Flame in the Night Read online

  “Heather Munn’s historical novel is a stunning tale of quiet heroism during a time of unimaginable terror. It brought to my mind the narrative skills of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale combined with the deep questions faced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Munn doesn’t go for pat answers. Her characters make choices where there are no good choices, and hurtle toward a future that might not exist. A lovely and love-filled book.”

  —DEB RICHARDSON-MOORE, author of The Weight of Mercy and the Branigan Powers mystery series

  “Heather Munn’s Flame in the Night is historical fiction in full color. The reader experiences the story intimately as Munn sets them deftly in the thick of the action. This novel is an essential read for those who avidly seek out World War II fiction. Don’t miss this one!”

  —SUSIE FINKBEINER, CBA best-selling author of the Pearl Spence novels

  “This is a compelling novel, historically and emotionally authentic, written with elegance and wisdom. It asks the great and difficult questions, and earns its answers. It is an all-too-timely story of the darkness, and of the light.”

  —KENT GRAMM, author of November, The Prayer of Jesus, and Psalms for Skeptics

  by Heather Munn and Lydia Munn

  How Huge the Night

  Defy the Night

  Flame in the Night: A Novel of World War II France

  © 2018 by Heather Munn

  Published by Kregel Publications, a division of Kregel Inc., 2450 Oak Industrial Dr. NE, Grand Rapids, MI 49505.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations in reviews.

  Distribution of digital editions of this book in any format via the internet or any other means without the publisher’s written permission or by license agreement is a violation of copyright law and is subject to substantial fines and penalties. Thank you for supporting the author’s rights by purchasing only authorized editions.

  Apart from certain historical facts and public figures, the persons and events portrayed in this work are the creations of the author, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-0-8254-4554-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 / 5 4 3 2 1

  For Rich Foss, my friend

  Prologue

  WHERE DO WE GO?

  ELISA SCHULMANN TOOK the last pin out of her mouth, slipped it gently into the silk of the skirt she was altering, and picked up her needle. She glanced up; Madame Mercier was watching her, standing in the open doorway that led to the front of the shop. Elisa kept her hands steady under her employer’s frown, taking a tiny, careful stitch.

  “Wash your hands.”

  Elisa laid down her work. “I washed them when I came in, madame.”

  “Wash them again. You’re sweating. Do you know how much silk costs these days? If we have to replace that I’ll dock every centime from your pay. Anyway, put that aside for now, I’ve just gotten a rush order from Madame Boutet. I’ll need you to stay till it’s finished.”

  Elisa sat up very straight, glancing at the doorway of the windowless workroom and the narrowing stripe of afternoon light. She ducked her head, keeping her hands still on the linty black fabric of her skirt. “I’m truly sorry, madame, but you know that on Fridays—”

  “You will make an exception tonight.”

  Elisa lifted her head and looked Madame Mercier in the eye. “I’m truly sorry, madame,” she enunciated.

  The woman’s cold frown sharpened. “You people shouldn’t work in Christian shops. I ought never to have hired you. Always rubbing your differences in people’s faces—too good to drink a cup of coffee with us. I wouldn’t be so proud if my religion was based on doing cruel things to baby boys—”

  Elisa was on her feet before she knew it, blood pounding in her ears. She froze. “Excuse me, madame,” she said through lips stiff as clay. “I have a personal need.” She turned her back and walked carefully to the shop’s tiny bathroom, then locked herself in and sat on the toilet lid, shaking.

  “God, help me,” she said in a harsh whisper. “Help me, please.” She closed her eyes, thought of the lines in Papa’s face last week when he’d told her the rent had gone up again. Their rent, not the neighbors’. All Jews have gold under their mattresses, didn’t you know? She remembered the day last year when Papa had asked her to take this job. The day David Schulmann, who once was able to provide what was finest for his family, admitted he needed his daughter’s help. A tiny, burning coal had lit somewhere behind her breastbone at that moment. It was burning still. I will not fail them.

  She took a deep, silent breath. Help me. She loosened her bun and re-pinned it carefully, then rose and opened the door. Madame Mercier was measuring a hem. Elisa stood silently till the woman finished, then spoke quietly, eyes down. “I apologize, madame. I will try to wash my hands more often. I apologize for my attitude and I will do as much as I can for you tonight.”

  “Till it’s finished?”

  “Till nine, madame.”

  Madame Mercier blew sharply through her nostrils and rolled up her measuring tape.

  By nine Elisa had the new sleeves of Madame Boutet’s dress pieced, pinned, and the first seam stitched, and she was exhausted. She showed Madame Mercier her work, ignoring the breathy sounds of her displeasure; they were good signs, signs that breath would be the only consequence tonight. She kept her face respectful as she said bonsoir. She walked out of the shop and heard the door close behind her, and filled her lungs with the open air.

  The narrow streets of Lyon were deep in shadow beneath the three-story houses, clouds already brightening to pale sunset gold in the sky above. Elisa walked quickly, threading her way to the dingier quarters. Going down her familiar alley, she hugged the gray wall, away from the stench of the sewer drain where something seemed to have died. She let herself in the back door and climbed the stairwell, shutting her ears against the sound of angry voices through thin walls. At her own door her fingers rose instinctively, her eyes on the two ragged nail holes where the mezuzah used to be. They always tightened her stomach a little, those holes. She passed them by and let herself in the door, into peace.

  It smelled like brisket. It smelled like Shabbos. The deep, sweet peace of Saturdays in the house in Heidelberg came back to her with the scent, and her eyes stung. Her right hand lifted to the small, bright mezuzah nailed in its new place on the inner doorframe, and for a moment she thought of nothing but the holy words inside. Then she heard her sister’s voice: “Just stop it!”

  She set her jaw and walked down the little hallway to their bedroom. Her brother, Karl, sat on the bed, arms crossed and face defiant, as their sister, Tova, fingers tangled in her half-made braid, wailed, “I’m going to have to redo it all!”

  “Karl,” said Elisa.

  “I didn’t,” said Karl hotly. “I just asked if I could share the washbasin a minute—”

  “You hit my elbow!”

  “I didn’t mean to!”

  “But you did,” said Elisa. “Apologize. Tova, I’ll fix it.”

  “Sorry,” muttered Karl to Tova’s shoes.

  “Thank you,” whispered Tova, tears appearing in her eyes. She gave Karl a wavering smile. She was the only one of them who used her Hebrew name for everyday; it had stuck, Mama said, because it meant “good.” And wasn’t that just like a parent, thinking pliable was good—even now, at thirteen years old? Elisa worried for her.

  “Shh now,” Elisa soothed as she braided her sister’s thick, wet hair. “It’s all right.”
<
br />   She gave Karl his turn at the basin and then shooed them out so she could change. She heard clinking from the kitchen as she peeled swiftly out of the sweat-stained black working dress. As she combed her hair something rustled behind her. A slip of paper appeared under the door—then flicked back out of sight. She turned her back. Do you know what I do for this family? I’d like a minute’s peace sometime. Rustle. Flick. She glanced behind. There it was, then—flick—a grin seemed to hang in the air. The corners of her mouth softened helplessly. Whispers from behind the door, a giggle. She twisted her hair into a bun, shoving hairpins in ruthlessly, and dove for the paper as it slid forward again. “Ha!” She threw open the door and displayed her trophy. “I win.”

  “Come to the table,” Mama called.

  As she followed her siblings down the hallway she glanced aside into her parents’ cluttered bedroom. Her smile fell away as she took in what lay on the bed.

  Mama’s jewelry box. Open.

  Her heart tightened, then began to pound. The open lid, which ought to be locked and hidden in its place under the floorboards, spoke to her as if aloud. It’s not all right. Tova and Karl were almost too young to remember the days back in Heidelberg when the automobile had gone, and the carved walnut furniture, and the piano. Her first piano. She’d cried and cried. The next day Papa had taken her to watch a rally from a friend’s third-floor window, her dark curly hair carefully hidden under a hood. She’d heard words she still couldn’t burn out of her mind. “We must leave this country,” Papa had told her quietly, as she shivered in the dark shuttered room afterward, hearing the last fierce, joyous voices in the square below. “I am so sorry, Lies. I would not have sold your piano for any lesser reason than this. You see, they will not let us leave with our money. That is the price.”

  “It’s not fair,” she had whispered.

  “It’s not fair,” he’d said gravely, as if they were reciting a lesson together. Then, “We will pay them and go.”

  She leaned on the doorframe, staring at the box. Who are we paying now? Where do we go? The handful of bright things in there was all their savings. Not enough. Papa said so. He said over and over that the rumors from Paris must be exaggerated; it was impossible to know what had really happened at the Vel d’Hiv stadium, with the reports contradicting each other so completely. Even if the Nazis had done such a thing in the Occupied Zone, he said, it was another matter here. This was still France.

  He had written to a friend in Paris to try to learn the truth. He hadn’t had an answer yet.

  The gold in the box spoke its silent question. “I don’t know,” she whispered, and turned away. She walked down the hall to the dining room, to where the table with its pure-white cloth stood against the scarred wall, laid with blue-and-white plates, clean napkins by each one. To Mama, behind her two tall candles, and Papa by her side smiling. To Shabbos dinner, and peace for tonight.

  Chapter 1

  WHEN THEY COME

  JULIEN SMILED REASSURINGLY at young Chanah—Anne, you’ve got to call her Anne—and gave a tug on the rope harness that held her to the high oak limb. The girl watched him with eyes bright and brave and a little too white around the edges.

  “Did I tie it right, Julien?”

  “Exactly right. You do it exactly like that when they come.”

  Anne nodded vigorously. Julien gave her another smile. His father’s words beat in his mind: They say they are planning a census. That is a lie.

  Around him the treetops glowed green and golden with afternoon sunlight, sweet as if no darkness had ever touched the world. Around him hidden by those summer leaves, Jewish children were strapping themselves into rope harnesses high in the trees, and from round the massive oak trunk came his sister’s voice, telling the little ones in the concealed treehouse to lie down. “You’ll have to be quieter than this when the police are here.”

  A week. That was what the préfet had said three frantic days ago: A census, in a week. Julien’s Scout troop had been assigned to the Les Chênes home, where more than half the sponsored refugee children were Jewish, an hour later. An hour after that, they’d been out in these woods tying ropes, hoisting boards, their wiry troop leader, Marcel, pacing the forest floor beneath them shouting, “I can see you! Move that board! Don’t nail anything down till you’re sure!”

  Julien’s father had barely been home these three days. When he was, he’d stand moving his lips, folding a sheet of blue-lined paper over and over in his fingers as he stared at nothing you could see. Then striding into his study, locking himself in there with Marcel, with Madame Thiers, with Pastor Alexandre. No words for his son except, “Don’t be late for Scouts.”

  They’d been entrusted with more than Scouts usually were. But Julien was eighteen now, and Marcel was twenty. They couldn’t be soldiers. But they could do this.

  Julien steadied himself on the oak limb, high in the green, and quizzed Anne on the alert signals. She recited them breathlessly, word-perfect, head high; Julien could see her at a blackboard, bright eyes on the teacher, and his throat twinged. This isn’t a test. You kids could get everything right—

  Or maybe it is a test. But not of you.

  Marcel had chosen this oak. He’d played in it with his brothers, he’d told Julien with a reminiscent grin: pretending to be Huguenot pastors hiding from the soldiers, if they could resist dropping acorns on them. My family’s been here six hundred years, you know, he’d said. One of our ancestors was a martyr. The people here remembered. They had done this before.

  A young rough voice rose from the other side of the oak, somewhere above the treehouse: “I’m nine years old, I can—”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Jean-Marc!” Another young voice, shrill with indignation. “Why don’t you ever—”

  “Wait here,” Julien murmured to Anne. “Don’t untie by yourself yet, all right?” He began to climb upward.

  His sister Magali’s voice snapped up from the ground like a whip: “Marek, no!”

  Marek? As in Guess what Marek did today? Magali asked that almost every night at the dinner table, after her workday with “her kids” at Les Chênes. Usually rolling her eyes. Guess what Marek did today, Julien’s mind babbled as he climbed feverishly, he fell from the top of an oak tree and—

  The scream struck through him to the roots, like lightning. He braced for the sound of a body hitting the earth—then scrambled desperately upward as the boy shrieked again from up high. And there he was, a small form dangling by one armpit from a loose harness, legs kicking, free hand flailing in the air.

  A lanky boy shot into view from above, flung himself belly-down on Marek’s branch and wrapped his legs around it, reached down and caught the loose end of the harness in both hands, screaming: “Stop kicking! Stop!”

  “Wait—wait!” Julien crawled toward them along the limb, not daring to look down. The lanky boy was twelve at most, barely heavier than Marek—he’d be yanked off the branch. “Don’t take his hand—just wait …”

  He made it, braced himself, his face almost in the boy’s determined face—Étienne, his name’s Étienne—and they grasped the rope together. They hauled up: ten centimeters. Twenty. Marek’s free hand found a branch jutting from their limb and locked around it. Julien reached down and took the boy under the armpits, fingers knotting in his sweaty shirt. Étienne took up the slack and secured it around the limb with a quick and fumbling hitch.

  “That branch—down there.” Julien barely had the breath to speak. His shoulders were trembling, and he didn’t even have Marek’s full weight. He’d never be able to lift him all the way onto their limb. “If we can get his feet on that one—he can stand.”

  Étienne scrambled down to the lower branch, not quite within reach of Marek’s legs, and held out his hands, ready.

  Marek was shaking his head.

  “You have to—let go,” Julien gasped. “I swing you—sideways—Étienne puts your feet—on the branch. Have to.”

  Marek’s eyes were huge. Tendons
stood out like bars in his thin wrists. He shook his head again.

  Sharp terror stabbed through Julien’s gut, and the strange, cold knife of memory: the préfet’s voice, the préfet’s cold eyes: Nothing you can do, nothing you can do—eyes on Papa—nothing you can—

  “Let go!” he snarled, guttural, and his body was hot suddenly with inexplicable rage.

  Voices rose from the ground.

  “We’re under you.”

  “We’ll catch you.”

  The Scouts—Marcel, Pierre—the Les Chênes workers, his sister, and—was that Benjamin? Julien looked into Marek’s wide eyes: the whites glaring, a mere rim of brown around the huge black pupil. Then he felt it, the boy drawing breath, the eyes going up to his hands—Julien’s knuckles spasmed into their tightest grip.

  And Marek let go.

  Pain flared through Julien’s back as he swung the boy sideways, Marek’s hands digging into his shoulders, both of them gripping like death. The limb tore his shirt and scraped his chest as he pushed himself forward along it—and Marek’s feet found the branch and Marek’s hands found Étienne and the weight lightened and was gone, and Julien did not let go. He could not let go. Deep, rough breaths rasped in and out of him, and the world was green and tilting, and the voice of the préfet was in his ears, was everywhere.

  Do not obstruct us. The eyes on Papa. Or it may be you we are forced to deport.

  “Your turn.”

  Julien’s eyes flew open.

  “To let go,” said Marek, looking at him with concern.

  Julien’s hands sprang open. “Sorry. Sorry. I …” He pulled himself up, drew a steadying breath. “That was amazing, Étienne, that was—well done.”

  Étienne’s shoulders grew straighter, his over-bright eyes meeting Julien’s. Then he turned and growled at Marek. “You’ll stay in the treehouse when they come. Or I’ll drop you next time.”

  “Okay,” said Marek. “Sorry.”