“Incredible,” Markie whispered. She had never heard of Le Chambon or the rescue efforts there.
“We hid in a barn,” Simone continued. “Angeline and me and our parents. It was owned by Monsieur and Madame Aubert. Lucien and Ginette. We were going to stay for a night. My parents had a plan to take us to a children’s home the next day. They had heard of this place, and they were going to leave us there, where they felt we would be safe. They would come back for us when they could, and take us home.
“But there were gendarmes all around, and their job was to sniff us out. They got my father when he was filling our water bucket at the well. My mother saw from the entrance of the barn, and she screamed, and so, of course, they got her, too. They searched the barn, and they woke Monsieur and Madame Aubert and their children, and they searched the farmhouse.
“Monsieur pretended with great shock to have had no clue about the ‘filthy Jews’ who had been squatting in his barn. He stomped and cursed and shook his angry fist at my parents, who were standing at the end of the lane, shivering with fear that the gendarmes would find me and my sister, too.
“My mother had given us a bath that night, only a sponge bath with a bucket and old cloths she found in the barn, but it was very cold out, and the water was like ice, and we could not warm up. We were so skinny, you see. She was worried about pneumonia, so she asked Madame if she could leave us inside the house by the fire, only for a little while.
“When Madame heard the gendarmes banging on the door, she hurried us upstairs into the bedroom of her children, and she told us to crawl down under the covers, one in her son’s bed, the other in her daughter’s. The gendarmes came crashing up, looking in closets and everywhere, and they made the children get out of their beds. But they did not flatten the lumpy blankets at the ends of the beds like Madame feared they might, to see if anyone might be hidden there, even though, as Madame told us many times later, she thought it was very obvious there were bodies underneath the bedding.
“For this, I believe, we must have had some lucky star above us, Angeline and I.” Simone ran a finger along the outline of the twin girls in the picture and smiled sadly. “They kept us, Madame and Monsieur Aubert. For almost four years! Here they were, with hardly enough to feed their own family’s mouths, and yet they took in two more without a hesitation.
“They had heard quite quickly that my parents . . . would not be coming back for us . . .” Simone paused briefly and looked down before going on. “So they knew it would not be only a few months that we would need someplace to stay; it could be years. And they acted as though this were no trouble at all! They would simply eat less. They would share their clothes, their blankets, everything. They would not turn us out—or turn us in.
“When the Germans invaded and things began to look worse for everyone, they decided it would be safest to arrange for their son and daughter to go to America to stay with Monsieur Aubert’s cousin, Girard. And because no relatives had come looking for my sister and me, they decided to send us, too. They had enough money for four tickets, and they used theirs on the two of us. They meant to come later, after they could save more.
“They did not make it. He was killed fighting for the Resistance and she must have died shortly after. From what, we never knew.” Simone set the picture aside with the others, bent her head, and folded her hands in her lap, as though in prayer. “Lucien and Ginette. I named my first son after him, and after our brother, too: Matias Lucien. If we had had a girl, she would have been Lea Ginette. But we had another boy.”
She laughed softly. “My husband was afraid I would insist on giving that name to our second son in any case! But I was not so crazy. I named him Marceau; it was Ginette’s maiden name. I think Lea would have approved.”
“That’s lovely,” Markie said. “What Lucien and Ginette did for your family. And how you’ve carried their names on with your children.”
“They used to write us every week,” Simone said. “And Cousin Girard would read the letters out loud. He would tell us our life story, too, over and over, from letters Monsieur had written before they sent us over. For Angeline and me, it was our story only from Le Chambon forward, of course. For the others, it was their entire life.
“We begged him to tell us what had happened to Ginette, and why she did not come, but he had no letter about that, of course. So now, here was Cousin Girard, himself struggling to take care of himself and his wife, and now he had four children on top of everything. There were some hard years, I can tell you. Edouard went to work as soon as he could, but he was young himself when we—”
“Wait!” Markie said. “Edouard? The Edouard? Angeline’s Edouard?”
“The very one,” Simone said. “He was only a little older than us, so he was nine when we came to them, to their barn. He was thirteen when we got to Pittsburgh—that’s where Cousin Girard lived. He was fourteen when he left school and got a job to help put food on the table. Later, he was able to put himself through school at night, and he finished high school and then got a college degree.”
“Is that what caused the rift?” Markie asked. “Did you and Edouard have an affair? Is the ‘old boyfriend’ your sister told me about actually her late husband? I know you said before that there was no fight about a man, but you’ve told me this much. Couldn’t you admit, now—?”
Simone chuckled softly. “My sister and her many stories. I was telling you the truth earlier, I promise you this. There was no affair, no stolen boyfriend. There was only the fact that when we were old enough to really understand our story after Cousin Girard told it—where we came from, what had happened to our parents—Angeline decided to listen one more time and never again.
“From that day, she reimagined her entire history. Our history. She was not a refugee—she was Girard’s daughter, and so was I. And Girard was not from France—he was from Quebec. We were not Jewish—we were Roman Catholic. We had no dead parents in Europe, and we never had a brother or sister, so Matias and Lea, of course, were also not dead in Europe.
“They simply never existed. Angeline made them . . .” Simone flicked a hand in the air. “Disappear. Poof. And when I argued about this, well, you can guess. I ceased to exist as well.”
“What?” Markie said. “But why would she pretend away your entire history, your religion, your own family?”