At the hour when night was disappearing, Claire Lévi discovered that her elder son was not in his bed. She looked through the house, then searched the icy street, out in her nightclothes, in a panic, not bothering to think of the curfew that kept Jews inside at night.

When she failed to find Victor, she went to sit in the garden on a stone bench, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She had not thought this was what her life would come to, but now she saw that it had. The professor noticed Claire wasn’t in bed, and when he found her in her nightgown, crying, he sat beside her.

There had been an early storm and the branches on the trees crackled with a sheen of ice. All of the rabbits that had once lived here had been caught and cooked by the neighbors, and the dormice had taken over the empty garden house, where bulbs and cuttings had once been stored under the glass dome of a ceiling. It was silent and dark, and Claire was hopeless. What a fool she’d been to think the world would not touch her or those she loved. André took her hand. For once he was truly beside her, not thinking of anything other than the moment they were in as she told him their son was gone.

“He’ll come back,” the professor insisted.

Claire shook her head. She knew how fearless and headstrong young men were; she just hadn’t realized that Victor was anything more than a boy.

“Of course he will,” her husband insisted. “He’ll be home by morning.”

But when the sun had risen, Victor hadn’t returned and they had no choice but to go inside and lock the door. That day the professor did not go to his study, but instead walked through the neighborhood and crossed the Seine at the appointed hour when Jews could shop, hoping to catch sight of Victor. He had always avoided the Marais, and had felt more connected to the academic Left Bank. Now as he went along Rue des Rosiers, past the bookshops and markets, and along the cobblestones of Rue des Barres, he realized how cut off he’d been.

When he’d had no luck finding Victor, the professor went to see the rabbi, although he hadn’t been to services for a dozen or more years. Neither of his sons had been bar mitzvah, and in the last few years they hadn’t celebrated Passover. He’d considered himself French through and through, but now here he was knocking at doors, asking if anyone had seen Victor. But no one could help him. Sons were missing all throughout Paris. He could search the world over, but when a young man wanted to fight for what was right, there was no holding him back.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

RUNAWAYS

VIENNE, WINTER 1941