Lily Vizniak

Lily Vizniak is a Jewish woman living in the same Paris apartment building as the Rossignol family on the Avenue de La Bourdonnais. She is married to Emile Vizniak and has two young children, Anton and Hélène. Her husband is already a prisoner of war, held in a camp near Pithiviers. Lily is described as a beautiful woman with skin the color of fresh cream and luxurious hair, and she owns a lacy silk negligee that must have cost a fortune when it was purchased, details that mark her as a woman of some means and elegance before the war stripped such distinctions away.

The Vel' d'Hiv Roundup

In the early hours of July 16, 1942, during Operation Spring Wind, French policemen arrive at the Vizniak apartment. Isabelle Rossignol, who has been working at the prefecture of police sorting identity cards of foreign-born Jews, witnesses the arrest. The policemen inform Lily that she is being "relocated" and instruct her to pack only the necessaries. When Lily asks how her husband will find them, the older policeman replies, "After the war, you will come back." The policemen explicitly state that her children, who are French-born citizens, are not on the list and may be left behind. Isabelle, who has been hiding in the stairwell, steps forward and offers to take the children, saying, "I'll take them for you, Lily." The children wail and cling to their mother. Lily refuses, insisting, "A mother can't leave her children. Someday you'll understand." She chooses to keep her family together, a decision that seals their fate. The French policeman warns Isabelle to leave, and she is forced to retreat, understanding that her own dangerous work with the Resistance prevents her from drawing further attention to herself.

Consequences and Aftermath

Lily Vizniak and her children are taken away by the French police. The next morning, Isabelle returns to the Vizniak apartment and finds it looted: only the biggest pieces of furniture remain, drawers are open, clothes and knickknacks are scattered across the floor, and rectangular black marks on the wall reveal missing artwork. The apartment has been stripped of its life. Lily Vizniak's story is a microcosm of the larger tragedy of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, in which thousands of foreign-born Jewish families in Paris were arrested by French police, held in inhumane conditions at the Vélodrome d'Hiver, and then deported to concentration camps. Her fate, like that of her family, is never explicitly stated in the novel, but the context of the roundup and the subsequent deportations to Auschwitz makes it clear that they were among the victims of the Holocaust. Lily Vizniak's brief appearance serves as a devastating illustration of the impossible choices forced upon Jewish families and the complicity of the French state in their destruction.