A Jew Must Die

by Jacques Chessex

  Yes, he’s an anti-Semite and has never concealed the fact. Yes, he thought that liquidating a Swiss Jew would provide a conspicuous example. And anyway, to hell with you, your police and your laws. In any case, Germany will have us out within the next few weeks. Do you think the Legation will allow us to be humiliated? He heard about Bloch’s death from the newspapers. But yes, it was he, the leader, Fernand Ischi, Party chief and Gauleiter, who ordered the Marmier brothers to bring the Jew to Rue-à-Thomas and kill him there. He knows nothing about cutting up the carcass. But if they did it, they were right. The fat swine! No pity. He makes no mention of Georges Ballotte or Fritz Joss. The Jew’s dismembered body has been sunk in Lake Neuchatel.

  Early that afternoon two senior police officers, Inspectors Jaques and Jaquillard, arrive in Chevroux by car, escorted by a squad of motorcycle police. The light is idyllic on the spring shoreline. Two of the sinister milk cans are resting on the bottom, four metres deep. From the third, floating half submerged, a man’s feet protrude, surrounded by squalling gulls. Along with the legs, they find half of the trunk, split lengthwise, and the intestines, lungs and heart. The police inspectors give the order for the three containers to be conveyed to the hospital in Payerne.

  14

  The arrests of the other conspirators take place over the next thirty hours. The two youngsters from Vers-chez-Savary have recognized the motorcyclists from the grotte aux chauves-souris. Fritz Joss is arrested at Grosse Pierre Farm, near the military airfield, on the property of the Marmier parents. The Marmier brothers are found in their lairs at Grosse-Pierre and on Rue-à - Thomas. Ballotte is taken at his parents’ house; his mother is a washer-woman, his father a warehouseman in the arsenal.

  In front of the now closely guarded lock-up, the same crowd that had cast such a sarcastic eye on the search, accompanied by base suggestions and anecdotes, now hurls insults at the accused and calls for the maximum sentence. The dismembering of the body and dumping it in the waters off Chevroux have impressed peoples’ imaginations and elicited stupefaction. An infectious mood of disapproval sweeps through this town of butchers and sausage-makers. Before the displays in butchers’ windows, the fearful population suffers an onset of attraction and repulsion that intensifies the emotion, along with a kind of collective guilt that will long endure in the conscience of Payerne. The town’s emblem — the cheerful, portly pig with broadly laughing snout, displaying its pink belly — the very trademark takes on an obscene, cynical, perverted look, for it recalls a different flesh, sacrificed and defiled for an odious cause. When the savage martyrdom of Arthur Bloch is mentioned, nearly everything, even the Jewish law, with its total prohibition of pork, is evoked by antithesis in a cruel symmetry of opposites: “They killed that Jew and cut him up like a pig in an abattoir.” In its guilt, Payerne juxtaposes and merges the example of a Jew and pork meat, the Wailing Wall and the pig butcher’s cleavers. O Jeremiah, melancholy prophet, you already spoke of the scandal: The Eternal was unto me as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret places. He hath turned aside my ways, and pulled me in pieces: he hath made me desolate.

  15

  What is horror? When the philosopher Jankélévitch proclaims the entire crime of the Holocaust to be “imprescriptible”, he forbids me to speak of it exempt from that edict. Imprescriptible. That can never be forgiven. That can never be paid for. Nor forgotten. Nor benefit from any statute of limitations. No possible redemption of any kind. Absolute evil, for which there can be no absolution ever.

  I am telling a loathsome story, and feel ashamed to write a word of it. I feel ashamed to report what was said: words, a tone of voice, deeds that are not mine but that I make mine, like it or not, when I write. For Vladimir Jankelevitch also says that complicity is cunning and that repeating the slightest anti-Semitic sentiment or deriving some amusement or caricature from it, or putting it to some aesthetic purpose, is already, in itself, inadmissible. He is right. Yet it is not wrong of me, having been born in Payerne and spent my childhood there, to explore events that have never ceased to poison my memory and left me ever since with an irrational sense of sin.

  I was eight years old when these events took place. In high school I sat next to Fernand Ischi’s eldest daughter. The son of the officer commanding the police station who arrested Ischi was a pupil in that same class. So was the son of Judge Caprez, who would preside over the trial of Arthur Bloch’s murderers. My father was principal of the high school and the Payerne elementary schools; since Ballotte had been a pupil of his, he was interviewed as a witness during the preparations for the trial. He was President of the Cercle de la Reine Berthe, a democratic, violently anti-Nazi club, and was himself on the list of future victims of the garage gang, after Jean Bladt and his children. At home, at school during breaks, in the shops, in the streets, loaded words fuelled the uneasiness. I remember the Nazi songs, Hitler’s rants, the Wehrmacht brass bands broadcast over Market Square at midday by loudspeakers and all the cars in the garage drowning the church bells, when school was out.

  Saturday 25 April 1942. Since dawn the five accused have been under lock and key in the Bois-Mermet detention centre in Lausanne. The examination of the case can begin. The trial date has been set less than six months away; it is to open in the Payerne courthouse on 15 February 1943 and will last five days. Presiding judge: Marcel Caprez. The accused (whose lawyers — one of them, especially arrogant, from Geneva - are paid by the German Legation) go into sordid details. Confronted with the implements used in the butchery and photographs of the pieces of the victim, they do not flinch; they show no emotion, describing their motivations and deeds with a slow, dull-witted, disjointed precision. A dense hatred of Jews. A vapidly deluded intelligence. Total confidence in Germany, soon to conquer Switzerland, making the Canton of Vaud the Northern Province, with Fernand Ischi as its Prefect. “Gauleiter!” corrects Ischi, drawing himself up.

  It emerges from all the interrogations that the example was intended, premeditated, and that they claimed responsibility for it. Fernand Ischi repeated several times: “Germany will get us out of this fix. All of you will have to pay for this, before long.”

  The five sentences are severe. Prison in all cases.

  A life sentence for Fernand Ischi, the ringleader and instigator of the crime.

  Life for Robert Marmier and Fritz Joss.

  Twenty years for Georges Ballotte, a minor — aged nineteen at the time of the crime.

  Just fifteen years for Max Marmier, considered less responsible.

  Seeing that the vice was closing on him, Pastor Philippe Lugrin fled to Germany with the help of the diplomatic services of the Reich. He would spend three years there in various translation and espionage services, until he was arrested in Frankfurt in 1945 by the American army, which sentenced him to fifteen years in prison, but then handed him over to the Swiss. The obsessively anti-Semitic theologian would appear before the court in Moudon in 1947 and receive a twenty-year sentence. He served two thirds of his time and came out more ardent than ever, virulent in the density of his hatred.

  One day in the summer of 1964, recognizing him at a café table in the old quarter of Lausanne, abandoning all discretion, I decide to sit opposite him and scrutinize him with intense curiosity. I cannot be mistaken. I have seen him only in photographs, but this is him all right, the fearsome Lugrin, sitting by himself just a few inches away. I stare at him; he stares back with the wary, arrogant gaze of a man always ready with a reply and prepared to make his escape. Deep-blue eyes. Angelic. Features unmarked by prison. High forehead. Long, narrow nose. Little round spectacles, whose metal rims frame the brilliant blue eyes that still gaze back at me. A man of God? A man of Satan. The demon has confused the bearings, distorted the aims, invested and perverted the remaining fire in this dead soul.

  “You are Pastor Lugrin,” I say.

  He makes as if to retreat, then stiffens and answers: “Philippe Lugrin. What of it?”

  The tone is cutting, the eyes hard; he l
owers his head as if to charge, and I get a better view of the smooth, unyielding forehead, the hair, or what is left of it, pasted down with bluish brilliantine. The radiance of that head, almost phosphorescent in the gloom of the café.

  “So nothing. I wanted to see at close range the pastor responsible for Arthur Bloch’s murder.”

  “You think you can intimidate me, young fellow, with ancient history!”

  He belches, ready to continue. Goes on the offensive:

  “You think you can shame me with the business of that Jew? I regret only one thing, mark this well. It is that I didn’t bring others to my friends’ attention. My friends, do you hear!”

  He has sat bolt upright on his chair, head high, his tone biting.

  I had not at all expected this encounter; mere chance had put me in the presence of this madman. I move to another table without taking my eyes off the individual who is beginning to act on me like a malign magnet. And suddenly a realization: there is such a thing as total depravity, pure in its filth, white-hot on its ruins, and it is a kind of damnation. The dreadfully blinkered man who pursues his absurd dream a few feet away no longer answers to any human authority; he answers to God.

  At that moment something said by Jankélévitch comes back to me: “The unprecedented responsibility that is ours, possessing a soul that lives after us, for all eternity...” How can the soul of the person I have just encountered live on? An untroubled, violent little man with small, gleaming spectacles, bent from the outset on hatred of God’s creature.

  I left the café astonished, thinking of Payerne, where I was born, where I spent my childhood, of Ischi, of his followers and of Lugrin, whom I abandon to his rage. But I have seen Lugrin; it is a sight that leaves one soiled; I must make the effort to put him in his evil place. And all the time I am walking, as I try to lose sight of him, some particularly grave words come to mind: “Do you know this man?” “No, I do not know him. I have never seen him.” “Think! You are quite certain you do not know this man?” “No, I do not know him.”

  As if, already, the dread of seeing him again gripped and distressed me.

  16

  Monday 27 April 1942, 8 a.m., the Jewish cemetery in Berne. Arthur Bloch’s remains are to be buried on a bare little path, about twenty yards from his father’s grave. The entire community is there. Its members have come from Basle, Zurich, Fribourg, Vevey, Lausanne, Geneva, Yverdon, Avenches and Payerne: acquaintances and strangers, often friends, sometimes cousins and distant relatives wishing to rally round Myria Bloch and her daughters. To come together, strengthening their bonds in sadness and fear. At 8:30, when Rabbi Messinger begins to speak, the tiny cemetery is crowded as the wind blows up from the River Aar, and tits chirp, hopping from branch to branch of the little elms and the cedars. The weather is fine; it is cool, the air is from the Aar... Rabbi Messinger recalls what a good man Arthur Bloch was. His love of his family. The humanity that emanated from his words and deeds. And that he had been a Swiss soldier. His refusal to leave this country for the United States, to follow part of his family that emigrated when war broke out. He was a just man, says the Rabbi. And it is this just man, as in ancient times, who has been sacrificed.

  Georges Brunschwig’s speech is more explicit. He denounces the running sore of racism, and sees Arthur Bloch’s murder as a historical and political crime. President of the Jewish community in Berne, Georges Brunschwig spent his childhood in the region of Payerne; he is himself the son of a cattle-dealer from Avenches. He knows what he is talking about when he denounces persecution.

  But just then a strange phenomenon occurs. As Brunschwig is speaking, describing the war, Hitler’s advancing armies and the threat to exterminate all European Jewry, it seems as if the little cemetery from which these words are ascending detaches itself and for a moment travels back four thousand years into the past, far from the horror, and bathed in a cool, musical light that mitigates and uplifts the tragic scene. And when the Kaddish is recited in fervent, resonant tones, it seems as if the human voice is taken up in God, the witness of these fresh trials and this abode in a barbarous world.

  God, once again his people’s only guide through a forbidding desert.

  The little Jewish cemetery in Berne, that morning a small island of ancestral soil, a moment of grace detached from a world where Aryan rule is bloodily imposed. A narrow patch of land engorged with age-old faith, a faith under threat, wounded and then revivified by the words of the Kaddish recited for Arthur Bloch, and hearts bleed, and injustice bows down our families in Alsace, Hungary and Poland, and one of our own is slaughtered, mutilated and cut up thirty miles from this holy place, O lamentable destiny of our people, a destiny hard to bear. That morning, in the Jewish cemetery in the city of Berne, very near and far from Adolf Hitler’s Europe, the martyred body of Arthur Bloch sows both strength and panic in the hearts of all those gathered around his closed grave.

  The following year Myria Bloch places a slab over the grave. Contrary to the custom of the Berne community, and against Rabbi Messinger’s advice, she has an inscription carved into the cold sandstone:GOTT WEISS WARUM

  [God Knows Why]

  The ironic expression of her confidence in, and distrust of, the Almighty’s decisions. And that darkness prevails. And that any human understanding, acceptance, knowledge or acknowledgement is for ever impossible.

  Myria Bloch would die five years after the murder of her husband and be buried at his side. Patronymic engraved on the slab, with the dates, and Dreyfus, her maiden name. Dead of sadness. And of utter despair. Myria Bloch lost her mind. Absence, dementia. Nothing can be explained, nothing is ever clear to one who has recognized, once and for all, all the injustice done to a living soul. Without reason. Without any purpose. Myria Bloch dies insane, but of grief. And this grief is the barrier. Jankélévitch’s “imprescriptible”. I reflect on this age-old injustice, and on the example of Arthur Bloch. I encounter the same barrier. A dense refusal in the depths of the void, about which God is silent, or knows and decides, while the axe of the evildoers, the fire of the ovens, condemn us to night and to ashes.

  But then again another strange phenomenon occurs. For the old writer who witnessed this story as a young boy sometimes wakens in the night, obsessed and scarred. He takes himself for the child he once was, who asked his family questions. He used to wonder where was the man who had been murdered and dismembered near his home. He used to wonder if he would come back. And what welcome he would receive.

  “Is it true this evening that he wanders about?”

  “You mean Arthur Bloch,” they answer him very quietly. Arthur Bloch is not spoken of. Arthur Bloch, that was before. An old story. A dead story.

  But a voice will not be silent in the old man-child’s dream.

  “So that was before? And it is now?”

  Arthur Bloch, the wandering Jew, because he knows no rest beneath the slab that reads Gott weiss warum. Arthur Bloch, who at this moment knows, the absolute God who knows, while we do not know. Arthur Bloch of the dark barrier under the snow. Or under the ashes of time. Because of insults, contempt, the gas chambers, the swastika, the desolation of the hills of Auschwitz and Payerne, the shame of Nazism at Treblinka and in the pig towns on the Broye. It is all a wound. It is all Golgotha. And redemption is so remote. But can there be a resurrection? Pity, God, by the pink of the open belly. Pity by the crown of thorns and the barbed wire of the camps. Have pity, Lord, on our crimes. Lord, have pity on us.

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2010 by

  Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  First published in French as Un juif pour l’exemple by

  Bernard Grasset, Paris in 2009

  Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of Switzerland

  © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2009

  English translation © W. D
onald Wilson, 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978-1-904-73857-2

  JF Print Ltd, Sparkford, Somerset