Last Twilight in Paris

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of antisemitic violence.

“The women were herded up a ramp toward an awaiting truck. Helaine recoiled. They were being placed in the back part of the vehicle where goods should have been carried, not people [….]. Smells of stale grain and rotting meat, the truck’s previous cargo, assaulted her nose, mixing with her own stench in the warm air.”

Helaine’s word choice of “herded” makes it clear that the Jews are treated like animals rather than actual people, and her shock that they are led into the truck’s cargo area confirms the Germans’ sense that Jews are more like objects than individuals. This dehumanization is consistent and deliberate, designed to break down Jewish resistance and to persuade collaborators that Jewish extermination is desirable.

“To distract herself, Helaine tried to picture the route they were taking outside the windowless truck, down the boulevards she had just days earlier walked freely, past the cafés and shops. The familiar locations should have been some small comfort.”

As she’s being driven in the truck to Lévitan, Helaine tries to figure out where in Paris they are based on the turns the truck makes. She thinks of how she walked these streets and saw these bustling places just a few days earlier, believing her memories of them ought to comfort her now, when so much else is uncertain. Instead, she is reminded of the way the city, and her own situation, has changed so dramatically recently. This highlights The Transformation of Civilian Spaces into Sites of Oppression.

“My mind reels back to the other day when the children had been playing hospital. They were using an old gauze bandage, wrapping it around a doll. Seeing this, Joe, usually so even-tempered, had become distraught […] His eyes had been wide with horror as he surely remembered men bleeding out when there hadn’t been bandages to save them.”

Louise recalls watching her children playing and the way Joe’s personality seems to change before her eyes. Instead of retaining his typically logical and serene disposition, he becomes quite distressed when he sees the old piece of gauze. He appears to conflate the past with the present, forgetting that there is no shortage of bandages now, that there aren’t friends of his bleeding to death in tents nearby.