The Sixth Lamentation

by William Brodrick

  The Defendant faced various counts of murder between 1942 and 1943. After each charge was put to him he entered a plea, his eyes fixed above the judge to the Crown Court emblem with its dictum: ‘Dieu et mon Droit.’

  ‘Not guilty.’ The lingering guttural intonation had not quite been spent.

  ‘Louder, please.’

  ‘Not guilty.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Schwermann. You may sit down,’ said the judge in scarlet and black, seated higher than all others among worn leather and panels of oak. From the Bar below, paper rustled and bewigged heads turned and leaned, whispering among themselves. Outstretched arms passed folded notes back and forth. The judge opened a notebook and lifted his pen.

  Amid a silence the like of which Lucy had never heard before, Mr Penshaw rose to his feet.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Penshaw I prosecute in this case, assisted by the lady behind me, Miss Matthews. The gentleman on my left, nearest to you, is Mr Bartlett. He represents the Defendant. My first task is to give you a summary of the case against the accused.’ Mr Penshaw rested his arms upon a small stand in front of him, referring now and then to a sheaf of notes. ‘You are about to try an ordinary man charged with an extraordinary crime. The state calls upon you for one purpose: to decide his innocence or guilt. The Crown says he devoted the best years of his early manhood to the systematic deportation of Jews from Paris to Auschwitz. A three-day journey to the East in cattle wagons, where they were gassed upon arrival or worked to death. You will listen to the voices of those who survived, They will tell you of the terrible things they saw, from which you will instinctively wish to turn away But you must not. You will have to listen and look dispassionately upon the actions of this man, whose crimes occupy one of the darkest chapters of history. And I’m afraid I must tell you now it is with the massacre of innocent children that you will be most concerned.’

  Lucy was lost to her surroundings. No one seemed to breathe or move. There was just the calm evocation of a time long past, strangely alive to her as though it were part of her own memory.

  ‘SS-Unterscharführer Eduard Schwermann was posted to Paris in July 1940, a month after the city fell into German hands and the Occupation began. He was twenty-three years of age and a volunteer. For one of low rank, he was astonishingly close to the highest echelons of his masters. Based in the Jewish Affairs Service of the Gestapo, he was an aide to its chief, the personal representative of Adolf Eichmann. The latter was Head of the Jewish Affairs office at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, eventually captured, tried and executed by the State of Israel in 1962. By the end of the war, this small department had presided over the deportation of seventy-five thousand, seven hundred Jews from France, most of them to Auschwitz.’

  For economy the Crown had restricted the evidence against Schwermann to operations in Paris during 1942. The case would focus on his participation in the notorious ‘Vél d’Hiv’ round-up (code-named ‘Vent Printanier’, or ‘Spring Wind’), and the destruction of a smuggling ring whose purpose had been to save some of the children likely to be arrested.

  Mr Penshaw went on to explain that at 4 a.m. on 16th July 1942, 888 arrest squads broke into Jewish homes throughout the city. For two days, amid screams and shouts, young and old were hauled through the streets to collection points. Coaches, once used for public transport, took them away — either to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, or to Drancy, an unfinished housing complex on the edge of the city. Time and again these squads returned to the old Jewish quarter, whose history stretched back to the Middle Ages and whose winding streets had been a refuge since the Revolution. News of the round-up spread like fire. Panic set in. Over a hundred people committed suicide. Paris watched, dumbstruck. No one could have foreseen this aspect of Occupation — 12,884 people vanished, including 4051 children.

  In due course, as the Defence formally admitted, families taken in the Vél d’Hiv round-up were first sent to other internment centres in the Loiret, either Pithiviers or Beaune—la— Rolande (known as the ‘Loiret Camps’), or Compiègne. There, the children were separated from their families before being transferred to Drancy The parents were deported to Auschwitz. The children, all under sixteen, later made the same journey and suffered the same fate. It was thought 300 or so may have survived.

  In the months prior to ‘Spring Wind’, rumours of a massive round-up spread throughout Paris. A group of young French students, all roughly Schwermann’s age, decided to act. Led by Jacques Fougères, a smuggling ring known as The Round Table was formed, linked to Jewish and other Resistance groups in the city. The aim was to collect Jewish children from various ‘drop off’ points in Paris and hide them in monasteries outside the city. From there they would be taken to Switzerland. It was am heroic and tragic effort. Heroic because they could never have protected the thousands at risk; tragic because they were all captured in the days before the round-up began.

  So what bearing did these events have upon the young German officer now brought before the court in the autumn of his life? He was a member of the team that planned ‘Spring Wind’; he stalked the rue des Rosiers and the rue des Blancs— Manteaux, overseeing wave after wave of arrests; he supervised the final departure of children from Drancy to Auschwitz. And as for The Round Table, he managed to infiltrate its ranks and secured the arrest of each member, before they could save any more children from the coming storm. The students were later transported to Mauthausen concentration camp where they met their deaths. The Jury would see the personal commendation Schwermann received from Eichmann, congratulating him on this ‘achievement’.

  Mr Penshaw emphasised the importance of viewing these events in the harsh light of the times. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had fled Germany during the 1930s, driven out by violence and the repressive legal machinery of the State. Many had sought refuge in France. But France fell, and within months of the Germans setting up their administration in Paris, they moved against the Jews. A census was ordered; businesses were seized; the first arrests took place in May 1941, with further round-ups in August and December. Them, on 20th January 1942, at a villa on the shore of the Wannsee, near Berlin, the Nazi government formally decided the fate of all European Jews. A ‘Final Solution’ was under way which required the urgent ‘evacuation’ of Jews ‘to the East’. Two months later, on 27th March 1942, the first trainload of victims left Paris for Auschwitz. The ‘evacuations’ had begun, and the mass killing of Jews deported from France would now get under way

  Mr Penshaw concluded:

  ‘The Prosecution case against Schwermann is simply this: he was inextricably involved in the machinery of death. And he must have known that execution or serious harm awaited those who were deported to the camps. If you, the jury, are sure this man was part of that enterprise then you must find him guilty of murder in relation to each of the charges laid against him.’

  Lucy covered her face with her shawl and mumbled a sort of prayer to the ether: that Victor Brionne would come forward; that Schwermann would be convicted; and that Agnes would die in peace. Raising her head she looked to the man in the cardigan beside her, and saw the thin tears streaming down his face.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  1

  Anselm left Mr Roderick Kemble QC prostrate in a cab at Waterloo and hurried through the Eurostar terminal, finding his seat a matter of minutes before the train lurched forward.

  He gloomily skimmed a cutting on The Round Table Wilf had given to him. He’d shown the text to Roddy who’d glanced over it while he ate, raising an aimless question as to why Jacques was interrogated in the June when the ring was not broken until the July With affection, Anselm had filled the Master’s glass. As expected Roddy appeared not to have read the cutting. The June arrest had had nothing to do with the events of the following month. Only a Silk of Roddy’s standing could get away with that sort of blunder — and he did, frequently with breathtaking aplomb.

  Once in Paris, Anselm took a room in a cheap hotel near Sacré Coeur. The next
morning he set off for the Boulevard de Courcelles, near Parc Monceau, to the Fougères home, wondering how he was going to phrase the application of the law to the death of their son.

  All the witnesses were agreed on the basic facts: the pensioner, Mr Ogden, had grabbed the man with the white beard (Milby never named him. Instead he used a rather coarse term of art) . The man with the beard had told him to let go, but Mr Ogden had then drawn back his fist. So the other had struck out. At that point Pascal Fougères had slipped and fallen, banging his head. The terms of the conversation prior to the altercation had also been agreed. But, as the investigating officer repeatedly pointed out to the outraged witnesses, nothing said by the man with the beard constituted a criminal offence. Milby told Anselm that the police would have liked to nail him, ideally with a manslaughter charge under the doctrine of transferred malice — on the understanding that the backhand slap directed at Mr Ogden technically ‘shifted’ to Pascal. But that ignored the only compelling legal analysis: Mr Ogden was the aggressor and the response of his victim was not an unlawful act. The brute fact was that the terms of every other potential charge could not be stretched to accommodate the offensiveness of the victim.

  After it became known that Pascal had died, the man with the white beard informed the police that he would not insist on charges being laid against Mr Ogden.

  2

  Etienne was the son of Claude Fougères and the nephew of Jacques, the Resistance hero. After the war the family had remained in the South — until the eighties when Etienne’s political career rose from local to national level. That prompted the return to Paris. The house had been rented out for nearly forty years, so it was a real homecoming.

  ‘And then, just when things got back to where they were before the war, Pascal was taken away

  Anselm gleaned this and more from the mumbling old butler who opened the great black front door and took him slowly to a drawing room on the third floor.

  Monsieur and Madame Fougères were subdued elegance itself, sitting apart on either end of a pink chaise longue, their faces darkened by grief. Anselm moved gently over the terrain of sympathy, explaining the predicament faced by the police enquiry. To his surprise, they understood perfectly They made no complaint: no sallies against the Law; no plea for a fairer world. They did not expect the legal system to give them something it was not designed, and could not be designed, to produce: a civic response proportionate to their loss. But while he spoke Anselm observed, painfully the cleft that had opened between mother and father. It was freshly cut.

  ‘I begged him not to go after that man. Begged him. But he would not listen,’ said Etienne.

  Monique Fougères closed her eyes slowly, her hands cupped upon her lap.

  ‘I wish he’d left the past alone,’ said Etienne. ‘It’s not a safe place while it touches on the living.’

  Madame Fougères lowered her head, speaking quietly ‘Tell me anything he said, Father, anything at all. I want to imagine his voice.’

  ‘We only spoke about Schwermann … and someone called Agnes.’

  Anselm threw in the last half-truth as the door opened and the butler brought forth tea. Etienne’s facial muscles had seized. The butler poured. Etienne reached for a small cup.

  ‘Agnes?’ he said, enquiringly

  ‘Yes. I got the impression she was once known to the family’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  Anselm thought: you’re lying. He said, ‘Apparently she had a child.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Etienne, an eyebrow raised, offering milk for the English palate.

  ‘A child.’

  ‘I’m sorry, no. As far as I know, Jacques never knew anyone called Agnes.’

  Anselm felt the warm trembling of success: we were talking about Pascal, not Jacques…

  Monique Fougères looked at her husband across a void. The butler softly closed the doors and the cleft between mother and father fell open wide.

  3

  By the great entrance cars chased each other down the Boulevard de Courcelles. The butler stepped outside with Anselm, his eyes towards the ornate gates of Parc Monceau. He said, ‘I knew Agnes Aubret.’

  Anselm only just caught the words.

  ‘I held her child.’

  The raucous sound of children spilled out from the park, scattering through the passing cars.

  ‘Is she alive?’ The butler spoke as though he would die.

  ‘I’m not sure, but I think so. I’ve met a young woman who knows her.’

  The butler pushed his hand deep into his pocket and produced a tattered envelope.

  ‘Father, please, find out if she’s alive. Give her this. It’s from Jacques. He asked me to get it to her after the war, if he was caught and she survived.’

  Anselm took the envelope.

  ‘Say Mr Snyman has borne it for fifty years.’

  The butler stepped back and the door swung shut. Anselm stood still, slightly stunned. He took another walk through the park to calm himself. It was crawling with children on their lunch break, arriving in cohorts from a nearby school. He paused by the gates into Avenue Hoche. A group entered two by two, each child wearing a white sash. And on the sash was the name of the school and a telephone number so that not one of them could be lost.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The stout figure in the witness box was dressed in black and wore round bottle-end glasses. She did not require the interpreter and answered Mr Penshaw’s questions with a disturbingly loud and deep voice.

  ‘Your name, please, Madame?’ said Mr Penshaw ‘Collette Beaussart.’

  ‘You were born in Paris on 4th October 1918?’ ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are now seventy-seven years of age?’ ‘I am.’

  ‘You are a Knight of the Legion of Honour?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You were decorated by General de Gaulle at the Invalides in 1946?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Please confirm the following. You were a journalist and condemned the Nazi leadership prior to the fall of France and afterwards. You were arrested on 18th February 1942. You were deported. You are a survivor of Drancy, Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.’

  ‘I am.’

  Before calling any evidence, Mr Penshaw told the jury he intended to present the first witness, Madame Beaussart, out of chronological order so as to give them a constant reminder of what the case was really about. ‘And so, ladies and gentlemen, in the coming days when you are listening to bare, lifeless facts about train timetables or the method used to fill in a deportation record, remember well what Madame Beaussart will now relate.’

  Lucy listened with a sort of proprietorial desperation. She had recognised the name. Collette Beaussart was the political prisoner Agnes had written about. They’d both got typhus and saved one another through talking … about jam. This was the woman who’d claimed Agnes was part of the group to which she belonged, the politicals who were transferred to Ravensbrück. Lucy wanted to stand up, to claim the witness as her friend. But a wall had been built. She would listen, like everyone else; and watch her go, like everyone else.

  Madame Beaussart was twenty-four when the gates of Drancy closed behind her. She witnessed the arrival of children taken in the Vél d’Hiv round-up, after separation from their parents. She saw them depart for the East. ‘I saw them come. I saw them go.’

  The courtroom was utterly quiet, save for Madame Beaussart and the soft scuffle of pen upon paper. Lucy was on the edge of her seat.

  ‘They came in boxcars, all of them under thirteen or fourteen years, the youngest just over a year or so. They were filthy their bodies covered with sores. Many had dysentery. Attempts to clean them were futile. Some were seriously ill with diphtheria … scarlet fever. One of them, naked, asked me why her mother had left her behind. I said she’d only gone away for a while …’

  Madame Beaussart’s voice, loud, wavering, uncompromising, described the horrors of trying to care for the abandoned.

  ‘Like the
rest of the prisoners, they slept on dirty straw mattresses until their time came to move on. Them their heads were shaved.’

  At dawn, Madame Beaussart and other internees brought the children from where they lay to the courtyard. Some didn’t even have shoes. In groups of fifty they were packed on to buses. Each bore the number of a freight carriage. A thousand left at a time for the station at Bourget.

  It was Schwermann who, with others, supervised their departure.

  ‘He paced back and forth, impatiently, lists in hand, his face like stone, barking orders. I can still see the children … and I hear now the engines that took them away.’

  Mr Penshaw sat down.

  ‘Madame Beaussart,’ said a yielding, compassionate voice. It was Mr Bartlett. He stood perfectly still, rotating a pencil between his fingers. ‘Should you wish to sit down at any time, please do not hesitate to ask his Lordship.’

  ‘Thank you, but no.’

  ‘Could you please describe what you can recall about the appearance of the camp at Drancy?’

  ‘I can remember it all.’

  ‘Then choose the details which you remember best.’

  ‘I said I can remember everything, sir. I cannot forget:

  ‘You remember the armed guards?’

  ‘They were French, my own countrymen. ‘‘The provision of electricity?’

  ‘Almost entirely lacking.’

  ‘How many prisoners to a room?’

  ‘About fifty:

  ‘Sleeping on what?’

  ‘Bunk beds, planks. Many slept on plain straw ‘

  ‘If I may say so, Madame Beaussart, your memory is without fault.’