Shattered Crystals - Mia Amalia Kanner (that summer book TXT) 📗

real coffee in almost four years. This extraordinary treat was legitimate. Lieutenant Dreyfus did not deal on the black market, nor did his father-in-law. It was Monsieur Meyer’s wife who was responsible for the coffee and an abundant supply of foods that were practically unobtainable in France in the winter of 1944.

Madame Meyer fell in love with the estate in the 1920s while vacationing in the area. Before returning to their home in Alsace, Monsieur Meyer bought the estate for her. In 1938, Madame Meyer became alarmed by the possibility of war and began to stock the mansion with coffee, tea, canned meats, fish and vegetables, sugar, flour, soap. When the war broke out in 1939, the couple fled from Alsace to the farm with their seventeen-year-old daughter. Soon after, Madame Meyer died in her country hideaway. The hoard she built up had already lasted more than four years, and the larder was still well stocked when I came in January, 1944.

The farm was an anachronism. Equally strange was its young mistress who took for granted its incredible abundance. An only child, she had been spoiled by her parents. At twenty-three, Madame Dreyfuss was tall, slender and beautiful. Idolized by her husband, she was indifferent to the suffering and deprivation not many miles away from her isolated world. She viewed me as a servant and had no idea that I had led any other life or had children of my own. She remained unaware of my incarceration in the camps. Sometimes I wondered if she had any idea of the danger her husband was in when he was away from her.

I worked extremely hard at the farm, harder than I had in the OSE kitchens where I cooked for more than one hundred people every day. At the farm, besides cooking, I cleaned the twelve-room house and took care of the child Michelle, who was not quite a year old.

What I found most difficult was the laundering. That was because there was a shortage of one essential item in that house—water. So I had to wash linens outdoors, using a washboard, kneeling on stones next to the stream. The wet tablecloths and sheets were heavy, and it took all my strength to wring them out and hang them on the line. It was not the hard work I minded. Hard work was a fair trade for my safety. What I minded was that Madame Dreyfus never showed any appreciation for my efforts. She was totally indifferent to the extreme difficulty of my task. For the first time since I had begun to work for other people, I felt degraded. I understood clearly why my mother had made me scrub our kitchen floor. She had wanted me to know how to direct our servants. More important, she had wanted me to know what it felt like to do these tasks. It was a lesson my young mistress had never learned.

In complete contrast to young Madame Dreyfus, her father treated me with unfailing courtesy and consideration. His kindness kept me going, that and Sal’s weekly visits on his free days.

After a short time at the railroad, Sal was offered work as a cook at the depot. He accepted, knowing the meals he was now expected to produce would have to be more complex than his contributions at the chemical factory cafeteria. Sal asked for the night-shift because then he would not have to prepare hot meals. During the hours he was on duty, sandwiches were the rule.

One day, however, when he filled in the order for the day chef, three workers brought Sal some rabbits.

“A treat for you, Keener, a chance to cook real meat,” the workman said. “How do you prepare rabbit?”

Sal had no idea, but said, “Leave it to me.”

He skinned the rabbits and pondered what to do next. The men were drinking in the dining room. Hearing their laughter, he had an inspiration. Wine is the answer. He cut the animals up, soaking the pieces in wine. Then he placed the chunks of meat in a saucepan, poured two more bottles of wine over them, and let the concoction simmer.

“Marvelous,” one of the men exclaimed when he began to eat the meal Sal had cooked.

“The best rabbit I ever had,” said the second.

When we heard the story, Monsieur Meyer and I could not stop laughing.

Another story Sal told was not so amusing. On his weekly visits to the farm, Sal always brought his dirty clothes for me to launder. He carried the laundry in a musette. Though he did not drink, he always had a bottle of wine in his bag, careful to leave the neck sticking out. He meant his satchel to look like those carried by other rail workers.

After a few weeks of going to and from the farm, he passed the Limoges checkpoint without fear. Upon reaching the bridge one day in February, he confidently pulled his railroad identification card from the musette and showed it to the two guards.

“Good, pass through,” one of them said.

He went blithely along until he heard a guard shout, “One moment, Monsieur, come back.”

Sal froze. He knew that the men were armed and that he would not be able to escape. Slowly, he made his way back toward the barricade. The guard was waving what looked like a dark strip of cloth. “Your sock,” he shouted. “When you opened your musette, you dropped your sock.”

With shaking hands, Sal stuffed the sock into his bag, too upset to thank the guard.

In truth, he should have, for he could not afford to lose the sock. I darned and re-darned Sal’s socks until there was more of my handiwork than of the original material.

I was myself desperately in need of clothes. When I left the OSE home in Vichy, I packed only one change of clothing. My underwear and stockings were worn out again. I had no clothing warm enough for a winter in the country. In the fifth year of the war, apparel was scarce in France. Even if I found something in the stores, it would have done me no good. Lieutenant Dreyfus had not supplied me with the ration card necessary to make any purchases in Limoges.

I began to think longingly of the clothes I had left in Vichy. When my slip tore one morning as I was pulling it over my head, I made my decision. I would travel to Vichy to retrieve my belongings. I could use the undergarments I had taken from the valise of the old woman from Mannheim. More than anything else, I wanted the warm burgundy dress I had fashioned out of the blanket.

Monsieur Meyer was doubtful about the undertaking. “I don’t mind your taking time off, Amalia,” he said. “But are you sure you want to take the seven hour-trip?”

I was sure. Wearing my old coat, I walked to Limoges one evening. Shabbily dressed and carrying a basket of bread and fruit, I looked no different from most of the women I saw in the station. Sal told me that the trains were crowded with women traveling to visit relatives. I expected to share a compartment with some of them. The patrol on the train rarely bothered asking local women for papers. Lieutenant Dreyfus assured me that the identification documents he gave me were perfect forgeries, but I did not want to have to prove that he was right.

I studied the schedules and purchased a round-trip ticket to Vichy. My train would not leave for another hour. The waiting room was crowded with civilian travelers and armed soldiers, but I found a seat on a wooden bench.

I watched the soldiers walking back and forth in front of me. I stared at their weapons and heard the sound of their boots pounding the stone floor. A rumbling voice over the loudspeaker confirmed that the Vichy train would depart at midnight, and still the soldiers marched back and forth, back and forth. I began to shake. Why were they in the station if not to arrest Resistance workers and Jews? Suppose one of them were to address me? My terror would show on my face and give me away before I had a chance to say one word.

It was insane for me to have come here, to sit exposed in the terminal, to undertake an all-night train trip, all for a few shabby pieces of clothing. On the farm I was never hungry, never saw guards or soldiers. How could I have forgotten Nexon and Gurs? It was madness to risk my life for a few bits to put on my back!

I waited for the patrol to pass me again. When I saw the backs of the soldiers, I rose from the bench and left the station. I walked along the city’s back streets to avoid the night patrol. Finally, I found a road that led back to the farm. It was a long walk, and it was dark, but I felt safe. God was with me.

It was past three o’clock in the morning when I reached the farm. As always at night, all the doors of the house were locked. I did not have a key. Unwilling to awaken the household, I decided to climb in through a window. The bathroom window was the only one not barred by an iron gate. It was the only way to get in.

An old log lay nearby. I rolled it toward the house, then steadied it against the wall. I stepped up on it and stretched my arms up. My hands reached the window ledge of the bathroom. I grasped the ledge and hoisted myself up. Suddenly, I felt a piercing pain in my back. Still, I clung to the sill with one hand and managed to push the window open with the other. Cold and exhausted, I climbed into the house and hobbled back to my room in the dark, every step renewing the piercing pain in my back.

By chance, a doctor came by the farm the next day. He was Dr. Levine, a cousin of Lieutenant Dreyfus, and no stranger to me. I knew him from the OSE homes. It was he who had sometimes cared for sick children. He examined me in my room and told me I had pulled a muscle in my back. “You should move as little as possible,” he said. “I advise you to rest in bed for two weeks.”

Monsieur Meyer insisted that I follow the doctor’s advice.

I lay in bed, and Madame Dreyfus pouted because she had to help her father-in-law with the cooking. Despite her ill humor, it finally occurred to the young woman that she had many more clothes than she could use and that she could have some of them altered to fit me.

After my foolish excursion to Limoges, I did not leave the farm again. The only risk I took was to listen to forbidden radio broadcasts from England on Monsieur Meyer’s short-wave radio. At night, Monsieur Mayer and I climbed up to the attic of the house. We crouched near the dimly glowing tubes of his radio, waiting anxiously for the start of the transmission. It always began with, “Ici Londres! Here is London!” magical words that always filled me with excitement and hope.

From the BBC, we learned that the Russians were pushing the Nazis back toward Germany and that the Allied armies were moving toward Italy. The news reports were interspersed with peculiar statements, unrelated to the war. “The lentils must be well cooked,” listeners were advised. “The cabbage crop is endangered,” we heard on another night. Monsieur Meyer explained that these statements were messages to the Maquis, the French Resistance fighters, who were extremely active in the spring of 1944.

Anything British and American bombers could not