Mireille and Vivi hadn’t helped Claire to keep going then I wouldn’t be here today.
‘You need to keep going too!’ I imagine I hear Mireille saying decisively, her dark curls bouncing.
‘It’s only when you know the whole truth that you will understand,’ Vivi’s calm eyes seem to be telling me.
And beside them Claire smiles her gentle smile, telling me that, even though she never knew me, she loves me. She is here with me. She will never leave.
1943
Paris was descending into chaos. As the war ground on and the Germans suffered more and more losses, the round-ups and deportations became more frequent, more random and more brutal. Most of the time, Mireille only left the atelier to go and get food, eking out the rations she was able to find for her ‘guests’ with the extra bits and pieces she was able to obtain on the black market which were paid for with money given to her by Monsieur Leroux. The two separate strands of her work, during the days and the nights as well, kept her busy. But whenever she could find the time, she would walk to the willow tree on the end of the island in the Seine and take refuge beneath its graceful arms.
One July day, as she sat watching the river flowing by and wondering what the ones she loved were doing at that moment, a smell of burning hung in the air. A plume of smoke smudged the sky over the Tuileries gardens and, loath to go back to the empty apartment just yet, she went to see what was happening.
A crowd had gathered in the park where she had taken Claire to meet Monsieur Leroux almost eighteen months ago. It felt like a lifetime had passed since that day. It had been winter then, but now it was high summer and the close, muggy air pressed in on Mireille, making little rivers of sweat trickle down the back of her neck.
As she drew closer to the Musée de l’Orangerie, she realised that soldiers were carrying framed pictures out of the gallery. She slipped into the crowd so that she wouldn’t be spotted. Appalled, she watched as one of the framed canvases was lifted high into the air and then thrown on to the bonfire which raged on one of the grass parterres. ‘What are they doing?’ she asked a man standing next to her, who was watching the scene in grim silence.
‘They have deemed these works of art to be “degenerate”.’ The man spoke with a quiet scorn. ‘Art threatens the Nazi regime by depicting the truth of subjects they find abhorrent, apparently. And so they are burning them. I have seen, with my own eyes, a Picasso thrown on to that fire. Anything they don’t like, anything that doesn’t fit with their picture of the ideal world, they destroy.’ He shook his head and his eyes burned with a passion born of fury. She noticed that his unkempt beard contained tiny droplets of paint and realised that he must be an artist. ‘First they burnt books, now they are burning paintings, and they burn people, too, in those prison camps of theirs, I’ve heard tell. Remember this day, young lady; you are witnessing a holocaust of humanity. Remember it, and tell your children and your grandchildren so that they never let it happen again.’
As another painting was hurled on to the pyre, she turned away and hurried home. But when she got back to the apartment, she couldn’t rid herself of the smell of the smoke that clung to her clothes and hair. And in spite of the heat of the July evening, she shivered as she remembered the man’s words: ‘They burn people, too, in those prison camps of theirs.’ For the millionth time, she prayed to any god who was left to listen that Claire and Vivi might still be alive and that they might be kept safe. Please. Let them come home one day soon.
As Claire began to get her bearings, she discovered that the camp at Flossenbürg was just one of many in the area, built to provide slave labour for the German war effort. The rough barracks, in which the prisoners were housed, occupied one sector of the central site. Factories had been established in the vicinity, manufacturing textiles, munitions and even Messerschmitt aircraft, making the most of the steady stream of prisoners for their workforce, who arrived on trains like the one that had brought them