She paused to wipe her eyes, but they were dry. She had used her tears up long ago. Elise, on the other hand, was crying, tears falling so quickly that she couldn’t stop them.
“The winter was terrible. Snow and ice everywhere, no proper clothing to keep us warm. People freezing to death, dying of illnesses, starving. It was hell, Elise. Hell. In January, the camp was evacuated. Everyone who could walk was sent marching west, guarded by the SS. But I was very ill by then. I had tuberculosis. I could hardly breathe, couldn’t walk. It’s a wonder I wasn’t shot; perhaps they thought I’d be a waste of a bullet. Instead, they simply left several very ill prisoners behind. On their way out, they blew up the crematoria, trying to destroy the evidence of what they had done, but they forgot about us, the witnesses who could speak the truth. When the Red Army arrived a week later, I was delirious, so much so that I didn’t know we had been saved, not for many days.
“I was taken to a hospital, and I remember nurses speaking over me in a language I did not understand, but I knew, from the tone of their voices, that they did not believe I would live. I could not open my eyes, but I knew then and there that I had to prove them wrong. I had to survive. I had to. For Georges and Suzanne. And because someone had to tell the world what the Germans had done.”
She stopped talking abruptly and looked again into the fire. Elise’s tears were still coursing down her face, and she couldn’t find the words to say in response. Ruth’s voice had remained flat, emotionless during the recounting.
“How?” Ruth asked, her voice so low it was barely audible.
“Pardon?”
“How?” she repeated. “How could they do those things to us? I have been over it so many times in my mind, Elise, and still, I do not understand. Are we not humans to them? I cannot understand what would make man turn against his fellow man this way.” She drew a trembling breath. “The children, Elise. So many of them dead. How could they kill children?”
“I don’t know,” Elise whispered.
Both women fell silent after that, lost in their own thoughts.
“I’m terribly sorry about Mathilde,” Ruth said after several moments, breaking the silence. “The kind of loss you have suffered, well, there are no words that can ease it, I think.”
Elise felt guilty for accepting sympathy from someone who had been through so much. “I would give anything to know,” she said, choking on the final word. She had to pause to collect herself. “To know what happened in her final moments. To know whether she was happy. Whether she was frightened or whether she went too quickly to know what was happening.” She paused to draw another breath, her whole body shaking. “I don’t know what her last months were like, Ruth. How can that be? I’m her mother. I’m her mother, and I don’t know who she had become. How can Juliette simply have left without leaving some word for me?”
Ruth looked down at her hands as Elise began to cry again, silently. She felt another wave of shame roll over her. She was being a terrible friend to Ruth now, just as she’d been a terrible mother to leave Mathilde behind. But when Elise finally dared look up to read the judgment on Ruth’s face, she found none. There was only sadness there.
“Elise, think of the loss Juliette suffered. Her husband, two of her children—all gone in the blink of an eye.” Ruth spoke gently. “How does a person move on from that? She must have believed, Elise, that you did not survive, and that she had nothing to remain here for. Who can blame her for wanting to run? If I had lost my children, I would have run, too, imagining that putting distance between myself and the past would ease the pain.”
“Would it, do you think? Ease the pain? Do you think the distance helps, the starting anew?”
Ruth sighed. “No.”
“So what do I do? How do I close the door on the life I had when I don’t know what happened to my child?”
“That will come in time,” Ruth replied. “Until then, my friend, you must keep moving forward, however difficult the road may be. You must live, and one day, you will realize that the future lies ahead of you, and it is time to let the past go.”
* * *
The next two years passed in a blur. The children adjusted to life in Paris, going to school, making friends, as their mother healed. They celebrated a bar mitzvah for Georges in the summer of 1946 and a bat mitzvah for Suzanne in the spring of 1947, and by May of that year, Elise could sense a shift in the household. She had become a part of the Levy family, entirely bonded to them, but she could feel them pulling away, could feel a restlessness within the walls of the apartment they shared.
“We must go,” Ruth said abruptly one night in mid-May, the air sticky and still outside the open windows as the children slept.
Elise was working on a large carving of a bird’s wings, which had become her trademark in the past year. She certainly wasn’t setting the art world on fire, but her pieces had begun to command more money at Monsieur Vasseur’s gallery, enough that she worried less about making ends meet and knew she could keep the apartment for as long as she wanted it. Perfecting her wings—sinewed muscles, delicate feathers—had kept her from carving faces, too, which helped maintain her sanity. She was only tempted to bring the curves of Mathilde’s face to life every few months now.
She looked up and was startled to see Ruth’s eyes glistening with tears. “Go where?” she asked, her heart already sounding a drumbeat of alarm.
“Away,” Ruth said, her gaze sliding away. “It is time, Elise. You know it is.”
“No,” Elise said, standing abruptly. “Ruth, this is your home.” Ruth still had terrible, debilitating dizzy spells, and she hadn’t been well enough to get a job. How would she support the children if they left? Still, Elise could see the sad resolution in Ruth’s expression, and she knew that somehow, the woman’s mind was already made up. “This is your home, Ruth,” she repeated feebly.
“No, this is your home,” Ruth reminded Elise. “And we have imposed for far too long.”
“It has never been an imposition.”
Ruth looked down. “It isn’t only that, Elise. It is that this country no longer feels like a home for us. How can I ever forget that it turned its back on me, and on my children, in the first place? I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and I simply cannot stay, cannot let my children become adults here. What if France turns on us again? How can we ever feel safe?”
“Such things will never happen again,” Elise protested.
“You cannot know that, Elise.”
“But… where will you go?”
“Your country, actually.” Ruth smiled slightly as Elise felt her throat go dry. “America. My father’s second cousin Julius has agreed to sponsor us.”
Elise knew that Ruth had been in touch with an American relative, a distant relation who lived in New York, but she had assumed it was simply a desire on Ruth’s part to reconnect with family after so many of her loved ones had been lost. She hadn’t imagined that it was a silent escape hatch, a plan in the making. “How wonderful,” Elise managed to say.
“Why don’t you come, too? Start anew along with us.”
The thought of leaving France, returning home, had crossed Elise’s mind many times over the past two years. After all, she had moved to France to marry Olivier, and now she was alone. Her parents were gone, and she had lost touch with all her old friends back in the States, but there would be something comforting about being back on American soil, starting over in a place like New York where she could be anonymous. But then who would tend her daughter’s plot in the cemetery? “I can’t leave Mathilde, Ruth.”
Ruth took her hands. “You know she is not here anymore. Her grave might be, but Mathilde herself—”
“France is the only home Mathilde ever knew,” Elise said, cutting her off. “I—I simply cannot. I’m sorry.”
Ruth released her, and Elise could see in the other woman’s eyes that she’d known the answer all along. “Come visit us, then. When we get settled.”
“I will.” She knew it was what she was expected to say. Her heart ached as she realized that for the second time this decade, she was about to lose her only family. “When do you leave?”
“In two weeks’ time.”
“Two weeks?” Elise sat back, stunned. “Do Georges and Suzanne know?”
“They do. None of us quite knew how to tell you, Elise. You’ve been very good to us, but we need to stand on our own now, a fresh start.”
Elise arose from the table. The half-finished wing seemed to be beckoning to her, but was it telling her to stay or to walk away? She blinked at it a few times, but there were no signals from beyond hiding in her art. A wing was just a wing, and a broken heart was just a broken heart. “I’m going to bed,” she said, trying to keep her voice from wobbling, but Ruth must have heard it, because her eyes filled with tears again.
“Thank you, Elise. For everything.”
Elise forced a sad smile and then turned to go. She didn’t look back, but she could feel Ruth’s eyes on her as she walked hurriedly away.
* * *