Or had she? Markie pressed her eyes closed and tried to remember. “About Canada,” Mrs. Saint had said, “I want to tell you about this, too.” Then Patty had walked in, and Mrs. Saint said they would discuss it another time, and the time had never come. Well, here it was. Markie opened her eyes and waited for Simone to explain.
“Ah yes,” Simone said. “I see what has happened here. What my sister has done. But we did not grow up in Quebec. We are from Germany. Breslau, to be precise. We left in 1938, right after we turned seven. And then we lived for some time in France. Matias and Lea”—she nodded to the two older children in the photo—“made it partway to France with us, but they were detained before we arrived.”
“Did you say 1938?” Markie asked. “How could you have been seven in 1938 when you’re only seventy-five years old?”
“We turned eighty-five in June,” Simone said.
“Of course you did,” Markie said. “Of course you are an entire decade older than she admitted to.”
But Simone appeared not to have heard. Clutching the photo to her chest, she stood and crossed to the window overlooking her sister’s ruined house. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against the window, and Markie wondered if it were an effort to be closer to her twin.
Quietly, Simone spoke into the glass. “The camp our brother and sister were taken to was called Drancy. It was a work camp. From there, they were sent to another. Auschwitz-Birkenau. A death camp.”
“Oh my God!” Markie said.
She rose, thinking she would rush to Simone, but something in the way the older woman stood, facing her sister’s house while she clutched the photo, made it seem like she wanted to be left alone with her siblings, so Markie lowered herself back to the love seat.
“We left Breslau as soon as we could,” Simone said, her voice still quiet, as though perhaps she were talking to herself. “On the train. We packed everything we could into a few small packs. But you had to be careful about what you took. You had to make it look like you were going for a day only, a simple, innocent little family outing before you were all to return home again.
“So you could take some clothes, maybe a few photos. If they looked in your bag and saw a family’s most valuable possessions—the silver candlesticks, say—they would know you were trying to leave, and you would be sent straight home, your tickets confiscated. The candlesticks, too.
“Of course, this meant we could also not take Matias’s dog, Bella.” Simone held the photo so Markie could see it. “You see how he looks to the side?”
Markie glanced at the photo and nodded at what she had noticed before, that Matias was looking outside the frame, and his oldest sister was trying to get him to redirect his attention to the photographer.
“He was always looking at Bella—or playing with her or running after her. He got her when we were born, you see, so they had been together a long time. I think our parents felt he would be outnumbered with three sisters. Funny that they got him a female dog in that case, but it did not matter to Matias. He loved the three of us and our parents, we all knew this, but he adored no other being like he adored Bella.”
Simone laughed softly, and a furtive smile appeared on her lips for an instant before fading. “To see him have to part with that dog before we left for the station, it was . . .”
A low moan escaped her, and she covered her mouth with a hand. Markie was wiping her own eyes when Simone spoke again. “None of it mattered anyway,” she said. “The careful packing we did. Matias giving up Bella. None of it got us what we had hoped. We had not acted soon enough. There were Nazis at every station by then, on every train car it seemed, and Matias and Lea were so healthy and strong. And they were old enough, you see.
“Angeline and I, we were too young, too weak, too useless. Although they would have taken us, too, I think, now that I have read about their . . . interest in twins.” Simone held a hand over her mouth briefly, and Markie, having read the horrifying reports of Dr. Mengele’s experiments, almost gagged.
“But our mother was sick that day,” Simone went on, “and she could only handle one of us. A woman on the train offered to take the other, and she was sitting many rows back, so when the soldiers came through, they did not realize we were a pair. My mother’s illness probably saved us.
“If only Matias or Lea had gotten sick as well, if they had caught whatever cold or flu our mother had. I have thought of this so many times. If only they had looked pale, unhealthy. If only they had not dressed so smartly for the train, sat up so straight, so obediently—”
Simone choked on her words then and covered her face with the photograph, and Markie’s eyes overflowed as she rushed to the window and put her arms around the older woman.
“I’m sorry,” Markie said. “Oh my God, Simone. I am so, so sorry.”
They embraced for a time, until Simone withdrew herself from Markie’s arms and drew a fingertip under each eye, wiping her tears.
“I am okay,” she said. “Thank you. But I am . . . I have made peace about this, as one must, in order to live. If you remain bitter after so many years, you will . . .” She made a circular motion with her hand, the same kind Angeline had made so many times when searching for a word in English. “I can now talk about it without wanting to commit a crime against another person. Many other people. This is progress.”
“What a dreadful, dreadful thing for you to have gone through,” Markie said. “When you were only children.”
Simone looked out the window again, at what was left of her sister’s house. “Och,” she whispered to the glass. “We were never children.”
She stood quietly for some time, and then she gestured to the love seat, and they returned there together, Simone staring at the photograph of the four children, lost in thought, Markie’s mind swirling with questions, guesses, wishes. She hoped the twins and their parents had timed it just right, arriving in the south of France while traffic was still allowed out of the ports. That they had managed to get on a ship and sail to Cuba, then to the United States, like so many she had read about.
“They hid us,” Simone said. She had been quiet so long that the sound of her voice startled Markie. “There is a town in France, in the Haute-Loire department, in what was the unoccupied region. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, it is called. It was a town full of Protestants who made it their purpose to hide Jews. Quite an extraordinary thing, non?
“Such a risk to them, and still they did this. And not because we were their neighbors, their friends. The people who came to this town, seeking help—people like Angeline and me and our parents—were strangers, from other parts of France or from Germany. Yet without a question, the townspeople said yes, we will help you.
“Many, they smuggled into Switzerland, after making false papers for them. What a chance they took, breaking the laws this way, to help those people escape. Others, they hid until the liberation. Five thousand in all, it is thought, were saved by the brave people of this single town. Mostly children. Imagine! Five thousand! C’est incroyable!” Simone clucked in amazement.