in the cupboards should the police arrive. André Lévi had answered when they came to the door. Two brilliant colleagues who were now wearing rags, carrying their children on their backs, thinking of starvation rather than algebra. They called what was happening in Berlin The Destruction. All Jews would be relocated, and then exterminated. The professor let his colleagues in without a second thought and asked Ava to make a pot of her soup. Claire was no longer speaking to her husband. She worried about her sons, fearing what lay in wait for them outside the garden gates. She had begun to keep certain treasures in a bag she carried around her waist, beneath her skirt. A few gold coins, her favorite earrings, her children’s baby teeth in a small glass jar.
Victor seemed especially lost. He’d never been a good student, for he’d always been a person of action. He’d wanted to join the French army, but he’d been too young. Soon he would be eighteen, and would likely be arrested. He kept a packed rucksack hidden beneath his bed, ready for the time when he would have the opportunity to leave and do his duty for his country and his people.
It happened one cold night when the sky was filled with clouds and ice coated the streets. There was a commotion on the other side of the river and he slipped out of the house without his parents’ knowledge and quickly made his way to the Marais. There was a curfew, but on this night groups of young men and boys had collected in protest. Among them was a fellow Victor had been chummy with in his younger days, Claude Gotlib. They’d been in the Jewish Scouts together and had spent weekends and holidays in the forest, learning the practical skills needed to survive in such circumstances. Claude motioned to him so they might speak privately as they surveyed the boys and young men who were rallying and demanding their rights. Many had mothers or girlfriends who had followed them and were now weeping, begging for them to come home. Before too long, the Germans would send soldiers to contain the crowd and many who were alive and protesting would be shot down.
“They can riot all they want,” Claude said sadly. “They can’t fight the Third Reich in the streets of Paris. The Germans have the soldiers, the weapons, the tanks, all of it.”
“So we do nothing?”
Claude shook his head. “There’s another way.”
Victor looked at his old friend.
“The Scouts are still functioning. Only now, we’re not playing.” Bands of young Jewish renegades, later to be called La Sixième, lived in the woods and did their best to help others escape and work against the Nazis. These young people were fearless and wild and felt they had nothing to lose. “Have you ever shot a gun?” Claude asked.
As a child, Victor had often been taken into the countryside by his grandfather. He’d been perhaps six or seven, too small to hold a proper rifle, so his grandfather had one made especially for him, the correct weight and size. They’d shot at birds, although it seemed a crime to do so; Victor had cried the first time they’d gathered the doves they shot, piled into a white sheet to carry home. Later, he had been given a full-size rifle, and as it turned out, he had perfect vision and excellent aim. Perhaps it had all been for a reason, his embarrassment at having cried in front of the old man on that first hunting trip, the rain of gray feathers that fell from the sky, the fact that he had learned to be so good at something that repelled him. Now it all made sense, as if his fate had been preordained the moment he walked out into the field with his grandfather and picked up the gun he hadn’t wanted to touch.
“Quite a number of times,” he told his friend.
At the hour when night was disappearing, Claire Lévi discovered that her elder son was not in his bed. She looked through the house, then searched the icy street, out in her nightclothes, in a panic, not bothering to think of the curfew that kept Jews inside at night.
When she failed to find Victor, she went to sit in the garden on a stone bench, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She had not thought this was what her life would come to, but now she saw that it had. The