“Stop it, you brat!” he bellowed as he grabbed the younger boy from the other policeman, held him by an ankle, and dangled him over the roof.
“No!” Jacob yelled.
His brother’s face was purple with terror, and he flailed like a fish yanked out of water.
“Come back up here. You don’t want your brother to fall, do you?” the corporal called with mocking as he held Moses a little farther over the edge.
Jacob’s heart beat harder and faster than ever in his life. He could feel it in his temples and in the tips of his fingers through his clenched fists. His breath abandoned him. He raised his hands and tried to scream, but nothing came out.
“Get up here now! You and your people have wasted enough of our time today!”
In the sunken eyes of the corporal the boy could see a hatred he could not understand, but he had seen it often over the past few months. He climbed back up the wall toward the roof and stood before the corporal.
The corporal was a tall, heavy-set man whose stomach threatened to burst from his uniform jacket with every breath. His hat sagged to the side, and the knot of his tie was half undone. In his red face, his brown mustache quivered as his lips frowned and spat out words.
Once Jacob came up from the terrace, the corporal let Moses fall with a thud onto the rooftop. The other two gendarmes grabbed both boys by the arms and carried them between them back to the first building. They descended in the elevator and returned to the courtyard.
The doorwoman smiled as they passed, as if the capture of the two brothers had brightened her day. The old woman spat at them and shrieked, “Foreign communist scum! I won’t have another Jew in my building!”
Jacob gave her a hard, defiant stare. He knew her well. She was a lying busybody. A few months prior, Aunt Judith had helped the doorwoman acquire ration cards. The woman could neither read nor write and had a disabled son who rarely left their apartment. Occasionally on a nice afternoon, she would labor to get him out to the courtyard and sit him down while the boy, crippled and blind, shook all the while.
Moses had not yet recovered from the terror of dangling over the roof, and he turned his eyes toward the woman. Though she always yelled at them when they ran in and out of the building or bothered the neighbors with their shouts or the noise of pounding up and down the stairs, they had never done anything to her.
The street still teemed with people, and the buses were already half full. The gendarmes shoved the women, hit the children, and brusquely hurried the older people along. There were very few young men. Most had been in hiding for months. The helpless throng, compelled by fear and uncertainty, moved like a flock of silent sheep about to be sacrificed, unable to imagine that the police of the freest country on earth were sending them off to the slaughterhouse before the impassive gaze of friends and neighbors.
The buses roared to life as Moses stared mesmerized out the window. He felt the odd sensation of going on a field trip. Beside him, Jacob studied the terrified faces of the other passengers, all of whom avoided one another’s eyes, as if they felt invisible under the scorn of a world to which they no longer belonged.
Chapter 2
Paris
July 16, 1942
The buses came to a stop in front of a large building. The gendarmes jumped out of their cars and stood in a line to prevent the Jews from slipping off to nearby streets. The sun was beating down on the buses, draining the passengers’ energy. Yet Jacob and Moses kept their eyes on the Eiffel Tower, situated behind them. Looking at it made their present reality seem less real.
The French police beat the metal doors of the buses for the drivers to open up. The passengers looked around. No one wanted to be the first to get off the bus. They had held collective silence on the way there, and now uncertainty had taken such a hold of their souls that resignation seemed the only viable response to their unexpected arrest. Most were foreigners, though some French Jews had fallen into the spiderweb woven around them. An elderly gentleman dressed in a work uniform stood and addressed the frightened passengers.