by Glenn Meade
It was only when they carried Lebel’s body to the mass grave along with the other wasted corpses, heard the faint gasp of breath, and saw the flicker of life in Lebel’s eyes that they decided the man was definitely still alive.
There had been two long months spent in a Russian field hospital to build up his strength before he was handed over to the British and allowed to return to his native Paris.
Lebel had survived the war, but it was a war that had cost him his wife, who was gassed, then burned in the ovens of Auschwitz, not only because she was Jewish, but because Lebel had been a member of the French Communist Resistance.
For the last eight years he had resumed the furrier trade his father, an émigré Russian Jew, had begun in Paris. Henri Lebel had gradually built it up into a flourishing business, outfitting the Parisian rich with the best of Russian sable and fur, and in the process turning himself into a wealthy man with a resident suite at the Ritz Hotel and a luxury villa in Cannes.
There were frequent trips to Moscow, where Lebel’s resistance connections had gone down well with the Soviet authorities, and as a result Lebel had managed to turn his company into a virtual monopoly, with sole rights in Europe to sell Russian fur. And with America beginning to boom in the postwar years, he had even opened a thriving branch on New York’s Fifth Avenue.
Life, it seemed, despite its horrors, had turned out reasonably well for Henri Lebel. But unknown to his business contacts in Moscow, he had a dark secret.
• • •
There were milestones in his troubled life that Henri Lebel remembered with great clarity: The day he and Klara were arrested by the Gestapo. The day he had met Irena Dezov. And the day he had begun to live again after the horror of Auschwitz.
The first, the arrest in Paris two years after the Germans invaded, he could never forget.
It was his wife’s birthday, and after several months in hiding Lebel was going crazy being cooped up and decided to risk taking her out to celebrate. As he sat in the Paris café with Klara that Saturday morning, barely enjoying the wartime ersatz coffee and the stodgy cakes, the door had burst in and three men in plain clothes entered. Lebel saw the black leather coats and gloves and the slouch hats, and a chill ran through his veins. As it stood, he was already a wanted man for his resistance activities.
The three men stood in the center of the café, hands on their hips, the sharp voice of the man in charge still perfectly clear in Lebel’s memory. “Papieren! Everybody get their papers ready!” And then the grim joke that rang around the café as the Gestapo man grinned. “And if there are any Jews among you, start saying your prayers.”
The laughter that followed from the Gestapo men still echoed in Henri Lebel’s ears. He had looked at his wife, her beautiful face draining of color. Lebel could still remember the feeling that spring morning. Icy fear. Sweat breaking out all over his body, his heart pumping in his ears, ready to burst. He was a resistant, and worse, a Jewish one.
The three men went through the café checking papers. The one in charge came to Lebel’s table. He smiled down at Klara, then looked at Lebel. “Papieren, bitte.”
Lebel promptly handed over his papers. The Gestapo man was tall, thin-faced, with piercing blue eyes. It was a face that was to live vividly in Lebel’s head day and night. The eyes flicked slowly from the photograph in the papers to Lebel’s face, as if the Gestapo man was trying to make up his mind about something.
The eyes narrowed. Lebel’s hands were shaking, and he guessed the man noticed.
The Gestapo man smiled coldly and said, “Where were these papers issued?”
Lebel could hear the silence in the café as the man spoke. He saw his wife glance at him nervously. “Marseilles, sir,” Lebel answered respectfully, trying to keep his composure. The place of issue was already stamped on the papers. Lebel had got rid of his own papers and had been given forged ones by the resistance. His new family name was Claudel. It had worked for six months. But now Lebel thought the Gestapo man sensed something wasn’t right.
He continued to scrutinize the papers, then looked up. “Your occupation, Herr Claudel?”
Lebel swallowed. His occupation was typed on the document. “I am a salesman.” He paused, decided to be bold and risk everything. “Is there a problem with our papers? There really shouldn’t be, you know.”
“That’s for me to decide,” the Gestapo man snapped, then looked down at Lebel’s wife. There were tiny beads of perspiration on Klara’s upper lip, her hands trembling in her lap as she clutched her napkin.
The Gestapo man had sensed her fear. He looked back at Lebel and said, “Your wife, Herr Claudel, she seems afraid of something. I wonder what?”
The question hung in the air like an accusation. Lebel felt his heart sink. He answered as calmly as he could. “She hasn’t been well, I’m afraid.”
The man looked at Klara. “Really? And what has been the matter, Frau Claudel?”
Lebel decided to brazen it out. “Really, officer,” he interrupted, “my wife’s health is no concern of yours. We are both upright French citizens. And if you must know, my wife suffers with her nerves. And this intrusion of yours is not helping matters. So please be so kind as to return our papers if you have finished examining them.” He held out his hand boldly as he tried to keep it from shaking.
The Gestapo man sneered before he slowly handed back the papers. “My apologies, Herr Claudel,” he said politely. “I hope your wife’s condition improves. Enjoy your coffee and cake.”
The Gestapo men left. Lebel could not help the feeling of relief and triumph that surged through his body.
It did not last long.
They came late that night.
Lebel heard the screech of tires in the street below their safe apartment, heard the pounding fists on the door. As he flicked on the light and went to grab the pistol he kept hidden under the pillow, the door burst in on its hinges.
Half a dozen men in plain clothes crowded into the room, the thin-faced man from the café leading them, a sneer on his face. He smashed Lebel in the mouth with a leather-gloved fist. Then Lebel was on the floor, and the man was kicking him senseless. “Get up, Jew! Get up!”
When they dragged him to his feet, two of his ribs were broken and his shoulder dislocated. The other men were already moving through the apartment, ransacking the rooms. His wife was dragged screaming from her bed and bundled downstairs.
Everything after that was a troubling, painful memory. Lebel could never forget the nightmare that followed: The separation from Klara. The ruthless interrogation in the Gestapo cellars on the Avenue Foch. And when they told him his wife had been sent to Poland for resettlement, Henri Lebel knew it was a lie and feared the worst.
For a week the Gestapo tortured him, trying to pry information from him about his resistance connections. Despite the beatings, the sleepless nights, he held out and told them nothing. Two days later he was put on a cattle train to Auschwitz extermination camp. There he endured almost two long years of painful humiliation, surviving only because of his will to do so.
And there he first met Irena Dezov. A young Red Army driver in her late twenties, she had been captured and sent to Auschwitz along with a ragged convoy of Russian prisoners. She was eventually put to work in the warehouse where Lebel had to sift through the clothes from the cattle-train transports of prisoners sent to the camp. Irena Dezov was a handsome woman, and despite the appalling camp conditions she was full of humor and vitality, and with a fondness for the illegal vodka the prisoners distilled. Although Lebel spoke fluent Russian, he had hardly exchanged a word with her in the two months they had worked together, until the day he found out with certainty the fate of his wife.
Since arriving at Auschwitz Lebel had been driven half mad wondering what had happened to Klara, hoping that somehow she might still be alive. When he learned that a trainload of French Jews had reached the camp two days before his own arrival, he gave Klara’s name and a description to a kapo in the women’
s section he had become friendly with and asked her to help.
The woman came to him a week later and confirmed his fears. “Your wife was gassed the day she arrived. Then burned in the crematorium. I’m sorry, Henri.”
Lebel looked at the woman in horror, expecting the worst, but not wanting to believe it. When she left he crawled into a filthy pile of discarded clothing at the back of the warehouse, where no one could see him. He lay there, curled up in a ball, weeping.
Images and memories raged like a fire through his mind. The day he had first met Klara, and how innocent she looked, and how much he had wanted to protect her. The first time he told her he loved her and the first time they made love. The grief and anguish that flooded his body were unbearable. When he finally dragged himself to his feet he knotted some clothes together to make a noose, and threw it over a wooden ceiling beam. He stood on a chair and put his neck in the noose. Then he let his body go with the fall.
As he slowly strangled, he heard the scream.
“Henri!”
Irena burst into the room and struggled to free him, Lebel protesting, wanting to die. But Irena would have none of it, the two of them struggling on the floor, Lebel gasping and punching the young Russian woman. “Get away! Leave me to die!”
“No, Henri, no . . .”
It took Irena all her might to calm Lebel. And then he was curled up in a ball again, crying his eyes out. Irena put a hand firmly on his shoulder. “The kapo told me. I came to see if I could help comfort you.”
Tears streamed down Lebel’s cheeks. “You should have let me kill myself. Why did you stop me? Why? You have no right—”
“I do have a right, Henri Lebel. We Jews must stick together. You and I, we’re going to survive. Do you hear?”
Lebel looked into Irena’s face. “You . . .a Jew?”
“Yes. Me, a Jew.”
“But the Germans don’t know?”
“And why should I tell them? They have enough Jews to kill.”
Lebel stared back at her, his pain deflected. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Irena smiled and shrugged. “What does it matter what a man or woman is? Does it change your opinion of me?”
“No.”
“Good. Take some of this.” She handed him a small bottle of illegal spirit. He refused, but she made him drink.
Irena, this cheerful Russian woman, looked into his face, and he saw compassion in her eyes.
“And now, Henri Lebel, I want us to say kaddish together. And then you’re going back to work, and you’re going to try to forget your pain. But remember one thing: the death of your wife does not have to go unpunished. Someday, the world will want to know about this camp. But for that to happen our will to survive must be stronger than the Nazis’ will to kill us. Do you understand me, Henri Lebel?”
Lebel nodded. He wiped his eyes.
Irena took his hand and smiled. “Come, let us kneel and say kaddish for your family.”
It was so unreal. In the midst of all the pain and death around him, Lebel had knelt with the young Russian woman and said the ancient prayer for the dead. Afterward he had cried again, and Irena had put a hand on his shoulder and hugged him. And then she made a supreme gesture to comfort him: she offered him her body.
Not for sex, but for solace. As Irena held him close, she whispered in his ear, “Remember, my little Frenchman. Only in surviving will there be justice.”
• • •
After that day, Henri Lebel and Irena Dezov had become friends as well as lovers. They endured the endless humiliations of camp life, laughed together when they could, shared what scraps of food they managed to scavenge to supplement their meager rations of watery turnip soup and stale black bread. They got drunk on illegal spirits whenever possible, anything to relieve the agony and pain.
The last time Lebel saw Irena was two weeks after the Russians finally liberated the camp. They were both still weak and emaciated and she was being helped to climb onto the back of a truck to take her behind Russian lines, her long, frail legs barely able to stand. They had kissed and embraced, and as the truck drove out through the gates Irena managed a smile and a wave. Lebel cried that day as much as he had when he had learned the fate of his wife.
In the five years after the war, Lebel tried to forget his past. A succession of nubile young models eager to parade in his furs on the Paris catwalks and also to give him comfort had temporarily dulled the pain, but somehow Irena Dezov never left his mind.
A year later he had to visit Moscow, an opportunity he was to be allowed with greater frequency because of his expanding business. On one such trip, as he came out of the Moscow Hotel, he saw a woman across the street and he froze, rooted to the spot with shock. She looked like Irena, only somehow different, and then Lebel realized she was no longer the emaciated skeleton in his memory but a full-figured, handsome woman, much like the one he had seen the first day she had arrived in Auschwitz. She climbed on board a tram, and in panic Lebel did something he had never done before.
He evaded the KGB man delegated to chaperone him and hopped on board the tram at the last moment. His heart pounding, he sat behind the woman. When she got off he followed her to an apartment off Lenin Prospect, took note of the address, then reluctantly returned to his hotel.
The KGB chaperone was furious; Lebel was sent for by his contact in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, who demanded an explanation for the evasion. Lebel pretended angry indignation: as a trusted friend of Russia he ought to be allowed to travel in Moscow more freely. He considered it a matter of mutual trust, and he gave his word as a gentleman that he would not break that trust. Besides, he had strong business interests in Moscow, and he would hardly destroy those interests by doing something he shouldn’t, now would he?
The man from the ministry merely smiled and said to him, “Impossible, Henri. You know the way it works here. Foreigners are suspect. Even if you do nothing we have to watch you.”
Lebel said indignantly, “Then you realize this: I can buy excellent fur from the Canadians and the Americans and without the irritation of being followed everywhere I go in New York or Quebec.”
The man’s face paled just a little, but then he smiled. “Is that a threat, Henri?”
“No, simply a fact. And another thing: I fought for the Communist Resistance in France. I lost my wife and was sent to Auschwitz for my ideals. You people know I’m not a spy.”
The man laughed. “Of course we know you’re not a spy, Henri, but you’re a businessman, not a communist.”
“That doesn’t stop me from having certain . . .sympathies.” Lebel’s sympathies had long since vanished, but business was business. “Besides, some of the wealthiest businessmen in France supported the Communist Resistance during the war.”
“True. But I still can’t grant your request.”
Lebel tossed aside the refusal and said very angrily, “Then I suggest you seriously consider this: I’m tired of these petty games you people play. Tired of being followed like some mistrusted schoolboy. Tired of being scrutinized like some unwelcome guest and feeling half a dozen pairs of eyes on me every time I go to the bathroom. I’m considering no longer representing your interests in Europe. Quite frankly, it’s not worth the bother. I can buy my furs elsewhere.”
The man permitted himself a knowing grin. “But not sable, Henri. You have to come to us for that. Besides, we could simply have someone else represent us.”
It was true—and Russian sable was the most sought-after. But Lebel had an ace up his sleeve. “Not Russian sable. But a firm in Canada has bred a marten species not unlike yours, and believe me, the sable pelts are the finest I’ve come across. So either we stop this petty pantomime and you trust me, or I go to them.” Lebel stood up to leave.
“No—wait, Henri. I’m certain we can resolve this.”
That settled it. A couple of phone calls to the upper echelons of the ministry and a fine sable coat for the official’s wife finally clinched the deal. Lebel would
be bestowed with honorary Soviet citizenship, which would do away with the need for him to be under surveillance as a foreigner.
The next day he went back to the apartment off Lenin Prospect, checking to make sure he wasn’t followed. He wasn’t. It was still a terrible risk, but he considered it worthwhile. He knocked on the door, and Irena appeared.
When she saw him she went white, and when the shock subsided her eyes were wet as she led him inside the two-room apartment.
For a long time they embraced and kissed and cried. There were two things Lebel learned that day. One, that he still loved Irena Dezov, much more than he had even realized, and two, rather more disturbing, that she was married. Or rather had been when they’d had their affair in the camp. The husband, a much older, stern-faced army colonel, had later died in the final battle for Berlin.
Somehow Lebel wasn’t unduly bothered by conscience about their affair in the camp. With death so close you took what human comfort you could. Besides, there was no such thing as a truly honest businessman, and in business he had sometimes committed sins considerably worse than adultery. And Irena wasn’t sad about it, quite the opposite. She confessed that the day she learned of her husband’s death she opened a bottle of vodka and got quietly drunk with joy. The man was a brute, and the only good he had done was leave her an army widow’s pension and a country dacha on the outskirts of Moscow.
That first day together in years, she had prodded his generous stomach and laughed. “You’re no longer a skeleton, Henri. You’ve grown fat, my little Frenchman.”
He had grown plump, but he saw the look on her face when she said it and knew she still loved him, too.
But Lebel knew Irena would never be allowed out of Russia, despite his connections. Nobody was allowed out of Stalin’s Russia. Dissidents were shot, committed to asylums, or imprisoned for life, not given exit visas. Even applying for an emigrant visa condemned the applicant as a traitor, which meant the firing squad or the Gulag. And each time he and Irena met—four, six times a year, more if possible, he had to take particular care he wasn’t followed, developing an elaborate sense of subterfuge and timing to travel to the dacha.