Scheisshaus Luck

by Pierre Berg

  Even though my parents were in the mountains above Monte Carlo, they weren’t on vacation this time. My father had leukemia, a cancer he had been battling for two years with radiation and arsenic treatments. He had been in remission for months, but it was back and my mother had escorted him to a clinic.

  After Claude’s brothers and his girlfriend came to visit a few times, I began to worry that the foot traffic would attract the attention of my neighbors. You couldn’t trust anybody, with the Germans posting rewards for reporting anything suspicious or out of the ordinary. I took Claude into our backyard and pointed to the toilet under the steps leading to a room over the garage.

  “Claude, if those bastards ever show up, this should be the best place to hide.”

  It was a Thursday afternoon. In France there was no school on Thursdays. Claude was upstairs in my room checking my homework. The only reason I was still in school was to please my father.

  He wanted me to become a jeweler and watchmaker, to have a business of my own. I suppose if he hadn’t sold off his leather wholesale business, which included a shoe factory in Berlin and a factory in the French Alps that manufactured gloves, after being diagnosed, he would have wanted me to join him. The only business I was interested in owning was a beauty shop, but my father wasn’t about to entertain that idea. Maybe he saw through it, since being a beautician had more to do with my aspirations as a gigolo than as an entrepreneur.

  I was in the kitchen putting the leftovers from lunch into the icebox. And as she did every Thursday, our maid, Madame Biondi, was washing the laundry in the concrete double basin in the backyard. Fists pounding against the front door suddenly broke the wonderful monotony of the last two weeks.

  “Aufmachen!” (Open up!), a guttural voice barked.

  I raced upstairs and peeked through the slats of the closed wooden shutters of my parents’ bedroom. Two plainclothes Gestapo officers and two soldiers with guns drawn were banging at the door and ringing the bell. I ducked into my room.

  “Let’s go!”

  Claude and I tumbled down the steps and out the back door.

  Madame Biondi wasn’t at the washbasin and the toilet door was locked.

  “Fire!” I hissed, knocking at the door. “Get out!”

  Madame Biondi rushed out with her panties around her ankles.

  I told Claude to stand on the toilet seat because of the gap at the bottom of the door.

  “Madame, look busy and pull up the panties.”

  “Mais, monsieur.” (But, sir.)

  “The Germans are here.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand,” she said, and went back to the basin.

  I grabbed a rake and started playing gardener. Just in time. The Germans came trotting around the corner. They didn’t say a word to either of us. The younger officer, who had dark hair and penetrating eyes, and was wearing a black leather coat and black hat, ordered one soldier to stay with us as the rest of them rushed through the rear door. On shaky legs I kept up my act as the gardener gathering leaves. I hoped they wouldn’t notice me in the photographs on the walls or search the house too thoroughly. I had a document stashed in my father’s study that could get me shot.

  Ten minutes later the boches came back out. The other officer, a bald-headed fatso wearing a tweed suit with brown leather buttons, had my father’s attachećase in his pudgy hand. The sides of the case were bulging and I wondered what they had swiped. The younger officer came up to me. He was definitely the man in charge.

  “Who are you?” he asked in broken French.

  I could tell from his accent that he was Austrian.

  “I’m the gardener.”

  “Papers,” he ordered, waving his Luger at the two of us.

  Madame Biondi pulled her I.D. from the pocket of her apron.

  “Ah, Italian,” the Austrian said in German.

  “Mama, I don’t have my I.D. with me,” I whimpered.

  “Mi figlio” (My son), she pointed at me.

  Fatso asked in French where the owners were.

  “They’re sick old people, both in the hospital.” For once I almost volunteered the truth.

  “There are dishes on the table,” he said, pointing toward the kitchen.

  “We had lunch.”

  “Die Frau am Telephon hat gemeldet dass hier viele Leute sind” (The woman on the phone mentioned a lot of people), the Austrian said to Fatso, who shrugged his shoulders.

  “Sind wir im falschen Haus?” (Are we at the wrong house?)

  “Vielleicht” (Maybe), said the Austrian.

  They weren’t hunting for Claude. They were hunting for Jews.

  The main reason for the flood of Gestapo and SS in Nice was that the Riviera had become a Jewish “Promised Land.” Under the Italians, fleeing Jews were given legal residence and protection under the law, and the Italian police did everything they could to protect them. The goons were here to correct that.

  The Austrian looked around.

  “Irgend etwas stimmt nicht. Wir werden die noch mal in der Nacht überraschen.” (Something is fishy. We’re going to surprise them again at night.)

  Idiots. They didn’t think that a gardener could understand German and three other languages. All French students were required to learn two languages. I chose German and English. Italian was more or less a second language in southern France since it had been a part of Italy until Napoleon III took it. Our Italian maids had been good teachers. Spanish I picked up when the family of a Spanish general became our neighbors after the civil war. I taught their two sons French, and as a result I learned Spanish. They had wisely fled to Mexico not long after the German invasion.

  “What’s behind this green door?” the Austrian asked in German.

  I struggled to stay calm. Fatso translated.

  “A toilet,” I said quickly. “The door has been jammed for a long time.”

  Fatso translated my response into German and the Austrian nodded. “Well, we will see.”

  He tried to pry it open, but it wouldn’t budge. He grabbed one of the soldier’s submachine guns and fired a volley at the bottom of the door. My heart stood still. Porcelain splinters came flying out the gap, followed by stinking brown ooze. Thankfully I saw no blood. The Austrian couldn’t stomach the stench and called off the search.

  After I made sure that they had left, I knocked at the toilet door.

  “Claude, open up.”

  He tumbled out, gasping as if he had been under water.

  “Boy, you got splashed. You stink,” I told him.

  “When the bowl collapsed I added to the mess,” he replied. “I shit in my pants.”

  Madame Biondi was sitting on the back steps, shaking and sobbing.

  “I’m glad that I didn’t flush,” she squeaked.

  Before curfew that night, Claude collected his things and went to stay with one of his brothers on the outskirts of town. For both our sakes I wasn’t about to contact my friend until the Nazis were defeated.

  A week later I rode my bike down Boulevard de Cimiez to visit my friend Bernard, a skinny seventeen-year-old whose thick glasses had made him the brunt of many of our classmates’ jokes. I had known Bernard since elementary school. In high school we wrote and performed goofy skits on his shortwave transmitter. We loved to imitate Laurel and Hardy. In France, their movies had become extremely popular when the comedic duo chose to speak their lines in French instead of using subtitles. Hearing French spoken with a pronounced British accent was more hilarious than their slapstick, and Bernard and I lampooned their voices in our skits. The shortwave signal was weak, but our friends received our transmissions, and we would be the talk of the school the next day. When our critics became ruthless in their reviews, we ended our careers as radio stars. No sense being the fodder for other kids’ jokes.

  Bounding up the marble steps of Bernard’s parents’ villa, I noticed that the heavy front door was ajar. I pushed it open.

  “Bernard?”

  “Hände hoch!” (Hands up!)


  I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was that Gestapo fatso. He sure didn’t have to shout. His 9mm automatic staring at my forehead was enough. I raised my hands with only one thought in my head, and it was truly peculiar, considering the severity of the moment.

  Was that a Luger or Walther? Before I could ask him, he pushed me face first against the wall next to a petrified Bernard. I could tell from the crimson splotches on his face that Bernard had been slapped a few times.

  After being frisked by a uniformed Waffen SS corporal, I was ordered to turn around. Fatso was wearing the same tweed suit.

  There was a Nazi Party button on his lapel.

  “It’s the gardener who didn’t have his I.D. papers,” he said smugly. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see why Bernard missed school yesterday.”

  “Do you have your papers today?”

  I nodded and handed them to him. I held my breath. These were the papers that I had hoped they wouldn’t find in my father’s study. My false identification papers.

  “Pierre Berceau. You’re Italian and have a French name?”

  I slid Bernard a glance. Either he was too preoccupied with his own troubles to take notice of my bogus last name or he had a great poker face.

  “My father’s French.”

  “Of course.”

  I held out my hand for my papers, but Fatso slid them into the breast pocket of his jacket. Not a good sign. He pointed at Bernard’s shortwave transmitter that was sitting on the floor.

  “Have you seen this before?”

  “Sure, my friend has played with it for many years.”

  “And you didn’t report it?”

  “Why should I?”

  “It’s illegal. It’s a weapon, not a toy.”

  Bernard started to turn around.

  “Gerade stehen!” (Stand straight!) The corporal bounced Bernard’s head against the wall. His glasses went flying. Whimpering, Bernard knelt to pick them up. A kick in the rear lifted him into the air.

  “He needs them,” I protested. “He’s almost blind without them.”

  Fatso crushed the glasses under his heel.

  Two SS soldiers pushed an elderly couple into the entryway.

  They were the housekeepers who had raised Bernard.

  “Was wollen Sie mit den anfangen?” (What do you want to do with them?), the corporal asked.

  “They’re Italian nationals. Let them go,” Fatso answered.

  “Have your men take the blind one here and lock him up. I’m sure we can find room on the Paris train for this gardener.”

  I was in a panic, but I couldn’t let on that I knew their language.

  When they put me in handcuffs I blurted out, “What did I do?”

  This time it was my head that was bounced off the wall.

  What did I do? Well, it was pretty bad luck on my part to have popped up twice in Fatso’s presence in the span of a week. From his vantage point I had to be guilty of something. And that was all the excuse a Nazi needed.

  They hustled us out of the house. Bernard was between the two soldiers and I was behind the corporal and Fatso, who was carrying the transmitter and a bag of loot from the house. What a dirty thief, I thought. Luigi, the gardener for the estate next door, watched from behind the iron fence that my bicycle was chained to. He had seen me lock up my bike that day and many other times. I managed to get the key for my lock out of my pants’ rear pocket and drop it when I passed him. I knew he wasn’t a collaborator, so I was pretty sure I could trust him. This was crucial. I was a courier for the French Resistance, and there was a message hidden in the air pump of my bike. That’s why I had false I.D. papers. I used them to get past roadblocks when delivering messages.

  The gardener gave me a wink. Hopefully he would hide my bike in his tool shed. If the Nazis found that message and connected it to me, it would be certain torture and death.

  Bernard and his guards got into one of the two Citroëns parked at the curb. I had noticed the cars when I locked my bike, but hadn’t given much thought that they didn’t have the cumbersome gazogene coal burners that civilian cars dragged behind them to fuel their engines. How stupid of me! Only the cars of Nazis and Vichy officials ran on gasoline. Fatso shoved me into the rear seat of his Citroën.

  During the drive to the Nice railroad station, I listened carefully to the conversation between the corporal, who was driving, and Fatso, who was inspecting the confiscated valuables.

  “I’ll return in a week. Meantime, see if you can get the other little bastard to talk, but keep him alive. Understand? He might be worth a ransom. His family is definitely wealthy and well connected. With his ever-expanding quotas, the one in the back will make Speer happy.”

  I breathed a little easier. It seemed that Bernard and I would survive for a while. Speer was Albert Speer, the head of Nazi weapon production, and I, it appeared, was going to become one of the millions of sprockets in their war machine. This meant, if I was smart, my involvement in the Maquis would stay a secret and I would be spared any interrogation and torture.

  The corporal took back roads to the train station, a shortcut I had volunteered after he pulled out a map in front of Bernard’s house. The way I saw it, the shorter the trip, the sooner I would be rid of the handcuffs. During the drive, the only person I saw whom I knew was the coffee merchant who was sweeping the sidewalk in front of his shop. I would tag along with my mother when she went to his shop because I loved the dense, invigorating aroma of the freshly roasted coffee beans. With the war came blocked shipping lanes and the aroma disappeared, replaced by the harsh smell of roasted date pits brought in from the French territories in North Africa.

  At the station, a passenger train bound for Paris was waiting for us—waiting for Fatso to board, to be exact. The corporal led me to a passenger car behind the caboose. The windows were wired shut and armed guards stood on the platforms at either end of the car.

  Once inside, the corporal removed the handcuffs and I was finally able to scratch some very nervous itches. He shoved me into a passenger compartment that had a vacant seat next to a girl a couple years younger than I was. Her freckled, turned-up nose gave her a cocky air, but she greeted me with a shy smile. A feeble “Hello”

  squeaked from my throat as I sat down. Any other time I would have played the café Don Juan with such a belle moˆme.

  I eyed my traveling companions with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. Any of them could have been a collaborator, a Nazi plant, or desperate enough to sell out a fellow countryman to save his or her own hide. A slip of the tongue could be a noose slipped around my neck. No one talked except for the whispers shared among loved ones. It could have been that we were all leery of a rat in our midst.

  When the train pulled out of the station it seemed to ease those suspicions and slowly bring home that we shared a common plight.

  Conversations were struck and soon enough I was acquainted with my fellow prisoners.

  Across from me at the window sat Marius, a middle-aged man with a handlebar mustache stained yellow from nicotine. He wore a leather jacket, corduroy pants, work boots, and a cap as dirty as his fingernails. A corncob pipe was stuffed in one jacket pocket while cloves of garlic, which he munched on like bonbons, were stuffed in the other pocket. Marius was a Corsican plumber and a low-level official of the French Communist Party. Next to him sat a beautiful young Honduran with shoulder-length jet-black hair and flawless olive skin. She was a stunning mix of Central American Indian and Conquistador. Her Austrian-Jewish husband, sitting on her other side, was at least twice her age. He was some kind of professor and had a coiffure like Albert Einstein. Every time I looked at him I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a correlation between high IQ and crazy hair growth. She constantly fussed over their two-year-old twin daughters sitting between them. They were headed to an enemy civilian internment camp because of their Honduras citizenship.

  Sitting at the window on my side was a refined lady w
ho was constantly wiping her nose and dabbing at tears with a lace handkerchief. Her husband I recognized from photos in the newspapers.

  He had been an official in the French Socialist Front Populaire government, which had been in power from 1936 to 1938. From their conversations I gathered that the girl next to me was their daughter, Stella.

  For some reason the monotonous clicking of the car’s wheels on the rails reminded me of the metronome my mother used when she rehearsed for a recital. She was a contralto who had performed all over Europe before I was born. After I arrived, my father decreed that there would be no more tours, but she still performed locally.

  There were times her rehearsals drove me out of the house. I closed my eyes and thought, if only now my homework was being disturbed by her practicing scales.

  Stella leaned toward me. Her breath tickled my ear.

  “Would you like to step out with me?”

  I nodded, welcoming the chance to stretch my legs.

  “I can’t bear watching my mother cry,” she said once we were outside the compartment.

  “Why were you and your parents arrested?”

  “Because of my father’s politics and editorials and my mother being Jewish. My father’s internment has been a priority since the Nazis crossed the demarcation line. How about you?”

  “Because of pure, irresponsible stupidity.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not important. Never mind.”

  Oh, Stella was pretty, but she was a pretty stranger. I wasn’t about to open up to her. At least not yet.

  “How about your parents?” Stella asked.

  “They’re safe, but I’m worried about them. I’m sure they’re going to be frantic when they realize I’m gone.”

  By giving the Nazis false identification papers I had made it impossible for my parents to trace me. Neither my parents nor any of my friends knew that I was involved in the Resistance, and the only person in the Resistance who I knew was the man who had given me the I.D. papers, Lucien Meffre. He was the man who recruited me and had been my contact.