the worst of it was that there was nothing she could do. Nothing but watch everything she held dear wash away into the gray mist of Nazi hate and French indifference.