Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay

men. She couldn’t understand.
    The next day, the girl noticed a handful of people watching them through the barbed wire. Women, with packages and food. They were trying to push the food through the fences. But the policemen ordered them to leave. Nobody came to look at them again.
    The girl felt like she had become someone else. Someone hard, and rude, and wild. Sometimes she fought with the older children, the ones who tried to grab the old stale bread she had found. She swore at them. She hit them. She felt dangerous, savage.
    At first, she had not looked at the smaller children. They reminded her too much of her brother. But now, she felt she had to help them. They were vulnerable, small. So pathetic. So dirty. A lot of them had diarrhea. Their clothes were caked with shit. There was no one to wash them, no one to feed them.
    Little by little, she came to know their names, their ages, but some of them were so small they could hardly answer her. They were thankful for a warm voice, for a smile, a kiss, and they followed her around the camp, dozens of them, trailing after her like bedraggled sparrows.
    She would tell them the stories she used to tell her brother, before his bedtime. At night, lying on the lice-infested straw, where rats made rustling noises, she would whisper the stories, making them even longer than they usually were. The older children gathered around, too. Some of them pretended not to listen, but she knew they did.
    There was an eleven-year-old girl, a tall black-haired creature called Rachel, who often looked at her with a touch of contempt. But night after night, she listened to the stories, creeping closer to the girl, so that she wouldn’t miss one word. And once, when most of the little children were at last asleep, she spoke to the girl.
    She said in a deep, hoarse voice, “We should leave. We should escape.”
    The girl shook her head.
    “There is no way out. The police have guns. We can’t escape.”
    Rachel shrugged her bony shoulders.
    “I am going to escape.”
    “What about your mother? She will be waiting for you in the other camp, like mine.”
    Rachel smiled.
    “You believed all that? You believed what they said?”
    The girl hated Rachel’s knowing smile.
    “No,” she said firmly. “I didn’t believe them. I don’t believe anything anymore.”
    “Neither do I,” said Rachel. “I saw what they did. They didn’t even write down the little children’s names properly. They tied on those small tags that got mixed up when most of the children took them off again. They don’t care. They lied to all of us. To us and to our mothers.”
    And to the girl’s surprise, Rachel reached out and took her hand. She held it tight, the way Armelle used to. Then she got to her feet and disappeared.
    The next morning, they were woken very early. The policemen came into the barracks, pushing at them with their truncheons. The smaller children, hardly awake, started to scream. The girl tried to calm the ones nearest to her, but they were terrified. They were led into a shed. The girl held two toddlers by the hand. She saw a policeman holding an instrument in his hand. It had a strange shape. She didn’t know what it was. The toddlers gasped with fear, backed away. They were slapped and kicked by the policemen, then dragged toward the man with the instrument. The girl watched, horrified. Then she understood. Their hair was being shaved off. All the children were to be shaved.
    She looked on as Rachel’s thick black hair fell to the floor. Her naked skull was white and pointed, like an egg. Rachel gazed at the men with hatred and contempt. She spat on their shoes. One of the gendarmes knocked her aside brutally.
    The little ones were frantic. They had to be held down by two or three men. When it was her turn, the girl did not struggle. She bent her head. She felt the cold pressure of the machine and closed her eyes, unable to bear the sight of the long, golden strands falling to her feet.