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

friend, and with whom she had taken Professor Schmitt’s course at Clermont-Ferrand on the Alsatian humanists. Clara didn’t write back.
    In April 1945, everyone knew it really was the end this time. The little flags finished covering the map of Europe, with red ones around Berlin, then, on April 24th, red ones in Berlin. It was over. Vichy France was declared null and void, the head of the so-called “French State” arrived in Vallorbe, on the Swiss border, then was brought back to France, where he would be put on trial. As for Hitler, he wouldn’t be—he had committed suicide.
    What a marvelous month May was! Once more like in one of Heine’s poems, all the buds were bursting. The most beautiful day of our lives, everyone kept saying. The war was over. Everyone went to the Champs-Élysées again to watch the military victory parade. They’re going to come back, thought Mireille. In the flowering Luxembourg gardens, in front of the old edifice of the Sorbonne, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, on the banks of theSeine, people strolled, hummed, smiled at strangers. As she walked down the boulevard on her way to class, Mireille looked at the beautiful books in the windows of the secondhand bookstores. Hardbound law books, some of which might have belonged to her father. Books on mathematics. Stolen from whom? she wondered. The German bookstore on the Left Bank had closed, the florist who had employed Mireille for a few months during the occupation had reopened his kiosk, it was a time to give flowers, and business was good, even without those arrogant Germans who showed up in June 1942.
    With the war over, the prisoners of war were starting to arrive at the Gare du Nord station. It was a time not to die, as the poets would say. But the extermination machine was well underway and continuing to kill, even killing poets, even the night watchman of Pont-au-Change, with exhaustion, disease, typhus.
    A few of the surviving deportees were also starting to return.
    In the month of June, Mireille, who was shy and reserved by nature, but determined nonetheless, went to wait for Henri Pariset at the end of one of his classes. André had told her all about his professor, but since Pariset had been appointed to Paris in 1940, he had already left Clermont when she got there, so she had never met him. She arrived well in advance and waited for a long time in the hallway of an institute on Rue Pierre-Curie. Through the door to the lecture hall came words she didn’t understand. From time to time, groups of men having discussions, probably mathematicians, would pass by, looking at her for a moment, then returning to their conversation. The gaze of one of the men—who had a red lockin his graying hair and wore a leather mask, as well as the somber clothes and black armband typical of someone in deep mourning, which didn’t keep him from laughing very hard—frightened her. Only a woman with a typewriter in her arms stopped to ask Mireille if she needed any help. She was the one who pointed out the hidden door where the professor would come out. Finally, there was the sound of commotion, seats slamming back up: the class was over. Pariset came out, with a little chalk on his nose and a lot on his sleeves. She approached him, introduced herself, and said she was a friend of André Silberberg’s. He took the sad girl to a café on Rue Saint-Jacques, listened to what she had to say, guessed without much effort what she wasn’t saying, confirmed that André had been sent to a camp in Upper Silesia, was a little surprised that she didn’t know that already, since the Silberberg family had been informed, but didn’t comment on it. He said that he had written letters to André and that the first letter he had received was a piece of paper André had thrown off the train as it was leaving Drancy. Mireille lowered her eyes to her glass of grenadine and he saw by this that she had received one, too.
    “He had signed it as André Danglars,”