In six long years of war, I’d grown from a naive teenager from a devout Jewish family in Metz to an independently minded intelligence officer who’d taken a vow of spinsterhood in memory of the fiancé she’d lost. I was twenty-five years old but felt very much older. Each year of war had seemed like a decade. Now that it was over, I felt vulnerable and isolated, afraid of what I would find when I looked for my family again, fearful of being alone.
