He thought he might be turned away from Izieu due to his age; he was now sixteen, the age when all Jews were sent on the trains, but the teachers were interested when they heard his father had been a professor of mathematics and that he was quite advanced in that field. They told him they were in need of teachers, and invited him to stay.

The forty-four children at Izieu, aged three to sixteen, boys and girls, came out on the terrace to greet him. Most of them had lived in several places in the past few months, and all had been moved to the free zone by the OSE. Their parents were in hiding or had been detained or were members of the Resistance. So far the government had allowed the children to have the dream that they were French; the OSE had an agreement with the French police to overlook the châteaus, and all of the children had paperwork that allowed them to be at Izieu.

Julien shook hands with as many as he could on his way inside the front hall. He was especially pleased to find there was a dog on the grounds, a friendly wolfish creature named Lex, who took an immediate liking to Julien. A young man named Max, who had been a medical student in Paris and now taught biology to the older children, showed Julien around. He would be a counselor, living in a dormitory room and overseeing some of the younger boys. He would be in charge of math lessons for the younger boys in the morning, and teach more advanced lessons in geometry, logic, and number theory to the older, more talented students in the afternoon. A few high-spirited ten-year-olds rushed past to get their mail as Julien was on his tour. The children wrote home faithfully, and mail call was the most exciting event of the day. Those who received packages shared with those whose parents were unable to send treats. There was no discussion about where missing parents might be, for there was a deep belief that they would return. No one wished to crush the idea of that possibility.

Exhausted from his travels, Julien lay down on his metal bed and slept through dinner right into the night. Lex had been tracking rabbits on the lawn, but he soon found Julien and woke him by licking his hand. The hour was late, and Julien sprang from his bed, confused as to where he was. He had been dreaming about the garden of his parents’ house. Lea was there, but she was disappearing in front of his eyes. Don’t let me go, she’d said to him, and he’d been panic-stricken, not knowing what to do.