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that someone had given her. The inside of this coat had a bold plaid design that looked new, and my mother decided to use it as the outside of my coat. I got to love that flashy plaid coat, and I was pleased that my mother had dared to use that old cloth. My mother was also becoming stylish, putting on lipstick and painting her fingernails. She went looking for food on her new bicycle but she wore high heels and short pleated skirts. Because of the scarcity of textiles the women wore their hemlines very short. I noticed for the first time that my mother had dancer’s legs.
    While I was preoccupied with my friends, school and the swimming club, my father, I learned later, was making false visas and other documents for the underground. People kept coming and going, and everyone asked us when we would be leaving. My father was waiting to hear from the people who had gone ahead. Everyone worried—there were rumors that the Germans were contemplating marching into the free zone at any moment. At this time a woman who lived next door, in a house where German Jews were under house arrest, came to see my mother. She had to make a choice, either stay in Marseille with her daughter or follow her sick husband who was being sent to a “work camp” somewhere in Germany. In fact, he was being sent to the gas chambers, but at that time we didn’t know. Her husband was sick and needed her. Distressed, she felt she should stay by his side. Her daughter had a visa to go to Spokane, Washington, and she was expected to stay there with her uncle. It had all been arranged. She had to wait for the boat that was due to arrive in Marseille at any moment. Instantly my mother agreed to take the girl in with us. I was not consulted.
    And my torment began. I had to share everything—my parents, my life with a complete stranger. She was pretty, and that didn’t help. I was totally unprepared for this newest turn of events. My parents had no time to be concerned with my feelings at that moment, they had much bigger worries. A ball of resentment invaded me and kept growing and growing. I hated Lilo.
    The Germans were entering the free zone, and my father announced we had to go, but he was still waiting to get news of the guide who had taken our friends into Spain. I was hoping, that if we left, we would also leave Lilo behind to wait for her boat. My parents didn’t know what to do about Lilo. She had a visa, and if her boat came she would be saved, while we had no visas, and who knows where we would end up once we escaped. To my dismay, Lilo insisted she wanted to stay with us. She didn’t care about the dangers we would face as long as we were together. She could not bear another separation, and she was frightened by the chaos that reigned in the house next door where the Jewish children had been left on their own. They went wild without adult supervision. Then a bully, a young boy, took charge of the children and was abusing them. Lilo begged my parents to keep her with us.
    I was consumed by rage and had no one to tell my misery. Everything my parents did intensified my anguish. They treated Lilo with special care and ignored me, or so I thought. They put Lilo on their passport as their daughter so she could leave France with us. I took it as a sign of a legal adoption, even though I knew the passports were false anyway. And all that time, too, I was expected to be extra good to Lilo “my new sister!” I hated her. I liked her only when she was bad, and I wanted her to be nasty so my parents would be sorry they had kept her. Sometimes I liked her and felt all the more upset to realize she could be liked. There was no solution to the situation as far as she was concerned.
    She was a pretty girl with light yellow hair, blue eyes and a turned-up nose. She had personality too. I hated her. When strangers thought she was my parents’ real daughter and I the adopted one. I wanted her dead. But she remained there