A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [141]
‘Why did you come to England?’ Fifi asked after she’d had a couple of mouthfuls of water. ‘Don’t you have any family in France?’
‘My mother died in the war,’ Yvette said. ‘I did not wish to have sad reminders.’
The crisp way she spoke suggested she did not want to talk about it, so Fifi took her comb from her handbag and began combing her hair.
‘You have such pretty hair,’ Yvette said, sitting down on the mattress beside Fifi. ‘I always weesh I was a blonde. When the Germans came to Paris, some mothers bleached their girls’ dark hair.’
‘Why?’ Fifi asked.
‘To try and pass them for gentile,’ Yvette said with a grimace. ‘It did not work too well, many ended up with orange hair.’
Fifi was suddenly taken back to an event in her early childhood when she must have been six or so. She woke to hear her mother crying and went downstairs. Her parents were in the kitchen, and her father was holding her mother in his arms while she sobbed.
‘You shouldn’t have gone to see it,’ her father was saying. ‘I told you it would be too upsetting.’
Fifi had always been a great one for lurking in the hallway or outside rooms while grown-ups were talking. Her parents used to get very cross with her about it. But however much they said things like eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves, she could never resist it. But that night she ran back to bed, frightened by what she’d seen and heard.
That evening her mother had gone out to the cinema with her sister. They went out nearly every week together, and always before her mother would be laughing when she came in. Sometimes she’d hear her telling Daddy the whole story of the film.
The following morning her mother still had red, swollen eyes from crying and Fifi asked her why.
‘Because I saw the most dreadful, terrible film,’ she said.
A trip to the cinema was a huge treat for Fifi. She’d seen Snow White, Dumbo and Bambi, and she couldn’t imagine how a film could be anything but wonderful.
‘Was it sad like when Bambi’s mummy died?’ she asked.
‘Much, much worse, because that wasn’t real. This was a film about how a bad man killed thousands of mummies, daddies and little children.’ Her mother’s eyes filled up with tears again.
‘Why did he kill them?’
‘Just because they were Jewish.’
Fifi had no idea then what Jewish meant and it was years later before she learned about the Holocaust at school. It was only then that she realized her mother was upset that night years earlier because she’d seen the film which was made at the time the British and American troops liberated the concentration camps.
Fifi became almost morbidly fascinated by the whole subject. She used to go into the library and look for books about it. But whenever she asked about it at home she always got the same response. ‘That was all over years ago. It should be forgotten about now.’
It had often baffled her why kind, decent people like her parents could brush aside something as terrible as six million people being exterminated. She had wanted to know why no one seemed to be aware it was going on, how they reacted when they first found out, if they wanted to do something to help, or if they were just too stunned. She wanted to know, too, what happened to the surviving Jews and if they could ever forgive or forget.
She hadn’t thought much about this in the last eight or nine years, but something about the way Yvette had spoken suggested she was Jewish, and that brought back all those questions she’d never had satisfactory answers to.
Turning to face her friend, she had to ask. ‘Are you Jewish, Yvette?’
Yvette sighed deeply. ‘Yes, Fifi, I am.’ The way she said it made it quite clear it wasn’t something she intended to discuss further.
Fifi had to let it go. She finished combing her hair, then offered to do Yvette’s. Fifi had only ever seen her hair scraped back into a tight bun, until yesterday when the pins began to fall out, and it was quite a surprise to see that it was very long and thick, though sprinkled with grey.
Yvette had lost most of the pins, so Fifi suggested