Today I am sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for THE GIRL FROM GUERNICA by Karen Robards on this HTP Books Fall 2022 Historical Fiction Blog Tour. This historical fiction story is an emotional and suspenseful rollercoaster ride from beginning to end.
Below you will find a book summary, my book review, an excerpt from the book and the author’s bio and social media links. Enjoy!
***
Book Summary
New York Times bestselling author Karen Robards returns with a riveting story of intrigue, deception and bravery in the face of war, inspired by Picasso’s great masterpiece Guernica:
On an April day in 1937, the sky opens and fire rains down upon the small Spanish town of Guernica. Seventeen-year-old Sibi and her family are caught up in the horror. Griff, an American military attaché, pulls Sibi from the wreckage, and it’s only the first time he saves her life in a span of hours. When Germany claims no involvement in the attack, insisting the Spanish Republic was responsible, Griff guides Sibi to lie to Nazi officials. If she or her sisters reveal that they saw planes bearing swastikas, the gestapo will silence them—by any means necessary.
As war begins to rage across Europe, Sibi joins the underground resistance, secretly exchanging information with Griff. But as the scope of Germany’s ambitions becomes clear, maintaining the facade of a Nazi sympathizer becomes ever more difficult. And as Sibi is drawn deeper into a web of secrets, she must find a way to outwit an enemy that threatens to decimate her family once and for all.
Masterfully rendered and vividly capturing one of the most notorious episodes in history, The Girl from Guernica is an unforgettable testament to the bonds of family and the courage of women in wartime.
THE GIRL FROM GUERNICA by Karen Robards is an emotional and suspenseful historical fiction with romantic elements story from beginning to end. This standalone novel follows a young female protagonist and her family from the first unprovoked aerial bombing of civilians at Guernica which shocked the world in 1937 through the end of WWII.
Sibil “Sibi” Helenger, her mother and three younger sisters are in the Basque city of Guernica. They were taking care of their grandmother in her last days while their father, a German rocket scientist remained in Germany. With the Spanish Revolution raging around them, Sibi wants to return to Germany, but her mother wants to stay. On a normal day in April, Guernica was suddenly attacked from the air with bombs dropping and machine gun aerial strafing from German planes.
Griff, an American military attaché pulls Sibi and her youngest sister from the wreckage. As Sibi attempts to get a hold of her father, she learns that her knowledge that the planes were German and not Spanish revolutionaries, puts her and her sister’s lives all in danger from the Nazi regime. Their father finds them and takes them back to Germany, but Sibi is still in danger, not only as she lies for the Nazi’s, but also because she continues to give Griff secret information to use against them.
As the war rages on, Sibi, known as “The Girl from Guernica” is committed to outwitting the Nazi’s who threaten her family while she does everything in her power to assist the allies in defeating them.
This is my favorite historical fiction book so far this year! It is riveting and I was unable to put it down. Ms. Robards does an amazing job of researching an often-forgotten war crime in the years leading up to WWII. Sibi’s resilience and strength while still being so young herself makes her an unforgettable character that I became invested with from page one. There are times when the story brought me to tears and others when I felt such happiness for Sibi, her family, and the mysterious Griff. All the characters and the historical references and locations are realistically written and believable.
I highly recommend this historical fiction read!
***
Excerpt
April 25, 1937
To laugh and dance and live in the teeth of whatever tragedies an uncaring fate threw in your path was the Basque way.
The stories Sibi’s mother told, stories handed down through generations of indomitable women, painted those defiant sufferers as heroes.
Sibi feared she was not the stuff of which such heroes were made.
She was hungry. Her feet hurt. And she was afraid. Of those things, afraid was the worst by far. She was so tired of being afraid.
A knot in her stomach. A tightness in her throat. A prickle of unease sliding over her skin. Familiar sensations all, which did not make their sudden onset feel any less dreadful. Sixteen-year-old Sibi—Sibil Francesca Helinger—pushed back a wayward strand of coffee-brown hair that had escaped from the heavy bun coiled at her nape and frowned out into the misty darkness enshrouding the Calle Fernando el Católico.
Her pulse thrummed as she clung to the desperate hope that she was not seeing what she thought she was. Since the fighting had moved close enough so that the residents of this ancient village high in the western Pyrenees could actually hear gunfire in the surrounding hills, fear had become her all-too-frequent visitor. But this—this was different. This was because of something that was happening now, right before her eyes, in the wide, tree-lined street just beyond where she stood watching the regular weekly celebration on the night before market day.
Have we left it too late? The thought made her mouth go dry.
“I want a sweet.” Five-year-old Margrit’s restless movement beside her reclaimed her attention. Gripping the child’s hand tighter, Sibi cast an impatient glance down.
“There’s no money for a sweet.” Or anything else, Sibi could have added, but didn’t.
“But I want one.” Round blue eyes in a cherubic face surrounded by gold ringlets stared longingly at the squares of honey and almond turrón being hawked to the crowd by a woman bearing a tray of them. The yeasty aroma of the pastry made Sibi’s stomach growl. For the last few weeks, she and her mother had been rationing their diminishing resources by skipping the evening meal so that the younger ones could eat.
“Ask Mama to buy you one later.”
Margrit’s warm little fingers—which Sibi kept a secure hold on because, as angelic as the youngest of the four Helinger sisters looked, she wasn’t—twitched in hers. “She won’t. You know she won’t. She’ll say she doesn’t have any money, either.”
That was undoubtedly true. In fact, Sibi had only said it in hopes of placating her little sister until their mother returned. Thinking fast—Margrit had mostly outgrown tantrums, but not entirely—Sibi was just about to come out with an alternate suggestion when thirteen-year-old Luiza jumped in.
“You know we’re poor now, so stop being such a baby.” Cross because she hadn’t been permitted to go to the cinema with a group of her friends, Luiza spoke sharply. The thick, straight, butterscotch blond hair she’d chopped to chin length herself the night before—”Nobody has long hair anymore!” she’d wailed in the face of their mother’s horror—had already lost its grip on the rag curls she’d forced into it. She looked like she was wearing a thatch of broom straw on her head, but Sibi was far too good a sister, and far too preoccupied at the moment, to point that out.
“I don’t like being poor.” Margrit’s lower lip quivered.
“None of us do.”
“I specially don’t like—”
Luiza cut her off. “You’re whining. You know what Mama said about whining.”
“I am not…”
A match flared in the street. Tuning her sisters out, Sibi focused on what the brief incandescence revealed as it rose to light a cigarette—red tip glowing brightly—before arcing like a tiny shooting star to the ground. Sibi looked beyond the cigarette to the dark shape behind it. The dark shapes behind it. She wasn’t mistaken. Soldiers—their soldiers, the loyalist Republicans, their uniforms unmistakable—poured into the street from seemingly everywhere. And the numbers were increasing…
Her heartbeat quickened. Does no one else see?
Biting down on her lower lip, she glanced around. The crowd clapped and swayed to the rollicking music of the highly prized town band and ate and danced and played games and— She concluded that no one else did. The village leaders who were present appeared unaware: Father Esteban talked to the woman behind the refreshment table as she ladled out a bowl of spicy fish soup for him; His Honor the mayor played mus, the popular card game, with three friends; the Count of Arana, the town’s most prominent citizen, stood with his arms crossed and a stern gaze fixed on his fifteen-year-old daughter, Teresa, as she walked away from him with her hand tucked into the arm of… Emilio Aguire.
Sibi’s stomach gave an odd little flutter.
Watching them reminded her of just how much of an outsider she was here in this quaint small town with its red-roofed white houses and narrow cobbled streets. Emilio was her age, he was the handsomest boy in school and he had been kind to her. She had hoped… But no. To hope for anything where he was concerned was foolishness. She and her mother and sisters were only temporary residents. She worked as a part-time waitress and her mother had worked in a dress shop before being fired three weeks ago, when the shop owner’s husband had displayed too much interest in her. And that, of course, had immediately become a topic for much discussion among the town gossips whose gleeful suspicions that the former Marina Diaitz, now Helinger, who had come home with her children but without her husband, was a floozy were thus seemingly confirmed. All those factors combined to put them near the bottom of the social ladder in this place where the wealthy local aristocracy had been comfortably in place for generations, and they, with their German father, would have been outsiders, anyway. And Teresa was beautiful and rich and— Well, there it was, foolishness.
She had no time for foolishness.
Glancing at those in her own party—Luiza and Margrit, and their other sister Johanna, all bunched close around her, and their mother, Marina, dancing merrily with the baker Antonio Batzar beneath the colored lights strung above the makeshift dance floor in hopes of securing a scarce loaf of tomorrow morning’s fresh bread—Sibi felt her heartbeat quicken.
Intent on their own concerns, they appeared oblivious to anything else. As usual it was up to her, notorious as the family worrier, to think about what might happen, to catch and make sense of what the rest of them missed.
Tonight, it was that their soldiers, their last line of defense against the surging rebel Nationalists, appeared to be coming together en masse to slink like starving cats past the Sunday night festivities.
These were the same war-weary, battle-scarred troops that had been camped out in the forested peaks surrounding the town since they had fallen back after the savage attack on the neighboring village of Durango that had brought the nine-month-old civil war as close as its ancient churches and rambling streets. In the days since, thousands of panicking refugees had flooded the town. The warships of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, commander in chief of the rebel forces, had blockaded the Basque ports. Food had become scarce: along with bread, milk and meat were almost impossible to obtain. People were hungry, frightened. The war that had been safely on the other side of the country had changed direction so fast that the residents of these sleepy villages high above the Bay of Biscay had been caught unprepared. But unprepared or not, in a new and terrifying offensive the newspapers were calling the War of the North, the fighting was now rushing like a wave toward their front door.
The soldiers were all that stood between them and the enemy forces determined to destroy them. And the soldiers were leaving.
***
Author Bio
Karen Robards is the New York Times, USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of fifty novels and one novella. She is the winner of six Silver Pen awards and numerous other awards.
Today I am once again posting on the Harlequin Trade Publishing 2020 Summer Reads Historical Fiction Blog Tour. I am very excited to be sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for THE BLACK SWAN OF PARIS by Karen Robards.
Below you will find a book summary, my book review, an excerpt from the book, an about the author section and the author’s social media links. Enjoy!
***
Book Summary
For fans of The Alice Network and The Lost Girls of Paris comes a thrilling standalone by New York Times bestselling author Karen Robards about a celebrated singer in WWII occupied France who joins the Resistance to save her estranged family from being killed in a German prison.
In Occupied France, the Resistance trembles on the brink of destruction. Its operatives, its secrets, its plans, all will be revealed. One of its leaders, wealthy aristocrat Baron Paul de Rocheford, has been killed in a raid and the surviving members of his cell, including his wife the elegant Baronness Lillian de Rocheford, have been arrested and transported to Germany for interrogation and, inevitably, execution.
Captain Max Ryan, British SOE, is given the job of penetrating the impregnable German prison where the Baroness and the remnants of the cell are being held and tortured. If they can’t be rescued he must kill them before they can give up their secrets.
Max is in Paris, currently living under a cover identity as a show business impresario whose star attraction is Genevieve Dumont. Young, beautiful Genevieve is the toast of Europe, an icon of the glittering entertainment world that the Nazis celebrate so that the arts can be seen to be thriving in the occupied territories under their rule.
What no one knows about Genevieve is that she is Lillian and Paul de Rocheford’s younger daughter. Her feelings toward her family are bitter since they were estranged twelve years ago. But when she finds out from Max just what his new assignment entails, old, long-buried feelings are rekindled and she knows that no matter what she can’t allow her mother to be killed, not by the Nazis and not by Max. She secretly establishes contact with those in the Resistance who can help her. Through them she is able to contact her sister Emmy, and the sisters put aside their estrangement to work together to rescue their mother.
It all hinges on a command performance that Genevieve is to give for a Gestapo General in the Bavarian town where her mother and the others are imprisoned. While Genevieve sings and the show goes on, a daring rescue is underway that involves terrible danger, heartbreaking choices, and the realization that some ties, like the love between a mother and her daughters and between sisters, are forever.
THE BLACK SWAN OF PARIS by Karen Robards is this bestselling author’s first historical fiction book and it pulls you in with a story of estranged family dynamics, loyalty, partisans, spies, intrigue and action. It is a story that features a young internationally acclaimed singer and her perilous life during WWII in Nazi occupied Europe.
Genevieve Dumont is a celebrated cabaret star with a voice and beauty that captivates. In 1944 Paris, Nazis, partisans and spies are everywhere as the Germans prepare for the invasion they know is coming. Genevieve has been both a star and a smokescreen for her manager, Max Bonet. She knows and at times resents how she is being used and she wants to know as little as possible about Max’s secret life, until she overhears about the capture and arrest of Lillian, Baroness de Rocheford.
Genevieve has kept secrets from Max, but now she needs his help to save the baroness, who is her mother. Reunited with her sister, who is working with the SOE, a daring plan is set into motion. Will the little group be able to rescue the baroness directly from the home of the sadistic SS General Claus von Wagner?
I loved this story, but it was a little confusing in the very beginning as all the characters are introduced because the connections and histories are reveled throughout the entire book in flashbacks. Once it started to flow, I was transported back to 1944 occupied Paris. The description of the Nazi opulence contrasted with the deprivation of the Parisians, the sparkle of the cabaret, the partisan spy networks helping to prepare for the invasion, the mistrust and secrets all engage the reader and I was completely engrossed. Genevieve’s story was as tragic as it was triumphant and her entire family’s history kept me turning the pages. Ms. Robards has written historical characters that could walk off the page with a plot that builds to an action filled climax.
I highly recommend this dynamic historical fiction book with a touch of romance!
***
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
May 15, 1944
When the worst thing that could ever happen to you had already happened, nothing that came after really mattered. The resultant state of apathy was almost pleasant, as long as she didn’t allow herself to think about it—any of it—too much.
She was Genevieve Dumont, a singer, a star. Her latest sold-out performance at one of Paris’s great theaters had ended in a five-minute standing ovation less than an hour before. She was acclaimed, admired, celebrated wherever she went. The Nazis loved her.
She was not quite twenty-five years old. Beautiful when, like now, she was dolled up in all her after-show finery. Not in want, not unhappy.
In this time of fear and mass starvation, of worldwide deaths on a scale never seen before in the whole course of human history, that made her lucky. She knew it.
Whom she had been before, what had almost destroyed her—that life belonged to someone else. Most of the time, she didn’t even remember it herself.
She refused to remember it.
A siren screamed to life just meters behind the car she was traveling in. Startled, she sat upright in the back seat, heart lurching as she looked around.
Do they know? Are they after us?
A small knot of fans had been waiting outside the stage door as she’d left. One of them had thrust a program at her, requesting an autograph for Francoise. She’d signed—May your heart always sing, Genevieve Dumont—as previously instructed. What it meant she didn’t know. What she did know was that it meant something: it was a prearranged encounter, and the coded message she’d scribbled down was intended for the Resistance.
And now, mere minutes later, here were the Milice, the despised French police who had long since thrown in their lot with the Nazis, on their tail.
Even as icy jets of fear spurted through her, a pair of police cars followed by a military truck flew by. Running without lights, they appeared as no more than hulking black shapes whose passage rattled the big Citroën that up until then had been alone on the road. A split second later, her driver—his name was Otto Cordier; he worked for Max, her manager—slammed on the brakes. The car jerked to a stop.
“Sacre bleu!” Flying forward, she barely stopped herself from smacking into the back of the front seat by throwing her arms out in front of her. “What’s happening?”
“A raid, I think.” Peering out through the windshield, Otto clutched the steering wheel with both hands. He was an old man, short and wiry with white hair. She could read tension in every line of his body. In front of the car, washed by the pale moonlight that painted the scene in ghostly shades of gray, the cavalcade that had passed them was now blocking the road. A screech of brakes and the throwing of a shadow across the nearest building had her casting a quick look over her shoulder. Another military truck shuddered to a halt, filling the road behind them, stopping it up like a cork in a bottle. Men—German soldiers along with officers of the Milice—spilled out of the stopped vehicles. The ones behind swarmed past the Citroën, and all rushed toward what Genevieve tentatively identified as an apartment building. Six stories tall, it squatted, dark and silent, in its own walled garden.
“Oh, no,” she said. Her fear for herself and Otto subsided, but sympathy for the targets of the raid made her chest feel tight. People who were taken away by the Nazis in the middle of the night seldom came back.
The officers banged on the front door. “Open up! Police!”
It was just after 10:00 p.m. Until the siren had ripped it apart, the silence blanketing the city had been close to absolute. Thanks to the strictly enforced blackout, the streets were as dark and mysterious as the nearby Seine. It had rained earlier in the day, and before the siren the big Citroën had been the noisiest thing around, splashing through puddles as they headed back to the Ritz, where she was staying for the duration of her Paris run.
“If they keep arresting people, soon there will be no one left.” Genevieve’s gaze locked on a contingent of soldiers spreading out around the building, apparently looking for another way in—or for exits they could block. One rattled a gate of tall iron spikes that led into the brick-walled garden. It didn’t open, and he moved on, disappearing around the side of the building. She was able to follow the soldiers’ movements by the torches they carried. Fitted with slotted covers intended to direct their light downward so as to make them invisible to the Allied air-raid pilots whose increasingly frequent forays over Paris aroused both joy and dread in the city’s war-weary citizens, the torches’ bobbing looked like the erratic flitting of fireflies in the dark.
“They’re afraid, and that makes them all the more dangerous.” Otto rolled down his window a crack, the better to hear what was happening as they followed the soldiers’ movements. The earthy scent of the rain mixed with the faint smell of cigarette smoke, which, thanks to Max’s never-ending Gauloises, was a permanent feature of the car. The yellow card that was the pass they needed to be on the streets after curfew, prominently displayed on the windshield, blocked her view of the far side of the building, but she thought soldiers were running that way, too. “They know the Allies are coming. The bombings of the Luftwaffe installations right here in France, the Allied victories on the eastern front—they’re being backed into a corner. They’ll do whatever they must to survive.”
“Open the door, or we will break it down!”
The policeman hammered on the door with his nightstick. The staccato beat echoed through the night. Genevieve shivered, imagining the terror of the people inside.
Thin lines of light appeared in the cracks around some of the thick curtains covering the windows up and down the building as, at a guess, tenants dared to peek out. A woman, old and stooped—there was enough light in the hall behind her to allow Genevieve to see that much—opened the front door.
“Out of the way!”
She was shoved roughly back inside the building as the police and the soldiers stormed in. Her frightened cry changed to a shrill scream that was quickly cut off.
Genevieve’s mouth went dry. She clasped her suddenly cold hands in her lap.
There’s nothing to be done. It was the mantra of her life.
“Can we drive on?” She had learned in a hard school that there was no point in agonizing over what couldn’t be cured. To stay and watch what she knew was coming—the arrest of partisans, who would face immediate execution upon arrival at wherever they would be taken, or, perhaps and arguably worse, civilians, in some combination of women, children, old people, clutching what few belongings they’d managed to grab, marched at gunpoint out of the building and loaded into the trucks for deportation—would tear at her heart for days without helping them at all.
“We’re blocked in.” Otto looked around at her. She didn’t know what he saw in her face, but whatever it was made him grimace and reach for the door handle. “I’ll go see if I can get one of them to move.”
When he exited the car, she let her head drop back to rest against the rolled top of the Citroën’s leather seat, stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about what might be happening to the people in the building. Taking deep breaths, she did her best to block out the muffled shouts and thuds that reached her ears and focused on the physical, which, as a performer, she had experience doing. She was so tired she was limp with it. Her temples throbbed. Her legs ached. Her feet hurt. Her throat—that golden throat that had allowed her to survive—felt tight. Deliberately she relaxed her muscles and tugged the scarf tucked into the neckline of her coat higher to warm herself.
A flash of light in the darkness caught her eye. Her head turned as she sought the source. Looking through the iron bars of the garden gate, she discovered a side door in the building that was slowly, stealthily opening.
“Is anyone else in there? Come out or I’ll shoot.” The volume of the soldiers’ shouts increased exponentially with this new gap in the walls. That guttural threat rang out above others less distinct, and she gathered from what she heard that they were searching the building.
The side door opened wider. Light from inside spilled past a figure slipping out: a girl, tall and thin with dark curly hair, wearing what appeared to be an unbuttoned coat thrown on over nightclothes. In her arms she carried a small child with the same dark, curly hair.
The light went out. The door had closed. Genevieve discovered that she was sitting with her nose all but pressed against the window as she tried to find the girl in the darkness. It took her a second, but then she spotted the now shadowy figure as it fled through the garden toward the gate, trying to escape.
They’ll shoot her if they catch her. The child, too.
The Germans had no mercy for those for whom they came.
The girl reached the gate, paused. A pale hand grabbed a bar. From the metallic rattle that reached her ears, Genevieve thought she must be shoving at the gate, shaking it. She assumed it was locked. In any event, it didn’t open. Then that same hand reached through the bars, along with a too-thin arm, stretching and straining.
Toward what? It was too dark to tell.
With the Citroën stopped in the middle of the narrow street and the garden set back only a meter or so from the front facade of the building, the girl was close enough so that Genevieve could read the desperation in her body language, see the way she kept looking back at the now closed door. The child, who appeared to be around ten months old, seemed to be asleep. The small curly head rested trustingly on the girl’s shoulder.
It wasn’t a conscious decision to leave the car. Genevieve just did it, then realized the risk she was taking when her pumps clickety-clacked on the cobblestones. The sound seemed to tear through the night and sent a lightning bolt of panic through her.
Get back in the car. Her sense of self-preservation screamed it at her, but she didn’t. Shivering at the latent menace of the big military trucks looming so close on either side of the Citroën, the police car parked askew in the street, the light spilling from the still open front door and the sounds of the raid going on inside the building, she kept going, taking care to be quiet now as she darted toward the trapped girl.
You’re putting yourself in danger. You’re putting Otto, Max, everyone in danger. The whole network—
Heart thudding, she reached the gate. Even as she and the girl locked eyes through it, the girl jerked her arm back inside and drew herself up.
The sweet scent of flowers from the garden felt obscene in contrast with the fear and despair she sensed in the girl.
“It’s all right. I’m here to help,” Genevieve whispered. She grasped the gate, pulling, pushing as she spoke. The iron bars were solid and cold and slippery with the moisture that still hung in the air. The gate didn’t budge for her, either. The clanking sound it made as she joggled it against its moorings made her break out in a cold sweat. Darkness enfolded her, but it was leavened by moonlight and she didn’t trust it to keep her safe. After all, she’d seen the girl from the car. All it would take was one sharp-eyed soldier, one policeman to come around a corner, or step out of the building and look her way—and she could be seen, too. Caught. Helping a fugitive escape.
The consequences would be dire. Imprisonment, deportation, even death.
Her pulse raced.
She thought of Max, what he would say.
On the other side of the gate, moonlight touched on wide dark eyes set in a face so thin the bones seemed about to push through the skin. The girl appeared to be about her own age, and she thought she must be the child’s mother. The sleeping child—Genevieve couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy—was wearing footed pajamas.
Her heart turned over.
“Oh, thank God. Thank you.” Whispering, too, the girl reached through the bars to touch Genevieve’s arm in gratitude. “There’s a key. In the fountainhead. In the mouth. It unlocks the gate.” She cast another of those lightning glances over her shoulder. Shifting from foot to foot, she could hardly stand still in her agitation. Fear rolled off her in waves. “Hurry. Please.”
Genevieve looked in the direction the girl had been reaching, saw the oval stone of the fountainhead set into the brick near the gate, saw the carved lion’s head in its center with its open mouth from which, presumably, water was meant to pour out. Reaching inside, she probed the cavity, ran her fingers over the worn-smooth stone, then did it again.
“There’s no key,” she said. “It’s not here.”
“It has to be. It has to be!” The girl’s voice rose, trembled. The child’s head moved. The girl made a soothing sound, rocked back and forth, patted the small back, and the child settled down again with a sigh. Watching, a pit yawned in Genevieve’s stomach. Glancing hastily down, she crouched to check the ground beneath the fountainhead, in case the key might have fallen out. It was too dark; she couldn’t see. She ran her hand over the cobblestones. Nothing.
“It’s not—” she began, standing up, only to break off with a swiftly indrawn breath as the door through which the girl had exited flew open. This time, in the rectangle of light, a soldier stood.
“My God.” The girl’s whisper as she turned her head to look was scarcely louder than a breath, but it was so loaded with terror that it made the hair stand up on the back of Genevieve’s neck. “What do I do?”
“Who is out there?” the soldier roared. Pistol ready in his hand, he pointed his torch toward the garden. The light played over a tattered cluster of pink peonies, over overgrown green shrubs, over red tulips thrusting their heads through weeds, as it came their way. “Don’t think to hide from me.”
“Take the baby. Please.” Voice hoarse with dread, the girl thrust the child toward her. Genevieve felt a flutter of panic: if this girl only knew, she would be the last person she would ever trust with her child. But there was no one else, and thus no choice to be made. As a little leg and arm came through the gate, Genevieve reached out to help, taking part and then all of the baby’s weight as between them she and the girl maneuvered the little one through the bars. As their hands touched, she could feel the cold clamminess of the girl’s skin, feel her trembling. With the child no longer clutched in her arms, the dark shape of a six-pointed yellow star on her coat became visible. The true horror of what was happening struck Genevieve like a blow.
The girl whispered, “Her name’s Anna. Anna Katz. Leave word of where I’m to come for her in the fountainhead—”
The light flashed toward them.
“You there, by the gate,” the soldier shouted.
With a gasp, the girl whirled away.
“Halt! Stay where you are!”
Heart in her throat, blood turning to ice, Genevieve whirled away, too, in the opposite direction. Cloaked by night, she ran as lightly as she could for the car, careful to keep her heels from striking the cobblestones, holding the child close to her chest, one hand splayed against short, silky curls. The soft baby smell, the feel of the firm little body against her, triggered such an explosion of emotion that she went briefly light-headed. The panicky flutter in her stomach solidified into a knot—and then the child’s wriggling and soft sounds of discontent brought the present sharply back into focus.
If she cried…
Terror tasted sharp and bitter in Genevieve’s mouth.
“Shh. Shh, Anna,” she crooned desperately. “Shh.”
“I said halt!” The soldier’s roar came as Genevieve reached the car, grabbed the door handle, wrenched the door open—
Bang. The bark of a pistol.
A woman’s piercing cry. The girl’s piercing cry.
No. Genevieve screamed it, but only in her mind. The guilt of running away, of leaving the girl behind, crashed into her like a speeding car.
Blowing his whistle furiously, the soldier ran down the steps. More soldiers burst through the door, following the first one down the steps and out of sight.
Had the girl been shot? Was she dead?
My God, my God. Genevieve’s heart slammed in her chest.
She threw herself and the child into the back seat and—softly, carefully—closed the door. Because she didn’t dare do anything else.
Coward.
The baby started to cry.
Staring out the window in petrified expectation of seeing the soldiers come charging after her at any second, she found herself panting with fear even as she did her best to quiet the now wailing child.
Could anyone hear? Did the soldiers know the girl had been carrying a baby?
If she was caught with the child…
What else could I have done?
Max would say she should have stayed out of it, stayed in the car. That the common good was more important than the plight of any single individual.
Even a terrified girl. Even a baby.
“It’s all right, Anna. I’ve got you safe. Shh.” Settling back in the seat to position the child more comfortably in her arms, she murmured and patted and rocked. Instinctive actions, long forgotten, reemerged in this moment of crisis.
Through the gate she could see the soldiers clustering around something on the ground. The girl, she had little doubt, although the darkness and the garden’s riotous blooms blocked her view. With Anna, quiet now, sprawled against her chest, a delayed reaction set in and she started to shake.
Otto got back into the car.
“They’re going to be moving the truck in front as soon as it’s loaded up.” His voice was gritty with emotion. Anger? Bitterness? “Someone tipped them off that Jews were hiding in the building, and they’re arresting everybody. Once they’re—”
Otto broke off as the child made a sound.
“Shh.” Genevieve patted, rocked. “Shh, shh.”
His face a study in incredulity, Otto leaned around in the seat to look. “Holy hell, is that a baby?”
“Her mother was trapped in the garden. She couldn’t get out.”
Otto shot an alarmed look at the building, where soldiers now marched a line of people, young and old, including a couple of small children clutching adults’ hands, out the front door.
“My God,” he said, sounding appalled. “We’ve got to get—”
Appearing out of seemingly nowhere, a soldier rapped on the driver’s window. With his knuckles, hard.
Oh, no. Please no.
Genevieve’s heart pounded. Her stomach dropped like a rock as she stared at the shadowy figure on the other side of the glass.
We’re going to be arrested. Or shot.
Whipping the scarf out of her neckline, she draped the brightly printed square across her shoulder and over the child.
Otto cranked the window down.
“Papers,” the soldier barked.
Fear formed a hard knot under Genevieve’s breastbone. Despite the night’s chilly temperature, she could feel sweat popping out on her forehead and upper lip. On penalty of arrest, everyone in Occupied France, from the oldest to the youngest, was required to have identity documents readily available at all times. Hers were in her handbag, beside her on the seat.
But Anna had none.
Otto passed his cards to the soldier, who turned his torch on them.
As she picked up her handbag, Genevieve felt Anna stir.
Please, God, don’t let her cry.
“Here.” Quickly she thrust her handbag over the top of the seat to Otto. Anna was squirming now. Genevieve had to grab and secure the scarf from underneath to make sure the baby’s movements didn’t knock it askew.
If the soldier saw her…
Anna whimpered. Muffled by the scarf, the sound wasn’t loud, but its effect on Genevieve was electric. She caught her breath as her heart shot into her throat—and reacted instinctively, as, once upon a time, it had been second nature to do.
She slid the tip of her little finger between Anna’s lips.
The baby responded as babies typically did: she latched on and sucked.
Genevieve felt the world start to slide out of focus. The familiarity of it, the bittersweet memories it evoked, made her dizzy. She had to force herself to stay in the present, to concentrate on this child and this moment to the exclusion of all else.
Otto had handed her identity cards over. The soldier examined them with his torch, then bent closer to the window and looked into the back seat.
She almost expired on the spot.
“Mademoiselle Dumont. It is a pleasure. I have enjoyed your singing very much.”
Anna’s hungry little mouth tugged vigorously at her finger.
“Thank you,” Genevieve said, and smiled.
The soldier smiled back. Then he straightened, handed the papers back and, with a thump on the roof, stepped away from the car. Otto cranked the window up.
The tension inside the car was so thick she could almost physically feel the weight of it.
“Let them through,” the soldier called to someone near the first truck. Now loaded with the unfortunate new prisoners, it was just starting to pull out.
With a wave for the soldier, Otto followed, although far too slowly for Genevieve’s peace of mind. As the car crawled after the truck, she cast a last, quick glance at the garden: she could see nothing, not even soldiers.
Was the girl—Anna’s mother—still there on the ground? Or had she already been taken away?
Was she dead?
Genevieve felt sick to her stomach. But once again, there was nothing to be done.
Acutely aware of the truck’s large side and rear mirrors and what might be able to be seen through them, Genevieve managed to stay upright and keep the baby hidden until the Citroën turned a corner and went its own way.
Then, feeling as though her bones had turned to jelly, she slumped against the door.
Anna gave up on the finger and started to cry, shrill, distressed wails that filled the car. With what felt like the last bit of her strength, Genevieve pushed the scarf away and gathered her up and rocked and patted and crooned to her. Just like she had long ago done with—
Do not think about it.
“Shh, Anna. Shh.”
“That was almost a disaster.” Otto’s voice, tight with reaction, was nonetheless soft for fear of disturbing the quieting child. “What do we do now? You can’t take a baby back to the hotel. Think questions won’t be asked? What do you bet that soldier won’t talk about having met Genevieve Dumont? All it takes is one person to make the connection between the raid and you showing up with a baby and it will ruin us all. It will ruin everything.”
“I know.” Genevieve was limp. “Find Max. He’ll know what to do.”
Karen Robards is the New York Times, USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of more than fifty novels and one novella. She is the winner of six Silver Pen awards and numerous other awards.
