The girl felt like she had become someone else. Someone hard, and rude, and wild. Sometimes she fought with the older children, the ones who tried to grab the old stale bread she had found. She swore at them. She hit them. She felt dangerous, savage.

At first, she had not looked at the smaller children. They reminded her too much of her brother. But now, she felt she had to help them. They were vulnerable, small. So pathetic. So dirty. A lot of them had diarrhea. Their clothes were caked with shit. There was no one to wash them, no one to feed them.

Little by little, she came to know their names, their ages, but some of them were so small they could hardly answer her. They were thankful for a warm voice, for a smile, a kiss, and they followed her around the camp, dozens of them, trailing after her like bedraggled sparrows.

She would tell them the stories she used to tell her brother, before his bedtime. At night, lying on the lice-infested straw, where rats made rustling noises, she would whisper the stories, making them even longer than they usually were. The older children gathered around, too. Some of them pretended not to listen, but she knew they did.

There was an eleven-year-old girl, a tall black-haired creature called Rachel, who often looked at her with a touch of contempt. But night after night, she listened to the stories, creeping closer to the girl, so that she wouldn’t miss one word. And once, when most of the little children were at last asleep, she spoke to the girl.

She said in a deep, hoarse voice, “We should leave. We should escape.”

The girl shook her head.

“There is no way out. The police have guns. We can’t escape.”

Rachel shrugged her bony shoulders.

“I am going to escape.”

“What about your mother? She will be waiting for you in the other camp, like mine.”

Rachel smiled.

“You believed all that? You believed what they said?”

The girl hated Rachel’s knowing smile.

“No,” she said firmly. “I didn’t believe them. I don’t believe anything anymore.”

“Neither do I,” said Rachel. “I saw what they did. They didn’t even write down the little children’s names properly. They tied on those small tags that got mixed up when most of the children took them off again. They don’t care. They lied to all of us. To us and to our mothers.”

And to the girl’s surprise, Rachel reached out and took her hand. She held it tight, the way Armelle used to. Then she got to her feet and disappeared.

The next morning, they were woken very early. The policemen came into the barracks, pushing at them with their truncheons. The smaller children, hardly awake, started to scream. The girl tried to calm the ones nearest to her, but they were terrified. They were led into a shed. The girl held two toddlers by the hand. She saw a policeman holding an instrument in his hand. It had a strange shape. She didn’t know what it was. The toddlers gasped with fear, backed away. They were slapped and kicked by the policemen, then dragged toward the man with the instrument. The girl watched, horrified. Then she understood. Their hair was being shaved off. All the children were to be shaved.

She looked on as Rachel’s thick black hair fell to the floor. Her naked skull was white and pointed, like an egg. Rachel gazed at the men with hatred and contempt. She spat on their shoes. One of the gendarmes knocked her aside brutally.

The little ones were frantic. They had to be held down by two or three men. When it was her turn, the girl did not struggle. She bent her head. She felt the cold pressure of the machine and closed her eyes, unable to bear the sight of the long, golden strands falling to her feet. Her hair. Her beautiful hair that everyone admired. She felt sobs welling up in her throat but she forced herself not to cry. Never cry in front of these men. Never cry. Ever. It’s only hair. Hair will grow back.

It was nearly over. She opened her eyes again. The policeman holding her had fat pink hands. She looked up at him while the other man shaved off the last locks.

It was the red-haired, friendly policeman from her neighborhood. The one her mother used to chat with. The one who always had a wink for her on her way to school. The one she had waved to the day of the roundup, the one who had looked away. He was too close now to look away.

She held his gaze, not glancing down once. His eyes were a strange, yellowish color, like gold. His face was red with embarrassment, and she thought she felt him tremble. She said nothing, staring at him with all the contempt she could muster.

He could only look back at her, motionless. The girl smiled, a bitter smile for a child of ten, and brushed off his heavy hands.

I LEFT THE NURSING HOME in a sort of daze. I was due at the office, where Bamber was waiting for me, but I found myself heading back to the rue de Saintonge. There were so many questions going around my head that I felt swamped. Was Mamé telling the truth or had she gotten mixed up, confused, due to her illness? Had there really been a Jewish family living here? How could the Tézacs have moved in and not known anything, as Mamé had stated?

I walked slowly through the courtyard. The concierge’s loge would have been here, I thought. It had been transformed years ago into a small apartment. A row of metal mailboxes lined the hallway; there was no longer a concierge who brought mail up every day to each door. Madame Royer, that was her name, Mamé had said. I had read much about concierges and their particular role during the arrests. Most of them had complied with police orders, and some had even gone further, showing the police where certain Jewish families had gone into hiding. Others had plundered vacant apartments and hoarded goods right after the roundup. Only a few, I read, had protected the Jewish families the best they could. I wondered what sort of role Madame Royer had played here. I thought fleetingly of my concierge on the boulevard du Montparnasse; she was my age, and from Portugal, she had not known the war.

I ignored the elevator and walked up the four flights. The workmen were out on their lunch hour. The building was silent. As I opened the front door, I felt something strange engulf me, an unknown sensation of despair and emptiness. I walked to the older part of the apartment, the bit that Bertrand had shown us the other day. This is where it had happened. This is where the men came knocking on that hot July morning, just before dawn.

It seemed to me that everything I had read in the past weeks, everything I had learned about the Vel’ d’Hiv’ came to a head here, in the very place I was about to live in. All the testimonies I had pored over, all the books I had studied, all the survivors and witnesses I had interviewed made me understand, made me see, with an almost unreal clarity, what had happened between the walls that I now touched.

The article I had started to write a couple of days ago was nearly finished. My deadline was coming up. I still had to visit the Loiret camps outside Paris, and Drancy, and I had a meeting scheduled with Franck Lévy, whose association was organizing most of the commemorations for the sixtieth anniversary of the roundup. Soon, my investigation would be over, and I’d be writing about something else.

But now that I knew what had happened here, so close to me, so intimately linked to me, to my life, I felt I had to find out more. My search wasn’t over. I felt I had to know everything. What had happened to the Jewish family living in this place? What were their names? Were there any children? Had anybody come back from the death camps? Was everybody dead?

I wandered through the empty apartment. In one room, the wall was being torn down. Lost in the rubble, I noticed a long deep opening, cleverly hidden behind a panel. It was now partly revealed. It would have made a good hiding place. If these walls could talk… But I didn’t need them to talk. I knew what had happened here. I could see it. The survivors had told me about the hot, still night, the bangs on the doors, the brisk orders, the bus ride through Paris. They had told me about the stinking hell of Vel’ d’Hiv’. The ones who told me were the ones who lived. The ones who got away. The ones who tore off their stars and escaped.