The Woman I Wanted to Be Read Online Free

seventy-six French francs for them.
    My father couldn’t believe his ears. Was he understanding right? Jean had a seller at thirty-three and Maurice had a buyer at seventy-six. So much profit could be made with the difference. The problem was that my father had no idea how to find Jean. He didn’t know his last name or where he lived, so he raced around Toulouse on his bicycle for three days and three nights, looking for him. On the fourth day, my father went to the cinema and, realizing he had left his newspaper when he came out of the theater, went back for it—and bumped into Jean!
    It took days to smooth out the many complications and finalize the transaction, because the sum was very large and my father had toprove he could deliver the money. He had to borrow some from his friend Fima to do a small sample transaction first, to prove he was trustworthy and, after a few days, completed the whole exchange. Overnight he went from having no money at all to actually being rich. In his diary my father recalls feeling so ashamed of his worn-out suit during the transaction that the day it was completed he bought three suits, six shirts, and two pairs of shoes. His good fortune didn’t end there. As fate would have it, the man who was buying the dollars turned out to be my mother’s uncle Simon. And that is how my parents met.
    Theirs was not an immediate romance. Leon Halfin was twenty-nine, ten years older than my mother, and very interested in being a ladies’ man. But Lily was a Jewish girl, and as far as he was concerned, you didn’t touch Jewish girls—you married them.
    The news from Belgium was that things weren’t so bad under the German occupation, and in October 1941, my parents returned separately to Belgium. My mother couldn’t go to university because of the racial laws, so she went to fashion school, studied millinery, and learned how to make hats. My father, who now had a lot of money, did not go back to Tungsram, the electronics company he had worked for, but became an independent businessman in the radio field in Brussels. They saw each other at gatherings of older relatives and family friends, but my father always treated my mother like a little girl, teasing her and pinching her cheeks. There was no romance although they clearly liked each other. Leon didn’t know my mother had a secret crush on him.
    It wasn’t until the summer of 1942, when the SS started rounding up Jews in Belgium and deporting them that the danger began in earnest. Lucie, my father’s very good friend and ex-colleague at Tungsram, advised him to get out of Belgium and flee to Switzerland.He bought fake papers from the Belgian underground and began to plan his escape under the assumed and typical Belgian name of Leon Desmedt. He did not go alone. Lucie arranged for Gaston Buyne, a nineteen-year-old Christian boy to accompany him through France to the Swiss border. In a surprising turn of events, they were joined by Renée, a nineteen-year-old girl my father had just met. She was a Belgian Catholic girl who had fallen in love with my father and wanted to run away with him. Her mother had recently died and she didn’t like the woman her father had taken up with. That was the unlikely trio who set out together on August 6, 1942.
    The train ride to Nancy, where they would transfer to another train to Belfort, was very dangerous. Gaston, a Belgian with legal papers, carried a lot of Leon’s money—banknotes in his shoulder pads, gold coins in his shoes and socks, and more Swiss notes in his toiletry bag. Because Gaston looked Jewish, much more so than Leon, he turned out to be the perfect foil. There were many, many checkpoints at which the German SS would randomly order male passengers to pull down their trousers to check whether they were circumcised. Gaston was ordered to drop his pants. “Sorry,” the SS man apologized to him, and didn’t bother with my father who was sitting next to him.
    They arrived in Nancy at night and