barely breathe in the damp night air. A sharp pain shot up his leg. There was the faint trilling of frogs in the garden, but otherwise not a sound could be heard. It was over. The school had opened on April 10, 1943, and now, a year later, everyone was gone. The French government had made a new proclamation declaring it was a kindness to send children to be with their parents in Auschwitz. This despicable edict must now be enforced by the French police in collaboration with the Germans. The forty-two children currently in residence were taken to Montluc Prison. The following day all were sent to Auschwitz. Not a single one survived. Six adults, educators and nurses, were arrested and murdered as well.
He went round to the front door, dazed and limping. He did not understand why he was here and not with the others. He could not make sense of anything, certainly not his own life. Strewn about the fountain were toys and clothes, as if a storm had come through. Inside, the rooms were deserted and dark, yet he could see the white sheen of windblown piles of letters, not yet handed out to the children, scattered across the floor. In the art room the air was heavy. All of the chairs were neatly in a row. Julien left, taking only some colored pencils and the drawing Teddy had made to send to his parents. A rocket ship with three people on board, a father and mother and son. They were in a blue horizon surrounded by clouds. I love you a million times had been written across a sky strewn with x’s, a million kisses given.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE OTHER SIDE
LE CHAMBON-SUR-LIGNON, APRIL 1944
IN THE VILLAGE OF LE CHAMBON-SUR-LIGNON winter always fell hard and stayed for a very long time. When spring came it was a joyous event, a miracle fashioned of blue and green, slowly unfolding, even when the snow was still in the shadows. It was a small town with a train station and long, sloping streets that were treacherous in winter. A deep forest of pines ringed the village of gray stone houses and shops. As soon as there was a snowfall, local boys took their sleds to the top of the hill and sledded all the way to the bottom, red-faced, shouting with joy. Now the sleds were put away; trees were greening and the birds were returning in huge flocks that nearly blacked out the sky. This was the heart of the Protestant stronghold, almost completely cut off from the rest of the world, a place known for taking in refugees, beginning with those who had been displaced in the Spanish Civil War. In houses and farms there were Jews hidden with families who had never before met someone of their faith.
The children’s home where Ava worked was made of a group of stone buildings in town with a school at the end of a steep road. She had gone directly to the kitchen, knocked on the door, and told them the only payment she needed was a place for her and Lea to stay. She had become a master baker and had no fear when the cook gave her a test. There was a stone baker’s house that hadn’t been used for some time where the stove was heated by logs. Ava was made to collect wood and fire up the old stove. Then she must bake ten tartes out of paltry ingredients: four cups of flour, ten bitter apples, sixteen chestnuts, unroasted and plucked from nearby trees. The results were stupendous and mouthwatering. The cook herself ate half a tarte in one sitting. Lea attended the school, but they were placed in the home of a local couple, as were many Jews who were hidden in town until they could be given false identification or taken to Switzerland. In all, somewhere between three and five thousand souls were saved by the village. The house they were brought to wasn’t far from the train station, on a lane off Rue Neuve.
All through the winter, they had shared an attic with an artist who’d also been taken in, a Jew from Belgium, Ahron Weitz. The couple who owned the house were Adele and Daniel. They owned a fabric shop and rarely spoke to their guests; the less they knew about one another the better in case the Milice, a paramilitary organization instituted by the Vichy regime to assist the Germans, came to