His name was Nico. He had been born in Czechoslovakia, but escaped at the age of eight just before the German invasion of that country. He had no idea if his family was still alive or had been sent to one of the concentration camps. He was now fourteen, painfully thin, with just a sprinkling of hair on his chin. But his eyes were the eyes of someone far older.
He spoke little, but everything was there in dark, haunted eyes that stared back at Paul Bennett's camera. He'd killed his first German when he was nine.
The girl's name was Micheleine. She was fourteen when the war started, from a village north of Paris.
Micheleine had followed her father and brothers into the Resistance. They had been captured and executed. That was four years ago. She wasn't a young girl any longer.
Because she spoke both English and French, and out of necessity had become almost fluent in German, she was a valued member of the Resistance with the ability to move behind enemy lines, carry messages between French and Allied groups, and gain valuable information on German troop movement.
She had been caught once and escaped. There were rumors a high-ranking German officer had died during that escape. She had a price on her head and a name she'd been given by the French people who considered her a hero. Jehanne.
She was just over five feet tall and couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds. She carried a rifle with the assurance of someone who knew how to use it, and was their guide through enemy lines.
She was a frequent visitor to their encampment at night. The camera and the pictures Paul took caught her attention and broke down a natural reserve around people who might be dead the next day.
“Do you take photographs for the American Army?” she had asked one evening as he carefully cleaned the lens that had somehow miraculously survived wading through channel surf, crawling across the beach, and the march inland.
Her usual reserve dropped, curiosity shining in her dark eyes.
He shook his head. “For the newspaper I worked for before being shipped over.”
He carefully extracted a roll of film and added it to the half-dozen other rolls he kept in the waterproof pouch to send off when they reached the next Allied post.
“Before the war, I did individual portraits, weddings, christenings, that sort of thing. When the war broke out, I got on with the Mirror. They wanted photographs of things out and about in London, how people were getting on with the bombings, food rationing, inside the shelters, that sort of thing.”
“And now you take photographs of bombings in France, towns destroyed, that sort of thing,” she had commented with unmistakable sarcasm.
She was entitled to that, he thought.
“Someone said that I need to take the photographs so that no one forgets what has happened here.”
He was fast losing the light, and set the aperture at the camera by the glow of a nearby campfire behind her. He adjusted the film speed. Then she looked up, everything she hadexperienced revealed in the emotion on her face and the look in her eyes, and it touched something inside him.
“Do you believe it will make a difference?” she asked.
“Do you believe that you make a difference?” he replied as the glow of that campfire surrounded her.
Click, click, click.
She frowned into the camera. “If I did not, then all is lost.”
He took several more shots of a beautiful young Frenchwoman who had seen too much, had killed, and left innocence far behind. But at that moment, just long enough for the shutter to capture her expression, the young girl peeked out at him.
Click, click.
“Take your pictures, Paul Bennett. They will tell the story,” she said as she stood to leave.
“Then perhaps, one day, this will end.”
When dawn came the next day, she and Nico were already gone, scouting ahead with a handful of commandoes, sending messages back about German troop movements. But in the days that followed, moving south by day, she sought out their small encampment in spite of the fact they weren't allowed to build a fire and it was pitch dark. She sat with them, eating their cold rations.
“Tell me about your family,” she said one night as they finally made camp at the edge of a grove of trees, sentries posted along the perimeter.
He told her about his mother and sister, safe he hoped, in Scotland.
“Tell me about Scotland.”
He thought about that for a long time, the way a place imprints itself in the memory and emotions, how to describe it.
