Children of War: A Bruno Courrèges Investigation (Bruno Chief of Police 8) Read online

  The usual mail was on his desk and atop the pile lay an envelope, addressed to the Mayor and already opened. A yellow Post-it note was attached which asked, in the Mayor’s careful handwriting, for Bruno to deal with the contents. ‘This comes as news to me,’ the Mayor had added.

  The envelope was of heavy paper, and the name and address of a Paris law firm was embossed on the flap. The address was on the Rue de la Paix, which Bruno knew to be close to the Opéra, a desirable and presumably expensive location. Bruno skimmed the opening greetings and then, increasingly fascinated, sat down in his swivel chair to read.

  The lawyer, who signed himself Yacov Kaufman, was acting for the estate of a client who had recently died, a wealthy Parisian doctor named David Halévy. The will provided for a bequest to the town of St Denis in gratitude for the shelter it had given him and his sister when they were children during the war. The doctor and his sister were Jews, and the town had probably saved their lives. The bequest, however, was somewhat complicated and the lawyer proposed that the Mayor let him know a convenient day to visit the town and discuss the matter. Bruno noted that one of the partners in the law firm was also named Halévy, and then he sat back to reflect. He knew quite a lot of the town’s history, but he had never heard of Jewish refugees being given sanctuary.

  The Mayor, who had for several years been writing a definitive history of the town where he had been born and bred, was the real expert on local history. He would know of any refugees being taken in, if anyone did. But he’d already seen the letter, confessed ignorance and had asked Bruno to take care of the matter. Bruno called Jo, his predecessor as town policeman, and at the same fired up his computer to google David Halévy, médecin. Jo had been in the village school in the war years, and while there had been a lot of refugee kids, mainly those of French stock who were expelled from Alsace once the Germans took control, he didn’t recall any Jews, or anyone named David.

  Google provided an obituary in Alliance, a Jewish Internet-magazine, which revealed that David Halévy, a retired surgeon and professor of medicine and a member of the Légion d’Honneur, had died the previous week at the age of eighty of a heart attack at his home on the Boulevard St Germain in Paris. He had never married and had no children, and was survived by a sister, Maya, who lived in Israel. The obituary listed a number of publications, the older ones on problems of the heart and circulation and the more recent articles relating to the links between psychology and health. Which was he, Bruno wondered, a heart surgeon or a psychologist? The obituary added one interesting detail, that Professor Halévy had for many years been the honorary president of the Eclaireurs Israélites, the Jewish Boy Scouts.

  Bruno called the lawyer’s number in Paris, identified himself and was put through to Maître Kaufman, who instantly asked if he was speaking with the Mayor of St Denis. Bruno explained that the Mayor had asked him to make a preliminary inquiry about the bequest.

  ‘I will need to go into this with your Mayor, but I can say that the instructions from Professor Halévy were somewhat complex,’ Kaufman said in a formal, almost old-fashioned French, although his voice sounded young.

  ‘Might I just clarify,’ said Bruno. ‘We are talking of Professor David Halévy and his sister Maya. That’s an unusual name.’

  ‘You know of them already?’ Kaufman asked, excitement coming into his hitherto formal voice.

  ‘Just the names, David and Maya; am I pronouncing that right?’

  ‘Yes, it means water in Hebrew. When they were in hiding she called herself Marie. Those are the two children. The Professor hoped that his bequest could be used to fund some form of memorial to the people in St Denis who had risked their lives on his behalf. Depending on the nature of the memorial, the bequest could be significantly increased. That is why this is more complicated than a simple bequest.’

  Bruno felt confused. ‘Does this mean this is some kind of test? If we come up with the right kind of memorial the bequest will be more generous?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘But Professor Halévy is dead, so who decides whether the memorial justifies a larger bequest?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘His executors, who include his younger sister. She was also given refuge in St Denis and has very fond memories of the region.’

  ‘Could you give me some idea of the kind of money Professor Halévy had in mind?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to reveal the potential sum, I’m sorry. But I can say that the initial bequest, whatever memorial you plan or even if you don’t produce a memorial, is fifty thousand euros.’

  ‘Mon Dieu,’ said Bruno, thinking that St Denis might even be able to afford the indoor sports hall that he’d been raising money for with jumble sales and collection boxes. ‘He must have been a wealthy man.’

  ‘Indeed. Now, when would it be convenient for me to call and pay my respects to your Mayor?’

  ‘I’ll ask him and get back to you by email. Just one more thing,’ Bruno said. ‘This all happened a long time ago and most of that wartime generation are dead. Did Professor Halévy provide any details about his time in St Denis, his hosts, where they lived, perhaps his schooling?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I only know that it was thought unsafe for him and his sister to go to school. They studied alone, at the farmhouse where they lived.’

  ‘With the farmer’s wife?’ Bruno asked. ‘Do you have her name?’

  ‘Sorry, no. I’ll look out for your email about coming down to see the Mayor.’ He rang off.

  Bruno sat back, pondering how to start finding out about two children living in secrecy some seventy years ago. He looked out of his window at the familiar scene below, the old stone bridge over the river Vézère, the square full of parked cars and locals gossiping by the postbox. The tables at Fauquet’s café were filled with people caught in that curious morning moment when it was neither too late for coffee nor too early for an apéritif, and some of the customers had compromised by ordering both. The buildings were mostly unchanged, and he tried to imagine how it would have been seventy years ago, with no cars because there was no petrol, except for the occasional German staff car or military truck. The streets would have been patrolled by Vichy’s Milice in their black berets and the shops would have been mostly empty because of food rationing.

  He remembered Jo, reminiscing about his wartime childhood, saying the men were always unshaven because of a shortage of razor blades, and the children had their heads shaved against lice. The women would paint a thin black line up the back of their legs, an attempt to suggest the seams of the stockings that were no longer available. In his family, Jo recalled, they had washed with bran soaked in water because there was no soap. On the posters outside the Mairie the watchwords of the French Republic – Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – had been replaced by Vichy’s slogan: Patrie, Famille, Travail, Homeland, Family, Work.

  Bruno sighed at the thought of France, of his own village, defeated, occupied and humiliated. But he knew there had been sparks and small flames of resistance, young men living rough in the woods to escape the forced labour conscription to Germany, and others gathering in the small hours to light the beacons that would guide the Royal Air Force planes that would drop guns and explosives. And there had been somebody risking arrest and torture to hide Jewish children. No wonder it had been kept secret. Bruno braced himself and turned back to his quest.

  There was no synagogue in St Denis but Daniel Weiss, a local insurance broker whom Bruno knew through the tennis club, was a member of the congregation in Périgueux. He called Weiss, explained the situation and asked his advice.

  ‘I’d start with the rabbi, but leave it to me,’ Weiss said. ‘Let me be sure I’ve got the details right – David and Maya Halévy, here in 1943 and 1944. I’ll see if anybody in the community knows anything, though I can’t say I ever heard of any Jewish children being sheltered here. We came long after the European war.’

  For Daniel Weiss and his family, and many others who came to France from Algeria, t
he phrase ‘the war’ meant the bloody insurrection and guerrilla war that finally secured Algerian independence in 1961. The Second World War was always ‘the European war’.

  ‘If I were you I’d start by asking the Shoah Foundation in Paris; they keep a lot of records. You might also try Yad Vashem, the big research centre in Israel for Holocaust studies,’ Weiss added. ‘That’s probably the biggest database and they’re on the Internet. It would be quite something if St Denis were to join Les Justes, the Righteous among Nations; that’s the list of people and places honoured for risking their lives to save Jews.’

  ‘Indeed it would. Let me know if the rabbi comes up with anything.’

  Bruno hung up and looked through his notes. He did another Google search to get an address and phone number in Paris for the Shoah Foundation and for the Jewish Boy Scouts. He then opened the website for Yad Vashem and began to explore, looking for references to France. In a section called Torchlighters, he came upon the thumbnail photo of a woman named Denise Siekierski with a French flag beside her name, and opened it. In a short filmed interview, interspersed with still photos of the young woman in wartime and then of German soldiers herding people onto railway wagons, Bruno heard her say, ‘In the Scouts, we learned to serve, and at that time that meant saving Jews.’

  Fascinated, he listened to her account of working with Protestant pastors to smuggle Jews out of Marseille and then to find refuge for dozens of Jewish children in the remote villages of the Auvergne. He began to look further, but caught himself. This always happened on the Internet; one thing led to another and before he knew it, hours had flown by and he did not have the time. But he had an idea. This was the kind of research project that would interest Florence, the science teacher at the local collège and founder of its very popular computer club. If there was anything about the Halévy children on the Internet, they could find it.

  First he had to see the Mayor. ‘You’re the town historian,’ he began. ‘Do you know anything about Jewish refugees in St Denis during the war?’

  The Mayor shook his head. ‘I never heard of any Jews round here, and I can’t understand why not. I’d have thought people would have been proud of it, after the war. It sounds odd to me; that’s why I want you to look into it. Tell me about this bequest the lawyer mentioned. Is it serious, do you think?’

  ‘Very serious. The lawyer wants to come down and talk to you directly.’ Bruno explained the unusual nature of David Halévy’s will and the prospect of more money if his executors approved the memorial. ‘But I need to make more inquiries. We need to know something about these children, when they were here, where they stayed, who cared for them and who brought them here.’

  ‘You might want to check the town archives in the basement,’ the Mayor suggested. ‘There are still files down there from the Vichy years. There might be ration cards or school enrolment lists that may have some trace of the children.’

  ‘I’m going to be tied up seeing Momu and the Brigadier, and nobody knows those archives like you do …’ Bruno let his voice trail away.

  ‘Point taken.’ The Mayor smiled, and Bruno was relieved to see that the old man suddenly looked rather less tired. ‘Leave the archives to me. It will make a pleasant change from fighting against cuts in the roads budget.’

  Bruno headed back to the collège. Florence had started the computer club soon after being hired as a science teacher. She began by rescuing discarded laptops from the town’s déchetterie, then persuaded local businesses and the Mairie to donate their old computers and convinced France Télécom to provide free Internet access. Half the school was now enrolled, learning to write programs, tackle viruses and engage in video conferences with pupils in twinned schools in Scotland and Holland. The latest project was to build an online game and hope to sell it.

  ‘I’m sure they’ll love the idea of tracking down Jewish children in St Denis, but after what just happened to you, Bruno, you’ll have to convince me that it won’t be dangerous,’ Florence said, spooning out a thick tomato soup to her twin toddlers. Living in one of the subsidized apartments for teachers in a block adjoining the school, she could quickly go home for lunch with her children before taking them back to the maternelle for the rest of the afternoon. She handed Bruno a bowl of soup and scattered some basil leaves on top before serving herself.

  ‘It will be up to them, of course, to decide whether to take this project on,’ she said. ‘I can recommend it and you might want to come along and explain why it’s important. But the whole point about this club is that the kids have to run it.’

  ‘I’ll be happy to do so. This bequest could be worth a lot of money to the town,’ he said. ‘This soup is great.’

  ‘We made the herbs and tomatoes,’ little Daniel told him proudly. ‘We made the garden with maman and water it every day. That’s basilic in your soup and I planted it.’

  ‘I put in the lettuce,’ said his twin, Dora. ‘We want a garden as big as yours, Bruno, and maybe have chickens like you.’

  ‘You already have the chickens in the school garden maman made,’ said Bruno. He’d been impressed by the way Florence had persuaded Rollo and the education department that getting the collège pupils to create their own garden and raise their own chickens was the best way of teaching them environmental science. Once upon a time almost every pupil in the school had come from one of the surrounding farms and was raised knowing about animals and crops. But those days were long gone and more and more of the kids thought that food came from supermarkets. Bruno reckoned that something of traditional France had died when a sandwich ceased to mean a baguette stuffed with ham and cheese and became sliced bread with some dubious filling, sold in triangles of plastic wrapping.

  ‘Would you like to share the omelette I’m making to go with Dora’s salad?’ Florence asked from the stove. ‘They’re our own eggs.’

  ‘I’d love to, but I have to go. I should have been at the Gendarmerie ten minutes ago,’ Bruno said, wiping his lips, finishing his glass of mineral water and kissing the children goodbye. ‘Let me know when I should come and talk to your computer club. And thanks for that delicious soup.’

  6

  Bruno barely registered the calls of ‘Au ’voir’ and ‘À demain’ and the clatter of feet on old stone stairs as the Mairie closed for the day. He was rapt, eyes fixed on his computer screen, making notes as he read the material the Shoah Foundation had sent him on the Eclaireurs Israélites de France, the Jewish Boy Scouts, and their founder, Robert Gamzon.

  Bruno had long been fascinated by the tangled myths and realities of the Resistance and the various underground movements that sometimes seemed as concerned with political rivalries as with fighting the Nazi occupation and the Vichy régime. He had read widely, talked at length to some of the survivors and thought he knew the subject quite well. But now he felt on a voyage of discovery, learning something that was at once entirely new to him and deeply moving. It revealed a whole aspect of what it meant to be French.

  He learned that France had not one Scout movement, but four. There was one for the Roman Catholics, another for the Protestants, yet another for the Jews and now one for the Muslims. Nor had he known how prescient many of his countrymen had been, beyond De Gaulle and that handful of politicians who had sounded the alarm on Nazi aggression in the 1930s.

  Robert Gamzon, an engineer and devoted member of the Boy Scouts, had been one of them. When the British and French governments signed the Munich pact in September 1938, surrendering Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s demands, Gamzon acted. As founder and commissioner for the Jewish Scouts, Gamzon bought a farm near Saumur to establish a school for Jewish refugees from Germany. At the same time he raised money to buy houses in remote rural areas and began moving into them Jewish children from the cities. Convinced of the Nazis’ intentions towards the Jews and fearing the prospect of France’s defeat, he thought it an essential precaution. He moved the administrative centre of his Scout movement to Moissac, deep in south-western France, and
persuaded those of his scoutmasters who were too old for military service to move to the south and set up more safe houses.

  Gamzon himself went into the French army. In May 1940 he won the Croix de Guerre for blowing up the main telephone switchboard and control system in Reims while under fire. After Marshal Pétain took power amid the French collapse and sued for peace, Gamzon headed south to establish schools for the children he had moved to the countryside. There he launched another organization to help the Jewish refugees who had fled to France from elsewhere in Europe. They were now being pushed into internment camps, by the Nazis and the Vichy government in the truncated southern half of France nominally ruled by them.

  Through contacts he made in Vichy, Gamzon established an intelligence network that warned him of planned arrests and round-ups. This was the origin of the Sixième, the clandestine wing of the Scouts, which forged documents and provided fake identities and ration papers, and found jobs in hospitals and on farms.

  Meanwhile, his wife Denise was based at Moissac, which had become a sanctuary for Jewish refugees. But the noose was tightening in the summer of 1942 when the Vichy police began the rafles, the raids to round up Jews. In Paris on 16 July, over 13,000 Jews were rounded up in Opération Vent Printanier, Operation Spring Breeze, and handed over to the German authorities A third of them were children, and Bruno was sickened to read that several thousand members of the French fascist party helped the police arrest and cram them into Paris’s Vélodrome d’Hiver to await the trains that led to Germany and finally to the death camp at Auschwitz.

  Shortly before that rafle, Denise had received a phone call from her husband who said only, ‘Send back the bills for 1936.’ When she protested there were no such bills, he replied, ‘Think.’ Deducing that he meant the Jews who had arrived that year in France she sent the three men concerned into the woods. At dawn the next day the house was raided by Gendarmes. Denise then contacted an old friend, Hélène Rulland, who ran the Protestant Girl Guides. Hélène found remote villages to hide another thirty Jewish children.