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Although France’s borders hadn’t been breached, the world was at war. “But surely we can help people, can’t we?” Colette had asked just before Christmas. “Our work is more important than ever.”

“Indeed,” her mother said. “But Paris is no longer safe, my darling. It’s only a matter of time before the Germans are here, one way or another.”

Colette, her little sister, Liliane, and her parents were among the hundreds of thousands who fled the capital, fearing that there would be heavy casualties as the Germans tried to take the city.

The roads were crowded with those trying to escape, pockmarked with recent bomb craters and lined with bodies; Mum kept Liliane’s eyes shielded from the chaos as much as she could, but Colette knew none of them would ever forget the things they’d seen.

A swastika flag now hung from the Arc de Triomphe; the clocks had been set forward an hour to German time; the museums and libraries had been stripped bare.

French soldiers were marched through the streets, their uniforms in tatters, on the way to prison camps, and German soldiers now filled the cafés that Colette and her family had once frequented.

“We must do something ,” Colette whispered to her mother on the night they returned to their apartment, which had gone musty and stale in their absence.

Mum was tucking Colette and Liliane into the bed they shared, and beside Colette, under the covers, Liliane was already drifting off to sleep, her breathing slow and even.

She was only two years old, too young to understand what was happening, which Colette supposed was a blessing.

“I want to help, Mum. Surely there are Germans we could steal from.”

“Darling, I cannot permit it,” Mum said firmly. “There was danger before, but at worst, you might have had to spend a night in jail. The penalties should you be caught stealing from a German now would be much, much worse.”

“Does that mean you’ll stop stealing, too, then?”

Mum bit her lip. “No,” she said with a sigh. “It is in the times of greatest danger that we must summon our greatest courage. It is what I have trained for all my life.”

“But I have, too, Mum.”

Mum’s eyes glistened with tears. “My darling, I cannot put you in harm’s way. You will have the rest of your life to do good, but now, your most important job is to survive.”

For two years, Colette reluctantly followed her mother’s orders.

For two years, her fingers itched each time she passed a German sympathizer wearing an expensive piece.

For two years, her heart twisted with shame each time she saw someone who needed help.

She had felt so powerful when her mother had trusted her to steal, and now, she felt a terrible sense of not mattering at all.

Mum had begun working with a clandestine organization based in the neighborhood, run by a man she knew only as Le Paon , the Peacock.

It was a loose group, hastily formed, but it was filled with people trying to help the cause, and it gave Mum purpose.

The more Mum threw herself into the work of stealing to fund the underground, the more useless Colette felt.

But each time she asked to help, her mother’s answer was firm and unequivocal.

“I simply cannot risk losing you, Colette,” she would say. “I cannot permit it.”

But by the time Colette turned fourteen in the summer of 1942, things had gotten much worse for all of them, and Colette could no longer ignore her urge to do something, anything .

The Germans had begun arresting Jewish men, women, and children in mass roundups, and Colette knew that Le Paon’s network was now helping to fund escape lines that would save lives.

She wanted desperately to help, too. She had the skills and the training to make a difference, and it was high time she tried.

She knew enough, though, not to tell her mother, and to wait for the right mark, the right opening. Mum had taught her well.

For her first target in two years, Colette settled on Madame Virlogeux, a dressmaker who had become quite wealthy in the last several months fabricating designer knockoffs for German officers to send home to their mothers and wives or, more often, to give to their French girlfriends.

Madame Virlogeux had a stable of eight women who cut and sewed patterns, and the rumor was that she had them beaten by one of her henchmen when a dress didn’t come out exactly to her liking.

That wasn’t Colette’s concern, however, nor was the money Madame Virlogeux was making from the Germans, though both repulsed her.

No, what had triggered Colette’s interest was the knowledge that the dressmaker had betrayed at least three Jewish families in her building, making false accusations to the Germans so that she could take over their apartments.

In this manner, she had secured for herself the entire second floor of a building on the rue Saint-Sébastien.

Her betrayals had, so far, resulted in the arrests and deportations of several adults and six innocent children, two of them just four years old, Liliane’s age.

For weeks now, Colette had been taking the long way home from school, weaving a few blocks out of her way so that her route would take her down the rue Saint-Sébastien.

She hadn’t been lucky enough to spot Madame Virlogeux on any of her previous passes, but today, as Colette rounded the corner, she saw the portly dressmaker standing outside the front door to her building, smoking a cigarette as she talked to two German officers, a narrow diamond-and onyx bangle twinkling on her right wrist. Her platinum hair was in a severe twist, and her immaculate lipstick was blood red.

Hatred sizzled within Colette, and before she could talk herself out of it, she crossed the street and slipped into a throng of people walking past the dressmaker’s building.

Colette hardly had time to consider what she was going to do, and though she hadn’t stolen anything in ages, instinct took over as she approached.

There were seven other people moving by in a group, including three young women and two older men.

Heart thudding, she reached out and grabbed the purse strap of one of the women, giving it a hard tug to create a distraction.

It was a move she and Mum had practiced several times before the war; she could easily create a confused commotion if she involved not one but two strangers at the same time.

The woman shrieked, spinning around and immediately spitting accusations at the two old men behind her.

The melee distracted Madame Virlogeux and her Germans, and as the little knot of people passed, Colette used the opportunity to jostle one of the men into Madame Virlogeux at the very same moment Colette herself slipped the bangle from the dressmaker’s wrist. Madame Virlogeux yelped and began to hurl obscenities at the man as Colette melted back into the crowd, her heart thudding.

She had done it. She had taken a diamond bangle from one of the cruelest women in Paris, exactly the kind of theft her storied ancestor would have cheered on.

But as Madame Virlogeux continued to rant at the now-cowering old man, one of the Germans she’d been in conversation with was peering around, and as Colette hurried away, his gaze landed on her.

When their eyes met, his expression hardened and he took a step forward, and that’s when she made her mistake.

Instead of continuing on her way as if nothing was amiss, as she’d been trained to do, her flight instinct kicked in, and she took off running.

She knew instantly that she’d reacted incorrectly, but it was too late.

Heavy footsteps sounded behind her, and then the soldier called out in German, ordering her to halt immediately.

But he was an older, slightly overweight man, and his speed was no match for hers, propelled as she was by sheer terror.

She circled her own block a few times before she was certain that she’d lost him.

Finally, she turned onto the rue Pasteur, where she had lived since the day she was born, and stopped across the street from her own apartment building.

She was breathing hard, and it wasn’t until she stopped running that she realized she was shaking uncontrollably.

Suddenly, the German came around the corner from out of nowhere, panting heavily.

Colette gasped and quickly backed into a doorway, pressing herself into the shadows as she held her breath.

If the man continued down the block, he’d pass her hiding space in less than two minutes.

There was nowhere left for her to go. What had she done?

The German paused at the corner and then began walking again, more slowly now, his eyes narrowed as he scanned the doorways along the street. Any moment now, he would see her. She put her hand over her own mouth to stifle a gasp and shrank back as far as she could go.

From the opposite direction, a boy she recognized vaguely from the neighborhood was hurrying toward them.

He was about her age, with thick, dark hair and long lashes, and he wore a yellow, six-pointed star outlined in black—it had just been announced a few days earlier, on the first of June, that Jews must wear them everywhere.

For a few seconds, Colette forgot all about her own predicament.

Go back , she wanted to cry out. As perilous as the city was for all Parisians now, it was ten times more dangerous for Jews, who could be arrested and even executed without cause.

But the boy only quickened his pace, as if he hadn’t noticed the danger at all, finally drawing to a halt just a few meters away from the frowning soldier. Slowly, deliberately, the boy bent to tie his shoe, right in the path of the German. What was he thinking?

The German stopped short, glowering down at the boy in his path. “Who do you think you are?” he barked in thickly accented French.