Anne Frank and Me by Cherie Bennett Page B

Claire.”
    â€œI face facts.” Claire examined the frizzy end of one braid. “Everything is getting worse. There is one Nazi decree after another. And no decent food.”
    Why did Claire always go on like this? Nicole felt even more restless. She didn’t want to be home but she didn’t want to be here, either. Yet there was no place else she could be. She decided to go back upstairs and read. Maybe she’d reread Gone with the Wind. For quite a while, Scarlett O‘Hara hadn’t had any decent food to eat, either.
    â€œI’ll just be going...” Nicole started for the door.
    â€œDon’t leave!” Claire begged. “I thought you might want to stay for supper.”
    â€œNo, I don’t think so.”
    â€œOh, come on. Whatever my mother prepared will be awful, so none of us will mind eating less. You could spend the night, too.”
    Nicole considered the offer. She couldn’t go out with Jacques or Mimi because of the Jewish curfew. Being with Claire would be better than spending the night with her sister.
    â€œMy mother will want me to eat at home,” Nicole decided. “She won’t want me to share your rations. But I suppose I could come back down after.”
    â€œWonderful!” Claire beamed. She jumped up and hugged Nicole.
    Nicole felt guilty that she didn’t like Claire nearly as much as Claire liked her. Why is it that people never love or like each other equally? she thought. There’s always one who cares more. A terrible thought hit her stomach, so physical it felt as if she had been punched: I love Jacques more than he loves me.
    â€œI’m so glad you’re my best friend now,” Claire said.
    Nicole smiled to be polite. Really, though, she wasn’t thinking about Claire at all. She was still thinking about Jacques, thoughts she would not dare confess to a living soul, not even to Mimi.
    I can’t go to cafes with Jacques, or to the movies or concerts or to the park, or anywhere, anymore. So why would Jacques want to be with me, anyway?
    Why would he want to be with a Jew?

thirteen
    They gathered around the radio in the Einhorns’ living room and quietly hummed along to the familiar tones that opened the British Broadcasting Corporation’s nightly shortwave radio transmission, The French Speak to the French. Nicole loved that the broadcast always began with the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, as if the BBC was saying to the Nazis, “Look! Look how far you have fallen from the best of what is German.” She also knew that the dit-dit-dit-dah of those four notes spelled out the letter V in Morse code: V for victory.
    Listening to the London-based BBC was the only way for French people to get honest war news. All the French newspapers had been transformed into outlets for Nazi propaganda. So, though Jews were forbidden to have radios, both the Bernhardts and the Einhorns had decided to risk it.
    â€œMove the antenna,” Claire urged her mother. “I can hardly hear.”
    â€œShhh!” her bubbe admonished, as Jean Oberle, the popular French voice of the BBC, began to speak. As he did, Mme. Einhorn whispered a translation into Yiddish for her mother-in-law
    This is the BBC, London, 15 July 1942.
    The news is being read by Jean Oberle.
    In France, Royal Air Force planes swept over Brittany during the day and attacked a variety of military objectives. In Paris, five additional members of a French family have been sentenced to death for the killing of a German soldier by a member of that family, in accordance with the new regulations announced by General Oberg. And from the collaborationist regime at Vichy comes word that French colonial authorities may confiscate Jews’ property anywhere in the colonies. In a new decree—
    A burst of loud static interrupted the broadcast. “The lousy Huns are jamming the BBC again,” Claire fumed.
    â€œDon’t say