by Richard Wake
The Gestapo had been in Lyon for four months. We were all in church when they arrived — literally. It was November 11, 1942, and we were praying for the dead of the first war on the anniversary of the armistice. And if everyone in the church was praying for the French war dead, and I was praying for the friends I lost while fighting for Austria-Hungary, so be it. We were on the same side now. When we walked out of the church together, the German columns were arriving. We were in the free zone for the first two years of the war, the part of France the Germans couldn’t be bothered with and left to the fucking Vichy to run things. But then, seemingly overnight, we were worthy of their attention. The brass piled into the Hotel Terminus, across from the train station, and attempted to operate from there for a while. But the business of torture and terror, a booming industry, quickly outgrew the hotel’s accommodations. So while they continued to use the Terminus as their dormitory, the Gestapo had taken over the old medical school on Avenue Berthelot, a block and a half from the Rhone, for their hijinks.
I could have avoided it, but I liked walking by — big and solid, Nazi flags flying, black-uniformed sentries at the gate. It reminded me why I was doing this. I made Manon walk by with me the last time we were close. And while she didn’t object, she did say, “You know full well that I don’t need a fucking reminder.”
Manon was my wife. We met in Zurich in late 1939. I followed her to Lyon, her home, after the German invasion in 1940. We had fallen in love despite a rather unconventional romantic beginning — unconventional in the sense that she was a spy for the French intelligence service who seduced me because she was trying to figure out what I was up to, me being a spy for the former Czech government in exile and all. As it turned out, we possessed not only a physical and an emotional attraction, but we also bonded over a professional realization that became clear as the panzers sped through the Ardennes: we worked for idiots, for blind men married to the past, for cowards incapable of action.
So now we worked for the Resistance, and for each other, and against the black uniforms and the swastika flags. We published an underground newspaper, one of a half-dozen in the city, called La Dure Vérité. It was really a sheet or two run off on a Roneo machine, once or twice a month, but we were convinced it made a difference, maybe even more than the sabotage — railroad tracks, telephone lines, whatever would disrupt the German terror machine. We were sure that the 1,000 copies we produced were being read by 20,000, passed secretly from hand to hand. Of course, there were also days when we were convinced that nobody was reading anything and that nothing mattered. Those were the days I went out of my way to walk down Avenue Berthelot, to watch the red flags starched in the breeze, to see the sharpness in the creases in the black SS uniforms. And, maybe to see Barbie.
Klaus Barbie was the man in charge and I had never seen him. There already were stories of his brutality, but how much was true and how much was an urban legend was unclear. It seemed as if everybody’s horrible story was third-hand. If he really was torturing and killing people, and doing it personally, they wouldn’t be around to tell the tales, after all. I didn’t know anybody who had been in his presence for more than a few seconds.
Max had seen Barbie on the street, arriving at Avenue Berthelot one day, and said, “He’s fucking short. He’s not one of those big, tall, blond assholes.” He guessed Barbie was maybe five-foot-six. Another friend had heard his voice once, outside the Terminus as he was waiting for a car. “He speaks French — he was talking to the valet at the front door, and he was doing okay with the language. Just really slow.”
But as for the rest, the rumors of torture and brutality, they were just that. Still, I was dying to put a face to a name, maybe just to give myself a more vivid nightmare. On this day, though, as on all the others when I walked by, I didn’t see him. And now that I thought about it, maybe that was what made the nightmares worse.
I crossed the Rhone and then walked north, up to our neighborhood, the Croix-Rousse, up the steep hills, so steep that sometimes there was a stone staircase to take you up from one cross street to the next. Our house, a tiny single with a tinier patch of grass out front, was a few blocks away from Manon’s family business, a silk manufacturing factory that her uncle ran by himself since her father’s death a few years back. Manon helped with the bookkeeping and used a storeroom in the back as the base of our underground publishing empire. Our Resistance cell was tiny — Manon and I, and a couple of others — and we met in the factory when it was necessary. Which meant twice in the last year, and one of those times was just an excuse to get drunk together after I came into possession of a case of bootleg wine. The other time was to tell them that the various Resistance groups had been forced to come together into a kind of confederation after Barbie and his pals arrived, and that our sabotage work would have to be coordinated. That’s how I ended up working with Rene and Max, who were with Combat and Liberation, much bigger Resistance groups than ours.
As I approached the house, Manon was sitting on the little front porch, taking a bit of the afternoon sun. Eyes closed, face upturned — God, she was beautiful. She greeted me in the time-honored fashion, and after we were done, we lay naked in the bed and she whispered softly, “Enough of this. I’d kill for a glass of that milk. And then a glass of the wine.”
I feigned annoyance. She reached down and grabbed me there. “The milk and the wine are rationed,” she said. “This isn’t. Not yet, anyway.”
We pulled on robes and sat at the kitchen table and drank first from the milk bottle and then from the wine bottle, just passing them back and forth, not even using glasses. I recounted what I had been doing the last two days, and Manon kissed me on the forehead and called me her “little mad bomber.” She told me a funny story about her uncle and the half-deaf old woman who ran one of the looms, screaming at each other about a botched order. The sun felt warm through the front window. Winter was done now.
Both bottles were about half-empty, maybe a little more, when the knock on the door signaled the arrival of three Gestapo men, two of them with guns drawn. One of them came into our bedroom and watched me get dressed, and then it was into the backseat.
4
It was well into the afternoon, and apparently the Gestapo worked bankers’ hours, so they didn’t take me to Avenue Berthelot. Instead, after escorting me to the car, and with Manon watching stoically from the porch, they drove me to Montluc Prison.
“PRISON MILITAIRE,” is what the sign said over the main gate, and that it was — an old shithole built originally to house the military’s criminal problems, mostly prisoners of war from the last time. By 1943, though, it had become the Gestapo’s holding pen for the people it wanted to hold and an execution site for those who no longer held the jailers’ fancy. The guards were French, but the orders handed down were quite German. To come here was not to receive a death sentence, not necessarily, but the cells weren’t filled with drunks and wife beaters and petty thieves, either. The Germans didn’t care so much about crimes committed against people unless they were German people. Montluc was a place for dealing with crimes against the Nazi vision. Oh, and for dealing with Jews.
I didn’t resist when I was arrested, mostly because if I had, Manon might have jumped to my assistance and gotten herself hauled in, too. Also, there were the guns to consider. I always considered the guns. During the ride over, I stuck to speaking French to the Gestapo gorillas, not wanting to alert them to the fact that I spoke German. Then I tried to eavesdrop on their chatter as if it would provide me with some morsel I might use to escape. Instead, all I found out was the name of the bar they were going to drink in after work. Jenney’s.
After we walked through the gate, my escorts could not wait to be rid of me. They skipped out of the prison as if freed from a 10-year stretch, which strongly suggested there might be a during-work stop somewhere else, before Jenney’s. I was left to sit on a bench in a holding cell, waiting for someone to fill out my paperwork. A fat, half-untucked French guard even
tually came for me and checked me in.
“Name?”
“Allain Killy,” I said.
“Papers?”
I handed them over. My real name was Alex Kovacs, which was duly recorded in my Czech, Austrian and Swiss passports; it’s a long story. For my first year in Lyon, I went by Alex. In 1941, I was convinced for operational reasons by other Resistance members to create a second identity. That’s when I became Albert Kampe. In 1942, I added Allain Killy. My friends, and most people in the Resistance, still called me Alex. Some called me Al, others AK. The point was to have several valid sets of identity papers so that, if I were arrested, I could change identities. That way, if I were arrested a second time, only the memory of a policeman or Gestapo agent would link me to the previous arrest. The name itself wouldn’t set off any alarm bells if somebody saw it on a list.
Which meant that the identity would have to be retired. It was going to be au revoir, Allain, once I got out of Montluc. Which was maybe a fantasy, I knew.
“Belt,” said the untucked concierge, and I handed it over.
“Shoelaces,” he said, and I handed them over, too.
“Get naked,” he said. He searched my clothes as I stood there, hands instinctively covering my privates. He ran his hands carefully over all of the seams of the pants and shirt, and the hems of my cuffs. He eyed up the soles of my shoes and then banged them together as if hoping to feel the vibration of a weapon secreted somewhere inside. He skipped over the peek up my butthole, likely for his benefit more than mine. Then, apparently satisfied, or maybe just bored, or both, he handed everything back.
“Get dressed,” he said, and turned and left me to it. But any hope I had that this was just going to be a courtesy visit, just taking down my name and warning me about something or other, was tempered by the knowledge that they had already taken my belt and shoelaces. And in a minute — I just had time to get buttoned up — another guard arrived to escort me out of the intake building, across a courtyard of sorts, and then into the building that housed the cells.
It was two floors of cells. Each floor had about 24 cells, 12 on each side. On the second floor, there was a balcony effect, with the cells along the perimeter and an open area between them, a railing separating you from the view of the first floor below. There was metal fencing that prevented anyone falling from the second floor down to the tile on the first floor. Or, more likely, jumping.
My accommodations were on the second floor. Each cell was maybe 6 feet wide and 12 feet deep. The walls were painted dark gray on the bottom half and white above that to the ceiling. The floors were dark tile of some sort. There were two straw mattresses on each floor, and there was a stinking bucket in the far right corner. My cell contained four prisoners — I was the fourth, when they slammed the heavy wooden door behind me — and that seemed about the norm. I didn’t recognize anybody.
There was not much conversation among the four of us beyond an initial hello. Honestly, no one knew who might be a Gestapo informant, so there was no way we could even consider trusting each other at the outset. It was impossible for me to tell them, “I blew up a train bridge, and how about you?” So there was just silence, and some outward courtesies as we took turns laying down on the two straw mattresses. That they were undoubtedly infested with lice didn’t matter, either to them or to me.
Really, the only thing anyone said after the initial greeting was when the one guy, an older guy, even older than me, stood up from the mattress, muttered “my apologies in advance,” and proceeded to take the nosiest shit I can remember in the open bucket in the corner. It almost would have been comical if it had not been so dehumanizing. And the smell, well, it was constant after that.
“When do they empty it?” I said.
“Tomorrow.” It was the youngest guy in the group. I’m not sure he was 17. I wondered if his parents knew where he was. I was going crazy, and attempted some conversation with him, as benign a conversation as I could conjure.
“How long have you been here?” He was wary, but then he answered.
“Three days, I think,” he said.
“Been outside of here in that time?”
“No, other than to wash my face. There’s a sink down at the end of the hall with four spigots. We get one wash a day. Oh, and a quick walk around the courtyard.”
“Food?”
“Stale bread and cold coffee in the morning — the fake coffee.” This was the fourth guy, 30-ish, almost bald. “Cold stew at night, no meat. That should be coming soon. It’s shit, but you have to eat something.”
He also had been in the cell for three days. The old guy said he was on his fifth day. The food arrived, and we stopped talking. It was shoved through a panel in the thick wood door, and it was as advertised — shit. Soon after we ate, it was dark and so quiet, at least for a few minutes. The four of us arranged ourselves so that each of us at least had our head on the mattress. As I settled down, it wasn’t the smell that bothered me the most, or the lice that I knew were crawling on me. It was the cloud of flies, which gathered during the day near the top of the tall cells, up near the light. Because when the light went out, the flies would dive-bomb from on high, and you would attempt to sleep between swats and whispered curses.
5
I knew nothing about the inside of Montluc before I arrived, but I did know that there was a procedure for finding out if someone you knew was being held there. You showed up with some clothing or food and said this was for so-and-so. If the package was accepted that meant so-and-so was there. And so I was greeted in the morning by a guard bearing a small package, wrapped in brown paper, that had apparently been opened and re-wrapped by the guards. Manon had come to find me. Inside was a shirt, underwear, socks, and four apples. And so my new roommates and I had an addition to our breakfast menu of fake coffee and stale bread.
I looked around the room, just to make sure I hadn’t missed it, and I hadn’t. None of the other three had any belongings other than what they were wearing, which meant that their families did not know where they were. Or maybe they had no loved ones in the area. Whatever, it was hard for me to reconcile how filled with love and support I felt at that moment, and compare it to the face of the young kid in the cell as he sat in the corner and gnawed on the apple, spitting out a few of the seeds but eating every other bit of it except for the stem. He was crying as he ate it, but his face was still hard as he wiped a tear with his dirty sleeve.
After we ate, we were permitted a quick walk around the courtyard, maybe 10 minutes’ worth. It was not an organized exercise period. We walked in a great circle around the perimeter of the yard, guards with rifles keeping us moving and in line as we snaked around the facility. I thought I saw Max about 100 people ahead of me, but I wasn’t sure and couldn’t maneuver out of the line to get a view of anything other than the backs of a few heads. Max. Fuck. I wondered if they got Rene, too – and then I was pretty sure I saw him, too, way off in the distance. But how? Had one of them been caught at their farmhouse? Had they talked?
At one point, we entered a part of the yard that featured a low building that had apparently been added recently. It butted up against the taller jail. There was still the smell of freshly cut lumber in the air, and scatterings of sawdust. It seemed as if there was an original structure, and that they were adding to it.
I poked the kid from my cell and pointed.
“What’s that?”
“Jews,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s where they put the Jews.”
We continued walking. We got close enough that, when a door of these new barracks opened, I could see inside for a second. There were rows of bunks, one on top of another on top of another. But it was just a peek as the door slammed shut.
After our exercise, all of the prisoners were led back inside and told to wait outside of our cells. It was crowded, like a train platform at rush hour, except more haggard. The hopelessness on so many of the faces forced me to stare down at
my shoes. In a minute, a guard with a clipboard began reading names. It was a list of 20 altogether. They were divided into two groups.
“With luggage,” the guard bellowed. “With luggage.” And then he called off 10 names, last name then first name.
“Now,” the guard said, yelling even louder. “Without luggage. I repeat: without luggage.” And then he read 10 more names. Heads noticeably fell as these names were read. There was the occasional gasp. One such gasp came from just to my right. It came from the old man in our cell, the one who had taken the noisy shit. Jean Bisset was his name.
“All names I have just read will report to me, either with or without your luggage,” the guard said. “You have two minutes. Now everyone back into your cells.”
The four of us were back inside, and the three of us not named Jean Bisset were leaning against different walls. I don’t know if we were trying to give him some space or to give ourselves some distance. Two minutes of silence can be forever sometimes, and this was. We didn’t look him in the eye but it didn’t matter because Bisset’s face was covered by his hands. He wasn’t crying, but it was as if he couldn’t bear to look, either. And then, whatever emotion had gripped him appeared to pass. His hands came down from his face and his look was nothing short of defiant.
“If they call your name…” he said. And then he stopped as his voice caught. And then he started again.
“If anyone ever asks,” he said, “tell them that Jean Bisset’s final moments were brave moments. Vive la France.”
And then, just as he reached the cell door, he turned and looked at me, smiled and winked, and said, “And thanks for the apple.”
That’s when I started crying, just after he left. I sat in the corner of that filthy shithole and blubbered. It took me a few minutes to look up and ask, “With luggage? Without luggage?”