Paris appears less as a sustained setting than as a place where lives begin, people are seized, and the history of deportation becomes legible in records. The city links the ordinary facts of family life to the systems that uproot it: a child is born in one of its arrondissements, while other Jews are rounded up there and sent into internment and deportation.

Roundups and Deportation

A fellow traveler tells a deportee that many stateless former Romanians in the wagon had been picked up in Paris or elsewhere in France. The detail places Paris among the locations where people were seized before being transported through the internment system. The travelers had been moved from Pithiviers to Drancy internment camp without being separated until the arrival of a cattle wagon signaled that their relative reprieve had ended. Paris is not identified as the site of that transfer, but it belongs to the geography of the roundup that brought people into it.

The conversation also gives the city’s role a human scale: those taken from Paris were not an abstraction or a single category. In the same wagon, a man describes himself as a stateless former Romanian, and another recalls Iaşi. The routes and former affiliations of the deportees converge in forced transport, while the place of capture remains one part of a wider displacement across France.

Birth and Deportation in the Family Record

The book’s historical appendix makes Paris an exact point on a family timeline. Abraham and Chaja Wiesenfeld’s twin daughters, Fernande and Jeannine, were born in the city’s tenth arrondissement on November 9, 1943. They were deported from Drancy on Convoy 64 on December 7, just twenty-eight days after their birth. The sequence compresses birth, registration, internment, and deportation into the first weeks of the twins’ lives; Paris marks the beginning of a chronology that almost immediately carries them away from home.

The city’s appearance in this record complements the novel’s fictional account of children caught in deportation. Dinah is registered as Diane on provisional papers and in a newly issued official family record book, while her child Henri is named in relation to Rose, his twin sister. Such records can preserve names and kinship even as the people they describe are forced into danger and separation. The appendix’s Paris birth entry makes that tension concrete through dates, an arrondissement, and the short interval before deportation.

The City as a Place of Memory

The Memorial to the Deportation of Jews from France, compiled from alphabetical lists of deportees, serves for the author and other children of deportees as a kind of family vault. Its entries anchor private histories in documentary evidence: the Wiesenfeld family’s names, the twins’ birthplace, and the dates of their deportation survive in a list that can be consulted after the destruction of ordinary family life.

Paris therefore carries two connected meanings in the book. It is one of the places from which Jews were taken, and it is also a precise location preserved in the record of a family’s beginning. The movement between those meanings resists treating deportation as an impersonal sequence of numbers: the lists point back to named people, a specific birthplace, and a time when the twins were only a few weeks old.