Tell No One Who You Are Read Online Free PDF Page A

to beat back the crowd. Their shouts could be heard over the screams.
    A sudden jolt from behind almost caused her to fall over. She held firmly onto her father, who was supporting her mother. Two soldiers pushed their way through the crowd, and came toward them. In the confusion, she realized they were pulling her brother away. She must say good-bye, but she couldn’t remember what she had planned. She grabbed his arm and she blurted out the only thing she could think of: “Don’t work too hard for the Germans.” It sounded like a joke and she regretted it. Then he was gone, a prisoner of the two soldiers, as they pushed him through the crowd toward the front gate. Her parents stood dazed beside her.
    Her mother broke into sobs, burying her face in herhusband’s chest. They had not been able to say good-bye to Léon at all.
    All around people screamed and shouted as the soldiers continued separating men from their relatives and pushing them into the station. They swung clubs to keep the crowd away from the entrance. Régine thought she saw her brother’s head among those going in, but she wasn’t sure. There would be no final embraces on the station platform.
    She took her place beside her mother, her father on the other side. Together the three began the long, slow walk home. Each time they would stop to rest her mother gave a choking sob. They could still hear the soldiers off in the distance shouting:
    “Raus! Raus! Juden Raus!”

Chapter Ten
    A FEW DAYS LATER Régine was sent away to a summer camp run by Solidarité. She should have enjoyed it, but thoughts of her brother came back, not just at night before she went to sleep, but even in the daytime when she tried to laugh with the others.
    When Régine came home from camp a month later, her mother was back in the hospital.
    Régine remembered the first time her mother entered the hospital. It was the only time she ever saw her father cry. Régine had visited her every afternoon after school with her father and brother, and the three of them stayed until the nurses told them to leave.
    Régine had sat on the edge of her mother’s bed and told her everything she was learning in school. Mademoiselle Descotte, her teacher, had shown the class how to knit, and Régine promised to teach her mother when she came back home.
    Régine kept her promise. She showed her mother how to knit. Léon, too, wanted to learn, and the three of them knitted a long scarf. But her mother had changed. She had even less energy. She took the medicine from the bottles that bore a skull and crossbones on their labels and every few months she returned to the hospital for injections that left her covered with bruises.
    Now back from camp and again standing at her bedside in the hospital, Régine was shocked to see how much thinner her mother had become. The hand held out to her seemed only bones, not at all like the strong hands that had ground nuts and stretched dough over the tabletop. Her mother tried to smile at Régine but the pain came through in her mother’s voice as she spoke: “I’m sorry you have to see me like this.”
    Her father stood by in silence and remained silent during the walk home. That evening Régine found out why.
    Her father sat Régine down on the sofa in the flat and sat down beside her. “I have something important to tell you,” he began. He looked more nervous than she had ever seen him. “You know Monsieur Gaspar, don’t you?”
    Monsieur Gaspar was the father of Jeanne Demers, the upstairs neighbor whose husband had been taken away by the Germans. She had moved out but her father had stayed on. He and Régine’s father always stopped to talk when they met on the stair landing.
    “I was speaking with him just this morning,” her father said. “He said maybe we should get some help.”
    “Yes?”
    “He said we should find someone who will take care of you. Just for a little while. I think it’s a good idea.”
    Régine frowned. “You mean Madame