On one chair, Sarah's wrinkled dress, waiting to be ironed.

In a corner, Henriette's shoes.

Did Henriette leave barefoot?

We'll never know.

She and everyone else are gone.

Mama talked to the neighbors.

Uncle Motl hid in a tool shed, they said.

That's what the Jewish leaders told men to do.

They thought only men would be arrested.

But when my uncle heard his wife scream and his children cry, he came out.

The police took them all away.

Mama takes a folded scrap of paper from the drawer.

It is a letter from eleven-year-old Serge.

Dear Auntie, Henriette and I are alone. Our parents are gone. Sarah went away to one camp with my mother, and Charles to another with my father. You are the only one who can help us. I don't know what to do now for my little sister Henriette. She cries for Mama all the time, and doesn't want to eat. The food is terrible, rotten cabbage soup. Please send us something to eat. Also, please send me a beret. They have shaved our heads because of the lice, and it makes me feel so strange, like a criminal. I would feel so much better with a beret.

Your nephew, Serge Mama says she tried to send Serge and Henriette some food.

But she never heard from anyone in the family again.

"Your aunt and uncle and all your cousins are gone," she says.

"Gone?" I say.

"But maybe they'll come back."

Mama shakes her head.

"They're not coming back, Odette," she says.

"They're gone forever."

Like my father? I wonder.

But I don't dare ask that question out loud.

I see how eagerly Mama still checks the mail, how her shoulders slump sometimes, afterward.

She's still waiting.

Waiting for a letter from Papa.

We haven't had one since we came back to Paris.

I decide I must look for my cousins myself.

I don't tell Mama.

I cross the big boulevard.

I pass the bakery.

I walk down their alley.

The smell is the same: urine and cabbage.

All the windows in the dreary courtyard stare at my back.

The caretaker peers out at me from behind her lace curtains.

A big man comes out of my aunt's apartment.

He knows nothing about my cousins, he says.

He has lived in the apartment for two years.

Did anyone come back, anyone at all? I ask.

"Never!" he replies.

He goes back into the apartment and slams the door.

I stare at the door, hoping to hear Serge's violin, Henriette's giggle, Uncle Motl's knitting machine.

Silence.

The caretaker opens her door.

"What do you want?" she asks.

"My cousin's violin," I say.

She shuts the door.

But I come back, again and again.

Each time I ask her the same thing, "Where is Serge's violin?"

"How should I know?" she says.

"That family's long gone.

Go away.

You're a pest."

Maybe I can find Serge's violin in a pawnshop, I decide.

I window-shop at all the pawnshops in the neighborhood.

I never saw so many violins!

I was sure I would know my cousin's violin anywhere, but I was wrong.

Can I ask my mother to describe it?

No.

Talk of my cousins brings her too much grief.

Anyway, what would I do if I found Serge's violin?

I don't have any money to buy it.

Still, I choose three or four violins.

I go back and visit them often, to make sure no one else has bought them.

I'm not sure which is the magical one, the one that leaned on Serge's shoulder.

But at least I have some idea where it is.

If Serge comes back, he won't be disappointed.

When he knocks on our door, I'll take him to see the violins.

I'm sure he'll remember which one is his.

Survivors.

Everywhere in Paris, I see people wearing black- women in black dresses, men with black armbands.

Mama says they're mourning people they loved, people who died in the war.

"They survived, but they're still suffering.

If you speak to them, speak gently."

Mama has a surprise for me ... our friend Bluma is back.

The train taking her to a camp in Poland was bombed by the Resistance ...

she escaped.

Now she's home in Domont, her sleepy small town outside Paris.

Mama and I go to visit her.

Bluma's home is like her, elegant, serene.

Her husband, Edmond, asks us not to stay too long.

Bluma's still frail, he says.

She had to stay in a camp near Paris, a place called Drancy.

"It was a terrible camp," Bluma tells us.

"Dirty, overcrowded, nothing to eat."

She shakes her head.

"I was so foolish.

I should have stayed with you in the country."

Mama puts her arm around Bluma's thin shoulders.

I stroke her pale hand.

No one says, It's true, you should have stayed.

But the words seem to be there, hanging in the air.

On the train on the way home, Mama tells me that my cousins- Serge, Charles, Henriette, and Sarah- stayed in the camp at Drancy too.

"That was before they were sent to Poland,"

Mama says.

She shakes her head.