The Woman I Wanted to Be Read Online Free Page A

checked into a hotel. The train to Belfort left at 5:15 a.m. and they had another run-in on board with a young SS soldier who wanted both Gaston and Leon to drop their pants. This time it was Renée who saved Leon by smiling coquettishly at the young soldier until he moved on to other passengers.
    Belfort was even more dangerous. There were many, many Jewish refugees checking into the same hotel, but my father’s fake ID saved him. The German SS raided the hotel that night and arrested all the Jews, but not Leon Desmedt. (My father’s diary records that he madelove to Renée twice that night.) Later they heard that all the people arrested that night were killed.
    Leon and Renée parted ways with Gaston the next morning as they approached the Swiss border. They took a bus to Hérimoncourt, at which point Leon hired a local guide to lead them through the mountains and pastures into Switzerland just six kilometers away. That last leg of the escape cost fifteen hundred French francs with no guarantee of success. A few more refugees joined in as they met the guide at five a.m., among them a woman with a baby. She gave the baby a sleeping pill so he wouldn’t cry, and they set out on foot through the alpine mountains to the border. “Run, run, run in that direction,” the guide pointed and sent them off on their own. I remember my father telling me that it was the cows and their noisy bells that made their escape possible. By following the bells, Leon and Renée arrived at the Swiss border town of Damvant on August 8, 1942.
    “Why do you carry so much money?” the border police asked my father. He told them that he was an industrialist from Belgium, but the police did not believe his story. “Your papers are fake,” they said. They confiscated his money but did allow him to enter Switzerland. “You can claim it back when you leave,” the police told him.
    My father was very lucky. Although he remained under surveillance by the Swiss authorities, and was unable to travel freely or have access to his money without going through long bureaucratic requests, he spent a few fairly pleasant years there. He separated from Renée, who eloped with a policeman soon after their arrival, and began to miss Lily, the vivacious “little” girl he’d left behind in Belgium. The occupation of Brussels had become very severe and he was worried about her. Lily and her parents had to abandon their apartment and live separately. She was hiding in a resistance house where she worked. Myaunt Juliette sent her son, my cousin Salvator, to live with his Christian Belgian nanny.
    Curious Lily went to her family’s apartment one day and discovered that the SS had ransacked it and stolen all their belongings. She also discovered something that would change her life. There was a letter in the mailbox, an unexpected letter from Switzerland, from Leon, the man she had met in Toulouse and never forgotten. After reading and rereading it many times, she responded. It started a daily correspondence between them, carefully crafted because all the letters had to go through censors as the wide blue stripe across the stationery indicated. I am lucky to possess those letters, which, over time, became more and more intimate and passionate. They wrote about their love and about the moment they would meet again after the war, that they would marry, build a life together, have a family, and be happy forever. It was all about hope and love.
    Then, suddenly, Lily’s letters stopped. (It was then, I recall my father telling me, that the mirror in his bedroom, on which he had taped a photo of my mother, fell and broke.)
    He wrote to her again and again, begging in vain for an answer. On July 15, two months after my mother’s arrest, he received a letter from Juliette, my mother’s older sister, written in code to get through the censors.
    “Dear Leon,” she wrote. “I have very bad news. Lily has been hospitalized.”
    W hen my mother returned from Germany in