Red Love

by Leo Maxim

  From the terminus a path leads into the vineyards that rise to the south of the city. Not far away a unit of German soldiers is driving along the road. From up here you can only see their steel helmets under the open tarpaulins of the trucks. The soldiers are singing songs, about flowers in an alpine meadow and a girl called Maria. Gerhard says he can’t bear seeing all these German soldiers all over the place. Eugen smiles at Gerhard and says that he might be sitting on one of those trucks himself right now, if he’d happened to have a different father. Gerhard is startled by the comparison, and Eugen explains that lots of soldiers are opposed to the war, which is why it’s important to engage with them, influence them and possibly even win them over to the right cause. Eugen’s group distributes flyers in barracks and also produces an illegal newspaper in German called Soldier on the Mediterranean. Eugen says that many of the secretly distributed newspapers are immediately passed on by the soldiers to the Gestapo. But the rest are read, and passed around. “It’s tiresome, exhausting work, but it might change something,” says Eugen. Gerhard is a bit disappointed. He didn’t actually want to distribute newspapers, he wanted to fight. But he doesn’t say that.

  Eugen’s remark that it might be a matter of chance who fights on which side later preoccupies Gerhard. He wonders what would have become of him if they hadn’t had to leave Germany, if his father hadn’t been exposed by the Nazis by some kind of chance. He writes: “Personal dismay determined our path, but where would that path have led if we had been freer to make our own decisions?” It’s almost as if he is relieved in retrospect not to have had a choice.

  Eugen gives Gerhard the assignment of going into a German labour exchange and getting a job as an interpreter with a Wehrmacht unit. Gerhard gets an ID which was issued by a French town hall with a genuine official stamp, and which stands up to a thorough examination. His name is now Gérard Laban, he’s seventeen, comes from Alsace and is a prospective student of German. He was born in Stenay near Verdun. The local mairie burned down in 1940, and the birth and death registers were destroyed, which makes it impossible to investigate his origins. He learnt the German language from his mother, which is why from now on he has to speak German with a French accent. Both his parents died young and his only relations live in Algeria. Eugen also gives him the address of an elderly couple with whom he can live in Toulouse. He warns Gerhard to be extremely vigilant at all times. Then they part.

  In the German labour exchange his story works fabulously well. He is taken on as an interpreter in transportation headquarters, which is based in an old hotel right behind the railway station. His boss is Corporal Fink, who wears a tailor-made uniform that seems to be cut of very good cloth. Soon Gerhard learns that Fink’s chief duty is to organize the Wehrmacht black market in unroasted coffee beans, which are taken from Toulouse to Germany by rail. Officially, Fink is responsible for relations between headquarters and the French authorities, which is why he urgently needs an interpreter. Fink is a likeable, uncomplicated type. He is so preoccupied with the black market that he soon leaves everything else to Gerhard, who now has access to all the written correspondence of the headquarters. He also gets hold of the transport plans which reveal the times of trains carrying prisoners or ammunition. Because it would be too difficult to make notes, he has to commit everything to memory. The routes, the departure times, loading, waiting times. Gerhard develops a mnemonic technique that enables him to keep all the details of up to ten transports in his head. At night he sits in his room at home and writes everything down in miniature handwriting on cigarette paper. A messenger comes twice a week and collects the secret messages.

  Once Corporal Fink forgets to lock his safe, and Gerhard quickly flicks through the “Secret Service Matters”, which do not appear in the regular correspondence. He finds an instruction from Lieutenant General Kohl in Paris, who is responsible for all the French transport headquarters. Kohl writes that from now on prisoner transports are to take “absolute precedence”. The deportation “of Jews and terrorists” has highest priority. Gerhard sees the routes that the prisoner transports are due to take. The prisoners are collected in Drancy and Compiègne, and distributed in various directions from there. Their final destinations are Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, Ravensbrück, Dachau, Buchenwald. Eugen tells him there is information to suggest that Jews from all over Europe are being killed in great numbers in the Polish camps. There’s talk of gas chambers, although no one knows if that’s true. Gerhard doesn’t believe these stories. Not even the Nazis would commit a crime like that, he thinks.

  In Fink’s secret documents Gerhard also finds a letter that was sent anonymously to the Wehrmacht. It says there is a waiter at the officers’ mess at transport headquarters in Toulouse who works for the Resistance. He is called Gaillard, but his real name is Riedinger. In the margin of the letter there is a note from the head of security at transport headquarters: “Must be arrested immediately.” The note is already two days old. Gerhard wonders if it’s too late to save Riedinger, or whether Fink might have left the safe open deliberately to test him? Gerhard decides to do something. Immediately after close of business, he goes to a phone box and calls headquarters. Disguising his voice, he says that there’s been an accident in Monsieur Gaillard’s family, and he needs to speak to him urgently. When Gaillard finally comes to the phone, Gerhard says, “This is a friend. You’re to be arrested, get out.”

  Several weeks later Gerhard learns from something that Corporal Fink says in passing that the waiter managed to escape. There is now great excitement in the Gestapo. They try to find the source of the leak. And ambushes by partisan units on prisoner transports are becoming ever more frequent. Through an open door, Gerhard hears a conversation between Corporal Fink and head of security Captain Wächtler. Wächtler says the ambushes are being planned deliberately, “as if the terrorists know exactly when the prisoner transports are travelling”. Gerhard feels proud and elated, he now knows that his work has a purpose. At the same time he warns himself to be even more careful.

  One morning Gerhard is woken by a loud knock on his bedroom door. It’s only half past five in the morning. His landlady is standing outside the door, in a state of distress. She says a German soldier is standing outside the door downstairs and wants to speak to him. Gerhard wonders whether he should escape via the garden, but if he was going to be arrested, more than one soldier would have come. The landlady says the soldier claims to be a friend of Gerhard’s. It turns out that this is Corporal Weininger, with whom Gerhard actually was acquainted. Weininger is the commanding officer’s chauffeur. He stands breathlessly in front of him and says Gerhard must disappear straightaway because he’s going to be arrested today. Weininger says he drove head of security Captain Wächtler the previous evening. He had been talking to another officer about how “this man Laban must be taken into custody”. Weininger offers to drive Gerhard somewhere. Gerhard hides in the back of the big Wehrmacht limousine. He has Weininger drive to an address that Eugen had given him as a safe house in emergencies. He gets out a few streets early, thanks Weininger and asks if he doesn’t want to switch sides. Weininger looks at him in amazement and drives off without replying.

  The safe house is a chemist’s shop, still shut. Gerhard waits in a house doorway until the chemist, a squat, grey-haired man, finally opens the door. Gerhard explains why he has come and the man quickly pulls him into the shop. By day he must hide in the medicine storeroom, which smells of lotions and corn ointment. Eugen comes in the evening, wearing an elegant camel-hair coat and a dark suit because, as he says, he’s never checked in that disguise. Eugen already has new papers for Gerhard. His name is now Jean-Pierre Ariège, and he is a seventeen-year-old office clerk. A new photograph has to be taken, and the job is done by an acquaintance of the chemist’s. The next morning Gerhard boards a bus with Eugen, and they drive fifty kilometres north. They wander along little roads and country paths until they reach a house on the edge of the forest. Gerhard is to live there for a while, unti
l they have decided what his new mission is to be. In the house he finds four former members of the Spanish Republican Army and two German émigrés who are waiting for their new mission, like Gerhard. In the evening the men light a fire in the hearth, one of the Spaniards has dug up a badger’s sett and Gerhard prepares one of the animals. They drink red wine and talk. For security reasons they’re not allowed to talk about their illegal work. Gerhard spends a week in the house at the edge of the forest. He likes being with people he can relax with. He is allowed to speak German without an accent again, even though it’s no longer very easy.

  *

  Gerhard as a lieutenant in the French armed forces, 1944

  I wonder what was happening in Gerhard at the time, what he thought about when he was able to relax. Didn’t he have doubts or fears? Didn’t he sometimes want just to stop, to run away, to escape this struggle? It was pure luck, after all, that he had escaped arrest. Did he not wonder what it would be like next time? His memoirs sound like the stories he told me or my mother. They are about a brave young man driven by a conviction. A young man who has no choice but to fight the enemy threatening his life and his family’s. This young man knows no questions and no doubts. He fights. But was that really the case? Can a conviction be so strong that it simply makes disturbing emotions and weaknesses disappear? Or did he repress it all? Did he forbid himself to be weak?

  Before Gerhard became a fighter, he was a delicate, sensitive youth. Someone who cried at sad Schubert Lieder. There is a photograph showing him in September 1944 in the uniform of a French lieutenant. He wears a beret and looks so dreamy and unmilitary that you would take him for a poet or a singer, but never for a soldier. The uniform looks like a disguise on him. In his memoirs Gerhard writes that after his escape to Toulouse the comrades offered to let him take a break so that he could deal with everything that had happened. He resolutely refused the offer and asked for a new mission, the sooner the better. He wants to be useful, successful, the struggle should be worth it. One of the questions that Gerhard keeps asking himself is whether what he’s doing is enough, whether he shouldn’t actually be doing much more. He feels so small and unimportant compared with this overwhelming enemy.

  In the archive I’ve found an assessment that the go-between Eugen, alias Werner Schwarze, wrote about Gerhard. He writes that Gerhard is “too impatient, too impetuous, which is probably down to his great youth”. Eugen praises Gerhard’s courage and commitment. “But he lacks the fear that makes you cautious. He’s inclined to force successes.”

  10

  Mistreatment

  IN MID-JANUARY 1944 Gerhard is sent to Castres, a small town 100 kilometres from Toulouse. There is a Wehrmacht division stationed there, made up mostly of Soviet prisoners of war who are to be deployed against the partisans in France. Gerhard’s mission is to make contact with the German officers charged with training the prisoners. He is to find out how the officers assess the operational capability of their unit. Eugen says it’s a difficult mission, because the Wehrmacht has only sent selected staff to Castres. If it’s too difficult, Gerhard should abandon the operation rather than take a risk. “Caution is the first rule,” says Eugen before taking his leave.

  Compared with Toulouse, Castres is a very small town. It’s easy to get your bearings, but you also attract more attention. The Agout, a narrow river, divides the town into two halves. There are four bridges that you have to cross if you want to get through the town, ideal places for ambushes. Eugen has given Gerhard the address of a couple who work in a textile factory, and he can stay with them. The house where they live is right on the river. In the evening, at the agreed time, he knocks at the door on the second floor. Three short knocks and one long one. It is opened immediately. His hosts are called Noémie and Marcel; Gerhard introduces himself as Paul. Over dinner the French couple talk about their work with the Resistance in Castres. For weeks they’ve been smuggling flyers into the barracks where the Soviet prisoners are being trained. There is contact with the prisoners, but not with the officers. Noémie and Marcel warn Gerhard to let things move slowly. The Wehrmacht has sent a whole counter-intelligence unit to Castres because they don’t trust the prisoners.

  Gerhard uses the first few days to look around the town. He finds out that the German officers meet in various restaurants in the evening, but above all in a bistro on Rue Gambetta near the theatre. Some stone steps lead to the cellar, where there are dark-stained wooden tables and benches. Here you can drink red wine from the Dordogne and Armagnac at black-market prices. From eight o’clock in the evening the bistro is always packed. Gerhard mingles among the guests, and after a few weeks the German regulars have got used to him. They talk about the weather, the high alcohol prices and their families at home. One evening Gerhard falls into conversation with a corporal whose name is Günther Wegener, and who talks openly about the state of the war, the threat of defeat on the Eastern Front and a possible American landing on the French coast. Wegener had been at the Front in Russia, was wounded and transferred to France. He says, “If only all this shit could be over soon,” and gives Gerhard a challenging look. But Gerhard doesn’t want to give too much away too quickly, so he changes the subject and tells funny stories about his schooldays in Paris. When they part company, Corporal Wegener says this has been the best evening he’s had in Castres. They arrange to meet again three days later.

  In the weeks that follow, Gerhard meets Wegener regularly. Once they go to the opera together and see Tosca. In the final act, when Tosca stabs the chief of police and sings, “All Rome trembled before him,” a voice in the circle shouts, “And who does Castres tremble before?” The lights immediately come on and the curtain is lowered. The audience boo. After a while the director of the opera comes on stage and says the performance has been halted on the orders of the police because catcalling is forbidden.

  Wegener seems very troubled after this event. The hostility of the French bothers him. He asks Gerhard what the people here would do with someone like him if they lost the war. The two men go to the bistro near the theatre. After a few glasses of wine Wegener talks about the Eastern Front. Once he drove through a burnt-down village in a cross-country vehicle. A child of about three sat crying among the charred ruins. Wegener stopped the vehicle and jumped down to rescue the child. But a lieutenant sitting next to him shouted at him to leave the Russian brat where it was. Wegener talks about men, women and children being driven to cattle trucks through a snowstorm. “Like animals,” he says, and falls silent.

  Gerhard decides to give Wegener a flyer about the Wehrmacht’s war crimes in France and the Soviet Union. He says he found the flyer in the street, and is about to take it out of his pocket when the door bursts open and three German military police storm into the bistro, sub-machine guns at the ready. They come up to the table where Gerhard and Wegener are sitting and the leader says to Gerhard, “You’re under arrest. If you try to escape, you will be shot.” The police push Gerhard to the door. The street outside is deserted. Fifty metres to the right are two black Citroëns with their engines running. Gerhard is pushed into the back of the first car, then the cars roar off. Gerhard sees it all as if through a veil, the houses which they speed past, the uniforms of the two guards he is wedged between. He thinks of the flyer in the inside pocket of his jacket, of his fake ID. He knows that the Gestapo torture prisoners with electric wires and red-hot irons to force them to talk. He feels his whole body suddenly becoming cold and numb. He could weep with fear, but he controls himself.

  The cars drive into the barracks yard, and Gerhard is led into a guardroom. Several officers are standing around a desk, and among them is Wegener, who has just picked up the phone and is speaking very calmly into the receiver: “Lieutenant Colonel, we’ve got him.” Gerhard’s pockets are searched, and they find the flyer. Gerhard is led to an office on the first floor. Behind the desk, under a lamp with a green shade, sits a man with white hair and red eyes. An albino. He is the lieutenant colonel of the Wehrmacht c
ounter-intelligence service. The albino holds the flyer in his hand and asks how much Gerhard is being paid to distribute these flyers. Without thinking, Gerhard says, “You don’t do something like this for money, you do it out of conviction.” He’s immediately annoyed with himself for this unconsidered answer, because he has now needlessly admitted to distributing illegal flyers. Gerhard firmly undertakes not to say anything else that might be significant, and above all not to betray anybody, not to give away any names or accommodations, however severe the torture.

  The albino asks about his go-betweens. Gerhard describes someone who is the exact opposite of Eugen. Small, dark-haired, bald. He says he had only met the man, who called himself Maurice, in the street. The albino laughs: “So, the great unknown.” He asks about the flyers that have been distributed in Castres. Gerhard confesses to distributing them all, because he knows it makes no difference in the end whether you’ve distributed one flyer or hundreds. The albino looks very pleased and says that means the question of the flyers is now resolved. He has Gerhard led away by the military police. They take him across the yard to a one-storey building with small, barred windows, and one of them opens the iron doors. When Gerhard is about to go in, a policeman’s fist lands in his back, knocking him to the stone floor of the cell. Before he can get back up again, the other policeman is over him, kicking him in the ribs with his boots. Gerhard struggles for air, tries to protect his head with his arms. Just then terrible shouts are heard from the neighbouring cell. “Shut it, you Russian swine,” roars one of the policemen. They let go of Gerhard and kick the other cell doors. The door falls closed behind Gerhard, and the bolt slides shut. He is alone in the tiny cell. Under the window there is a narrow plank bed with a dirty horse blanket. Next to it is an empty preserving pan that probably serves as a toilet. Gerhard stretches out, shaking, on the pallet. Now he has time to think.