No Stars at the Circus Read Free Page B

the beans and cabbage were cold because this room is so far from the kitchen. Or else maybe he couldn’t heat them because there was no gas. That often happens.

27 AUGUST 1942
THE FILE WE WERE NOT ON
    The Germans changed the laws of France.
    Our neighbour Monsieur Zacharides said they did it just for spite because they were annoyed by the planes that came from England dropping bombs and spies. The spies had to rush off and hide their parachutes and then try to blow up the railways. But Papa said it was a much more serious plan the Germans had. He wouldn’t say what, though, he just seemed to go into himself and got thin in the face. But Papa said it wasn’t just spite: the Germans had a much more serious plan.
    Some of the plan was just for Jews. Mama said that some people want Jews to live all together in one place. How stupid is that? But Mama said there was no need for us to worry even though we are Jewish because there was no record of us in any synagogue.
    “Our identity cards say nothing about it,” she said. Then she put her hand to her mouth. “You are never to repeat one word of what I just said. Do you hear me, both of you?”
    Nadia and I looked at each other. Did Mama really think we talked about things like that?
    But then Mama explained that after the Germans arrived we were supposed to have put our names down in some sort of file. There was a special order for all Jewish people to go along to an office and do this. But Papa didn’t want to because he was born in Germany. So he thought the German army might come looking for him to join up.
    When he heard we knew about the file we weren’t on he roared, “Do my children think I’m going to fight against France?”
    We certainly did not.
    The bit about not going to the synagogue is true because neither Mama nor Papa is religious at all. My friend Jean-Paul said I was dead lucky because I didn’t have to go to Mass every Sunday, or be an altar boy like him. He had to wear a kind of dress but you couldn’t call it that or he got mad.
    Mama said there were good bits in every religion and it was wrong for anyone to boast that theirs was the best. Papa said she was foolish if she thought the good Catholic Führer, Herr Adolf Hitler, agreed with her on
that
. He said that being Jewish was not just about having a religion anyway, but about having a whole history.
    Papa would never have said Mama was foolish before the Germans came. Nadia cried for a long time.

THE POTATO BUGS
    At school, in the yard, we called the Germans “potato bugs” because they chewed their way through everything that was good in France and turned it all rotten.
    It’s a good name for them but you had to say anything like that in a low voice because walls have ears. Jean-Paul said there were German-lovers everywhere who would report you if they heard you call the soldiers “potato bug” or “Fritz”.
    “Then you’ll be hanged from the nearest bridge and people will pelt you with rocks and dog poo,” he said.
    I said they wouldn’t be allowed to do that to children but he got really cross with me.
    “They can do what they like, pea-brain. Remember, I saw those pilots shooting people on the roads. You didn’t. There were real bodies that we had to pass by. Even babies in prams. It was awful.”
    One of the first new laws was that there were to be two parts of France.
    Potato bugs are so stupid they cannot even count on their fingers as far as Julius Caesar did. He divided France into
three
parts even though he had no trucks or tanks to get around the country in. But everyone with a brain knows that France has lots of parts!
    Paris and the north are in the worst half. It has the most Germans and the most rules. People say the other part is not so bad, though Papa makes a face if anyone says “Vichy”. That’s the town where the French government ended up after they stopped running away from the Germans. Papa says all there is in Vichy is smelly hot baths and smelly