June 11, 1940 (evening) [Paris]
[…] Vilma is leaving tomorrow morning between five and six. It would be better if she sneaked out so that the concierge would not hear her. She is leaving on foot and is carrying a white linen sack on her back in which she has all her things. She is going to look like I imagine the Jews must have [when they] wandered from Egypt…
Mother and I also will be going on foot. We shall be leaving tomorrow sometime in the morning. We were lucky to have found two wax-lined bread bags in a small store, an article that can probably no longer be had in Paris, nor can anything else that would be of use for us. This musette [sack] will hold quite a bit. I am going to tie the “baggage” on the back of my bike, which I plan to take along. That way the bike instead of being a burden will help me to carry our things and I don’t have to leave it in Paris.
Tomorrow we shall leave Paris on foot. Our immediate destination will be Dad, who is only about one hundred kilometers from Paris. Our final destination is the Beaufils family, who suggested that when nothing else works to take refuge with them. They are seven hundred kilometers away. The idea is fantastic—seven hundred kilometers on foot! If we walk on the average thirty kilometers a day it will be an interrupted march that will take twenty-three days. Not to think of it, give it no thought… Only away from Paris.
This afternoon I still took time to hurry through the Latin Quarter. Although excited I tried to fix everything in my mind, the houses, the plazas… and I asked myself for how long? Forever… or will it be for only a short time? […]
- Elizabeth Kaufman, age 16; Paris, France
(Zapruder, Alexandra. Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2002)