One Hundred Twenty-One Days by Michèle Audin, Christiana Hills

at them with her. She would remember the words he had used to talk about numbers, his jokes about the inverse powers of 2, like 1/2, 1/4, 1/16 Jewish blood: “Ah, you’re onlyhalf Jewish, 1/2 for you, 3/4 for me, that would make 5/8 for our children, and a great fractions exercise!” He would say words like “symmetry” and “star,” we would laugh together about a delicate six-pointed star composed of solid water frozen on a window. But André wasn’t there. Where had they taken him? she wondered as she scrutinized the map.
    When January began, it had already been snowing for two weeks. People celebrated the new year as best as they could. It would be the year of victory and, in expecting victory, everyone could tighten their belts a little more. Once again, Strasbourg was under threat. But after the blue, white, and red flags of the Allies finally signaled the defeat of the Germans in the Ardennes, then in Strasbourg, other little red flags far to the east responded: the Russian army entered Warsaw.
    Seated in the middle of the crowd of students gathered in the seats of the big lecture hall, Mireille attended another ceremony, over which de Gaulle himself presided, that officially marked the liberation of the university. It was so cold in Paris that Mireille spent whole days in January in her coat and gloves working underground in the metro, where the temperature was more tolerable than in the university library. The winter was even worse in the east, according to the newspapers, which were being printed on a single sheet because of the paper shortage.
    The little red flags cleared the Oder on January 31st, then, on February 14th, the blue, white, and red flags of the Allies crossed the Rhine. Snippets of unbelievable information started to arriveabout the camps the Red Army had liberated in Poland. The war was soon finished, German cities were being bombed, Dresden had been reduced to ashes, and, at the beginning of March, the Allies’ flags arrived in Cologne. Finally, a big city, a symbol. Standing at her window, Mireille watched the park’s bare trees while thinking about the big gothic dome reflected in the Rhine, an image from one of Heine’s poems. Two years already, she realized. It was on the 23rd of February, 1943, that she had first seen André.
    In March, Mireille went back to Strasbourg for the first time. It was, she would think to herself even long afterwards, the coldest day of her entire life. The harsh winter wasn’t over yet. She had left the train station and asked for directions; she remembered the name of the street, since André had told her about his parents’ shop and she remembered every word he had said to her. It wasn’t too far. She entered the Silberberg’s store, with the book she wanted to return to them, which was wrapped in an old newspaper, clasped tightly to her chest.
    “ Bonjour , Madame,” she had said. “Do you remember me? I’m one of André’s friends.”
    “Not at all,” André’s mother replied after having looked her up and down. “We don’t know you.”
    And because Mireille was about to protest, give her name, explain herself:
    “This is a store, we have work to do. Go away!”
    And she had turned her back on Mireille. Out on the street, the wind stung her like another slap in the face. Of course she recognized me. At Clermont, André had asked Clara to inviteMireille over to their house. Clara hadn’t been very happy about it, but she had done it anyway, she always did what her brother asked her, and she had introduced Mireille to her parents—that was in April of ’43, two months before André had been arrested. And now his mother was refusing to speak to her. But why? That’s what they call rejection. She would not be hearing anything from André’s parents. Mireille took a train back home, put the Inferno in her bag—the book with the dedication to André and Daniel Roth’s signature inside. Back in Paris, she wrote to Clara, who had been her