She curled her arms around my neck, closed her eyes, and kissed me again. Even if at that moment I had been magically wired the money I had been waiting for and granted every piece of paper I needed—a release certificate, an exit visa, a real passport (not the Nansen substitute that served only to mark me out as a dubious exile), a ship’s boarding pass, a Portuguese transit visa, an American entrance visa—I doubt I would have gone anywhere.

Go here.

The Auction House

MADELEINE AND I NEVER discussed how long she would stay. She just did. To me, every moment we were together was a gift, a stay of execution. Ambushed by love, I succumbed to it without thought to my survival. It was a love devoted entirely to the present, without a tomorrow, and thus entirely of its time. I should have been at the railway station with my black suitcase, camping out on the platforms with the crowds, waiting for a place on a train headed south. Only I didn’t want to go.

The writers, artists, publishers, intellectuals, and other natural enemies of the Nazis, in those last few weeks of the Third Republic, adhered to two opposing schools of thought about how best to survive: there were those who opted to leave and those who preferred to stay. To leave—provided one had the wherewithal—was to abandon an entire life, to embrace exile, to choose to be cut off from everything that was familiar, to risk destitution. And yet to stay was to risk, once the Germans arrived, internment, interrogation, torture, even death. Every time I saw someone I knew, when I bumped into Arthur or Fritz on the stairwell, for instance, or a friend in the street, or if I came across the postman or my landlady, we discussed the matter: stay or go? Go or stay? I was in the remain camp. I felt I was faced with two different kinds of suicide, and in the face of this choice, my decision felt arbitrary and therefore inconsequential. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my adopted city. I was too old to adopt another. And, in any case, if worst came to worst, I had sixty-four capsules of morphine, enough to kill a horse. They’d accompanied me everywhere since I’d left Germany seven years ago. Death would be easy. Painless. Blissful, even.