Free One Hundred Twenty-One Days by Michèle Audin, Christiana Hills Page A

crossed the Demarcation Line a few days after it had become mandatory to wear the star, just before the big roundups in July. Only Mireille and her mother were mentioned in the previous sentences because Mireille’s father died “ pour la France ” during the fighting that took place in May 1940. As for the star, it came up because French law had decided that Mireille’s mother Nicole, with a maiden name of Gorenstein, was Jewish, and therefore so was Mireille. This imposed Jewishness was a novelty for the two women. It did not accompany any religious beliefs, any rituals, any family traditions—in fact, not one specific thing Nicole and Mireille could have possibly shared with other “Jews” or “half-Jews.” What’s more, the women had thought for a few weeks afterwards that because Mireille’s father, a Parisian lawyer from a family of practicing Catholics (though he himself was an atheist and a free thinker), had been killed in action, they would be protected from the anti-Semitic decrees of October 1940. They had quickly understood that that wouldn’t be the case. But now it was over, France was going to be free, they were going to live again.
    In September, when there was fighting around Metz (because the war wasn’t actually over), Mireille and her mother arrived in Paris, the same day the leaders of what had been previously known as the French State were taking refuge in Sigmaringen, Germany.On Rue de Médicis, the women’s apartment had been emptied of all its furniture. They found the dining room table and chairs with a neighbor, who had kept them in expectation of the women’s return (so she said). But they would never know what became of the rosewood desk and bookcase from the law office, or the bathtub. The fact that all the books had disappeared upset them more than the loss of their armchairs, beds, linens, or dishes. Living again… Yes. To start, one had to find mattresses to sleep on. Eating again… not quite yet. So much energy was needed to procure something to eat. Something to cover up with, as well, because autumn, cool and wet, had arrived. So much time was lost in the displacements. The price of a bicycle was unimaginable. Fortunately, certain sections of the metro were starting to work again, when there was electricity.
    It was over. People were reconnecting, writing to friends with whom they’d been out of touch, for years in most cases. Some wrote back, others didn’t. People were visiting each other. Information was spreading. Letters arrived from a cousin who was being detained as a prisoner of war. One of Mireille’s neighbors and classmates was beaten and her head was shaved in public, all because someone claimed to have seen her walking with a German soldier in the Jardin du Luxembourg. One of Nicole’s cousins, a brilliant young professor and the head of a Resistance network, had been denounced as a Jew by a fellow Frenchman and hanged. Another was said to have been killed along with his wife by the French Militia; both were supposedly found later with insulting words written on their bodies. Yet another had been shot for acts of resistance. Or deported to Germany.
    But of the ones sent there, there was almost no information.
    Since the women’s return, Mireille’s mother had received news of her brother Robert, who was confined to the Saint-Maurice psychiatric hospital, and with whom she had not been able to communicate for several years. Like the other patients, he had mainly suffered from the lack of food during the occupation, but he had really made the best of the situation, having even managed to publish mathematics articles under a pseudonym that he had abandoned as soon as the liberation of Paris was announced—proof that he had continued to be interested in current events. That’s what the psychiatrist, a Doctor Busoni, wrote to Nicole in his response to her letter. She went, a little on the metro and a lot on foot, to the hospital, which she hadn’t done