The next picture showed a lady in a turban talking to an officer with wire-rimmed glasses who wore a swastika armband.

“No use thinking about the past,” Odile said, her tone as stony as her face. She shoved the photos back into the book.

Why did she have a picture of a Nazi?

“You knew a Nazi?”

“Dr. Fuchs came to the Library.”

When I’d imagined Nazis, they were killing people in concentration camps, not checking out books. It seemed unseemly that she knew his name.

“Paris was occupied,” Odile explained. “We couldn’t avoid them, and not all people wanted to. He was what the Nazis called a ‘library protector.’?”

“So he saved books?”

“It’s not so simple.”

I thought about what I’d learned at school. “My history teacher said Europeans should have known about the camps. She said it was obvious.”

“I learned about them after the war. At the time, my family merely tried to survive. I worried about Anglophone friends and colleagues, who were arrested as ‘enemy aliens.’ Though Jewish people were barred from libraries, it never occurred to me that they, too, would be arrested and that many would be killed.”

Odile was quiet for a long time.

“Are you mad that I asked?”

“Mais non. Forgive me, I was lost in my memories. During the war, we librarians delivered books to Jewish friends. The Gestapo even shot one of my colleagues.”

Shooting a librarian? Wasn’t that like killing a doctor? “They killed Miss Reeder?”

“She’d left by then. The Nazis arrested several librarians, including the director of the National Library. We feared Miss Reeder might be next. I was brokenhearted when she left. But saying goodbye is a fact of life. Loss is inevitable.”

I was sorry I’d dug out the photos; they’d only made her sad. But then she cupped my cheek gently and said, “Sometimes, though, good things come from change.”

Paris

1 December 1941

Monsieur l’Inspecteur: I am writing to inform you that the American Library houses more enemy aliens than an internment camp. To start with, there’s the arriviste American, Clara de Chambrun. She spends more time at the Library than she does at home like a good wife should. She devotes her days to soliciting funds from fancy socialite friends in order to sustain the Library. I doubt she declares this revenue.

She does not like Germans (or “Huns” as she calls them) and flouts their regulations. Just because she’s a countess doesn’t mean that she needn’t follow the rules. I believe she smuggles books to Jewish readers. Who knows what else she is up to? She’s very evasive.

Pay a visit and see for yourself. You’ll see she thinks she’s above the law.

Signed,

One who knows

CHAPTER 27

Odile

PARIS, DECEMBER 1941

CLARA DE CHAMBRUN, our new directress, had helped found the ALP in 1920. Along with Edith Wharton and Anne Morgan, she’d been one of the original trustees. The Countess not only wrote several works on Shakespeare, she also translated his plays into French. She and Hemingway shared the same publisher. More recently, these past months, she sought donors to cover expenses from coal to payroll, and she wrote letters to prevent Nazi authorities from forcing Boris and the caretaker to work in Germany as a part of the Relève plan. I worried that as a prominent foreigner, she could be arrested.

At the circulation desk, I shared my fear with Boris and Margaret as he stamped Madame Simon’s Harper’s Bazaar. He said that Clara had married Count Aldebert de Chambrun, a French general, in 1901. She had dual citizenship, and would not be considered an enemy alien.

Just then, M. de Nerciat burst in, Mr. Pryce-Jones on his heels.

“Kamikazes hit Pearl Harbor!” Monsieur shouted.

We gathered around him.

“What on earth is a kamikaze?” Margaret asked. “And where’s Pearl Harbor?”

“Japan attacked an American military base,” Mr. Pryce-Jones translated.

“Does this mean the United States will join the war?” I felt a glimmer of hope that soon the Germans would be defeated.

“We believe so,” M. de Nerciat said.

“The Americans will annihilate the Nazis!” I said.

“They can hardly do worse than the French army,” Margaret said.

My head reared back. How dare Margaret criticize soldiers like Rémy, when she’d been one of the first to flee Paris. “British forces were certainly quick to retreat to that puny island.”

We glared at each other, and I waited for her to take back her words.

“We shouldn’t talk politics, should we?” she finally said.

She offered an olive branch, not an apology. I tried not to be angry. She didn’t mean to be tactless. Afraid to say something I’d regret, I hurried to the typewriter in the back room, hoping that working on the newsletter would distract me. Before the Occupation, I’d cranked out five hundred copies on our mimeograph, but with the penury of paper, I now posted one lone copy on the bulletin board.

Mr. Pryce-Jones scooted a chair beside mine. “We can hear you pounding away from the reading room.”