Elodie

“Oh look, the first daffodils are out,” I said.

The old lady sat near me on a bench in the Tuileries gardens in Paris. Drab, tired clothes on a small, huddled frame; a hat and coat from a long-past era. Her head lifted and her lips drew to a half-smile that as quickly faded. Her head turned to me and I realised she was blind.

“Oh you can’t see them!”

“No my dear but I like to know that the daffodils are out again.”

“Yes, it’s lovely to see them after a long, cold winter.”

“Ah,” she sighed. “Winters come and then they go. They always go.”

“You sound sad.”

“I am always sad.”

“Well I hope that the daffodils and the warmth of the sun make you happier.”

“That’s very kind.” She paused, then: “You don’t sound like a little girl.”

“No, I am a grandmother,” I laughed. “But…oh dear, why are you crying?”

“Ah, my dear,” She dabbed her eyes with a small linen handkerchief. “I had a little girl once. I used to come here with her when the daffodils were blooming. She loved them. They made her laugh and dance because they meant the roses and tulips would soon bloom and the days would be warmer and the world would be bright and alive. The daffodils made her dance.”

“She must have been a lovely little girl.”

“She was like a flower, like sunshine – laughing and dancing and looking for the good in people and everything. She wanted everyone to be happy and to waltz around the flower beds with her. Children are tiring so I usually said no when she tried to get me to dance. Now I wish I could have just one more moment to dance with my beautiful little Elodie.”

“She is grown up now?”

“No, no, she went away.”

“Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Where did she go?”

“If I knew I would follow her to the ends of the earth, but I do not know. I have never been able to find out.”

“Why…what happened?”

“I was married to a good man. Jean Costantino. His name was Gianluigi but he preferred Jean in France. We were sitting together here and Elodie was dancing and singing. Jean had to go to his workshop to finish some boots he was making for a carter. Elodie begged to go with him – she loved talking to him while he worked. He looked at me to see if it was OK, and I laughed and nodded, of course. ‘I’ll see you later at home,’ I said.”

She paused and raised her head towards the sky she could not see.

“He took her away … and I never saw her again.”

The air seemed to dry and harden. I looked at her, now facing outwards and upwards, searching the darkness for her lost little Elodie.

“When did this happen?” I ventured.

She was silent for a minute and I wondered if she would answer, but then she said quietly: “It was July 1942. They were probably taken to the Vel’ d’Hiv. He was Jewish you know.”

“Oh dear. I am so sorry, but what is the Vel’ d’Hiv?”

“The Velodrome d’Hiver. July 16 and 17 the French police – yes, Frenchmen! - rounded up over 13,000 foreign Jews in Paris including about 4,000 children and held them in the velodrome without food or water or toilets and then sent them to Drancy and then in trains to Auschwitz.”

That word, that dreadful word. I stared at the daffodils, imagining a little girl dancing.

“Now you are silent. I understand,” she said. “No act is so awful that people cannot be found to carry it out.

“You know the youngest child taken then from Paris to Auschwitz and killed was 18 months old.

“The police were helped by thousands of French members of Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français. People forget that France had its own nazis, just like England had its brownshirts.

“What is it about an idea that can turn humans into uncaring monsters? There would have been police and guards at the Vel’ d’Hiv with little French sisters just like my Elodie, but because her father was a Jew, that single idea in their minds changed her, in their minds, from a sweet little girl to a thing of no value.

“Why did people allow lies to have such power over them? Were their minds so weak? Did their parents not teach them that doing good is the way to heaven? Are our human brains so badly made that they absorb and spout such beliefs without questioning?”

She shook her head and slumped a little.

“Those are big questions - hard to answer.”

“I am sorry. I do it so I don’t become angry. No, in fact my anger faded a long time ago. Now I only have sadness, forever sadness, and too much time to think.”

“Did you ever hear anything of your daughter?”

“I clung for years to the hope that she had been adopted by Government or police people who wanted a daughter and that she would come back and find me, but I think the most likely end is that she died in a gas chamber.”

We watched a young couple walked past us, arm in arm, with an exuberant spaniel puppy on a lead.

“Life happens and then you are old,” she said. “The older you get the more past you have and the less future. But only the future can be changed.”

An old man walked towards us, using a cane for support, his eyes focused on the old lady.

“Agnes,” he said as he approached, in faintly accented French.

“Ah here he is,” she said. “I was just talk to this lady. I am afraid it was the same old diatribe Jean.”

He tutted, and took her arm as she stood up.

“How… how are you here?” I stuttered. This could not be the Jean who had been taken to Auschwitz, surely?

“I am sorry my love, I have told her too much,” the lady said to the old man. She turned to me and said: “Not everybody died my dear. Some came back. My Jean came back.”

“The daffodils are out my love,” he said to her.

“I know, I know,” she said. “The little girl told me.”

The old man tipped his hat to me and led her away.  

My husband approached down the gravel path, nodding to them as he passed.

“Elodie,” he said to me. “Have you been interrogating old people again?”

…