On Pain of Death
by Jan Rehner

excerpt 2

August 15, 1942

She knelt alone before the altar, her eyes fixed on the wave of white before her — white gardenias, white daisies, white phlox — like seafoam breaking over the carved wooden pews and spilling across the stone floor of the nave. The flowers were for her husband, Jean Aubin, his hands tied behind his back, waiting outside in the market square to be shot.

Gabrielle felt she could not pray any longer, but she stayed on her knees, unable even to lift her head. She had been baptized in the church of St-Léger, and walked up the aisle in a white dress with a blue satin sash when she was confirmed. That day, she and Jean had stolen away from the village fête and he had kissed her for the first time in the narrow lane behind the boulangerie. Afterwards, they had eaten cake with pink icing from Madame Pascal's pastry shop, and Gabrielle had given him the ribbon from her black hair.

She leaned forward and placed her hands flat against the stone floor as if to pull strength from its polished surface. She had stood just here as a young bride at nineteen, Jean strong and proud at her side, their lives full and without horizons.

But the war had come to St-Léger. At first, the fall of France was too large a thing to believe, but the reality soon rumbled in on German trucks and marched in jackboots through the town. Who would care about tiny St-Léger? It was no more than a dot on the map of France, a few hundred inhabitants, a stone church on a slight hill at the top of a dusty square. On either side, there was a line of modest shops — a boulangerie, a charcuterie, a small grocery, a tabac, a bar with a couple of outside tables. The peeling colours were different shades of faded pink and yellow ochre. Most of the buildings were of weathered stone or stucco, with brown wooden shutters.

But still the Germans came and the St-Léger of Gabrielle's childhood became a foreign country. Swastikas hung from the flagpoles and the offices of the mairie where Jean was a clerk. German orders and German laws were plastered to the sides of buildings and the fronts of shop windows on brown broadsheets with double columns of red printing. Most began with the word verboten: forbidden to keep firearms, forbidden to listen to foreign radio stations, forbidden to walk after curfew, forbidden to aid or abet the enemy. Orders upon orders, some ending with the stark warning, "On pain of death."