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Approximately seven thousand Jewish children in France were saved, yet over eleven thousand were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1942. Most were gassed on arrival. The fact that French police were in charge of rounding them up remains a matter of national shame.
It’s important to remember the past, no matter how painful the process might be.
Jacques wants to share the joy of discovering an author who speaks to one’s soul, the thrill of losing oneself in a story more vivid and exciting than real life. He will call his shop La Page Cachée – The Hidden Page – because he knows the magic that is to be found within the covers of a book.
They might smoke on the Métro and bathe naked in the Seine but they seem to enjoy being in Paris, and many of them are undeniably tall and good-looking.
She’s brave and passionate, and that passion is dangerous.
‘If you can’t think what to do,’ her brother Andrew had once told her, ‘at least decide what you don’t want to do.’
‘Here’s what I want you to do,’ she told him. ‘Pick up your suitcase and get on that plane. Apart from that, I really don’t care.’
She felt so light, if she’d let go of her luggage she would have floated up into the air.
She looked at him sadly. ‘We have to try. A life without freedom is no life at all.’
Books were his livelihood, his passion, his raison d’être; how could he allow them to be destroyed?
Reading on a tablet just wasn’t the same; she had to hold a physical copy, smell the pages, look at the cover, flick back to a passage she wanted to remember or hadn’t understood. Bookstores and libraries were her spiritual home, so quiet and calm and full of knowledge – and now here was the ghost of a bookstore on her doorstep.
Your spirit gives me the courage to hope and dream and fight for what’s right. One day our children will grow up in a free country, we have to believe that, and they will be able to act and think as they please. Don’t be afraid, chéri. Death is coming for all of us, sooner or later. It’s how we live that matters.’
‘A life without freedom is no life at all,’
He closed his eyes and leant back against the seat, hearing her voice in his ear. ‘Death is coming for all of us; it’s how we live that matters.’
He hurried on home with a renewed sense of purpose. There were people everywhere who needed help, once you opened your eyes – and found the courage not to look away.
Over three thousand foreign-born Jews had been rounded up and sent out of Paris to
a camp further south, it emerged via whispers and reports in partisan newsletters over the next few days.
Police went from house to house with lists of names, and over four thousand Jews were arrested in a single day and shipped off to prison camps.
Stepping back, he noticed a notice written in large letters that had been pasted on one of the ground-floor windows. ‘Here lived two Jews who have killed themselves. This course of action is highly recommended to others.’
They are driven by passion: for each other, for the communist ideals that have brought them together, and for the fight for freedom. The idea of separation frightens them more than death.
What havoc could be inflicted on the world by one man with a lust for power!
Je reviens: I’ll come back.
‘Mon Père, je m’abandonne à toi, fais de moi ce qu’il te plaira. Je suis prêt à tout, j’accepte tout.’ Father, I give myself up to you, do with me what you will. I am ready for everything, I accept everything.
