Chapter 2
Just as I took my place in the endless cortège of those guillotined, hanged, shot, garrotted, among all the tortured in the world, so too I am that hostage with the vacant eyes, this man waiting for the blade to fall. You must understand that I love life madly, love it all the more now that I am close to leaving it – so much so that I do not even believe what I have just said, which is a statistical proposition, a piece of pure rhetoric that finds no response in my flesh, in my bones. I cannot know what state I shall be in nor how I shall behave when the last bell sounds. What I do know is that this life I love so irrationally would have been tainted by a fear of equal magnitude, the fear that I might prove cowardly if I had to lose that life through one of the evil acts described above. How many times have I wondered how I would react under torture? And every time my answer has been that I would have been incapable of taking my own life as Pierre Brossolette did, as André Postel-Vinay attempted to do, when, with sudden determination, like Julián Grimau, he jumped from the second-storey of the Prison de la Santé as he was brought in for questioning, and as many less famous but no less heroic people such as Baccot have done. I need to talk about Baccot because he is always with me; I am, in a certain sense, responsible for his death. It was in late November 1943, after class, in the boarders’ quadrangle of the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. Though Baccot was studying for his baccalauréat in philosophy while I was already in Lettres supérieures, he knew that since we had returned to school that autumn I had been leading the Resistance at the Lycée. In fact, I had set up the Resistance network from scratch. I had become a member of the Jeunesses communistes during the summer and since coming back to school had recruited about forty boarders – khâgneux (preparing for the École normale supérieure), taupins (preparing for the École polytechnique) and agros (studying agronomy) – into the nucleus of the Jeunesses communistes, with whose help I had recruited 200 others into a mass organization – the FUJP, Forces unies de la jeunesse patriotique – controlled, unbeknownst to them, by the Parti communiste français (PCF). Such was the policy of the clandestine Communist Party at the time. Baccot, to whom I had barely spoken before then, faced me squarely, dark eyes blazing beneath his bushy eyebrows, his hair pushed back to reveal the cliff-face of his forehead; he was thick-set, stocky and exuded a concentration, a dark force. ‘I want to join the Resistance,’ he said simply, ‘but the stuff you’re doing doesn’t interest me. I know there are action groups out there, that’s what I want to join.’ I asked him how old he was. ‘Eighteen.’ I was not even older than him! I said, ‘You know what action groups mean, you know the risks?’ He knew, he understood. I told him, ‘Take a week, think about it, think hard and talk to me again.’
What were we doing that did not interest Baccot? Beneath the Lycée Blaise-Pascal was a network of long interconnected cellars like catacombs. My only contact with the outside world, with the Party, was a woman, whom I knew only as Aglaé. She had smuggled three revolvers and some ammunition into the school and entrusted them to my care. A few friends, those I was closest to, and I would sneak soundlessly out of the dormitory at night – thanks to my father I was adept at such things – go down to the cellars and practise shooting at improvised targets. No one ever heard the deafening explosions that echoed in the depths, nobody found out what we were doing – very few people even knew that the cellars existed. But there were times, on days of red alert or when I had been warned by Aglaé, that I would come to class with the revolver in the pocket of the grey school smock that was the standard uniform for boarders. It is difficult to describe this period, and few have done so well. Among the day pupils, there were a number of Vichystes, boys with connections to the Milice, some who were even in the Milice. They knew who we were; we knew who they were; you have to imagine the schoolyard of Blaise-Pascal at break time, the factions watching each other, weighing each other up, scrutinizing each other and turning away. The kids from families of collaborators or miliciens were the same age as we were. At the time, Clermont-Ferrand had been occupied for a year (November 1942, the date of the Anglo-American landings in North Africa) by German troops, the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo, ruthlessly supported by Darnand’s Milice, but the Communist Party action groups – the ones Baccot wanted to join – were making life difficult for them: intimidation, suspicion, fear stalked both camps. We had managed to get two or even three copies of every key in the school, most importantly the key to the double gate in the central quad, the gate that led directly into town, enabling us to evade the caretakers and supervisors. Aglaé supplied me with pamphlets, calls to resistance, denunciations of Nazi crimes, advice, information on how the war was progressing, poems by Aragon and Éluard, texts by Vercors published by Les Éditions de Minuit. We had divided Clermont-Ferrand into sectors. On weekends and Thursdays too we sneaked out of the lycée in groups of five to head for whichever sector we had been assigned: we worked calmly and quickly, slipping the tracts through letterboxes or under doors. In every group, two members acted as lookouts and we repeated these operations, careful to vary both times and places since distributing pamphlets almost immediately alerted the attention of the police and of the Milice. It was almost impossible to work by night – we did so only in extreme cases – since there was usually a curfew, and even when there was not, the town was swarming with German patrols.
What astonishes me, what seems incomprehensible to me even now is that, in 1943, in this one small hypokhâgne class, there were three Jews: my very dear friend André Wormser, the son of Georges Wormser, former directeur de cabinet to Georges Clemenceau (he stayed for only two months), a girl called Hélène Hoffnung and me, all three of us enrolled under our real names and without the obligatory and ignominious stamp – JEW – in red letters on our identity cards, and all, therefore, completely illegal. Since the summer of 1941, French Jews had been compelled to register so I possessed an identity card stamped this way. I still look for it sometimes – I mislaid it, probably during a period of change in my life – but I’m sure that a girlfriend kept it and it will turn up when the time is right. I remember my adolescent face – I was about to write ‘my innocent face’ – struck through diagonally with that stamped curse from the dawn of time. Back then, we did not know whether it was better to obey the new laws or to ignore them. For a brief period, my father had favoured obedience, but he soon became convinced that we should fear the worst and this branding of himself and his family seemed to him, to all of us, intolerable. We had identity cards printed in our own names, but without this vile stamp. We had sought refuge in Brioude, a sub-prefecture of the Haute-Loire where we had previously lived from 1934 to 1938 after my parents separated. My father had loved the area from when he had first gone there, for the treatment of his lungs, at the end of World War I: having volunteered in 1917 at the age of seventeen – his father had been fighting on the front line since 1914 – he had been the victim of a mustard gas attack at the Somme. Now, separated from my mother, and with a new wife, he chose to make a new life for himself in Brioude, taking with him his three children: my sister Évelyne, my brother Jacques and me, the eldest at nine. Yet in 1938 we returned for a time to Paris when I started secondary school at the Lycée Condorcet (the petit lycée). I had time to be profoundly shaken and terrorized by the force and the virulence of the anti-Semitism at this Parisian lycée. Paradoxically, the war, which was to expose me to far greater dangers, freed me of such fears: we left Paris for Brioude once more when war was declared in October 1939.
Since my father was almost forty, had three children and was a veteran of the 1914–18 war, he was not called up for active service, but enlisted as an ‘affecté spécial’ working on projects related to the national defence. He was allowed to choose the region where he would work and opted for Brioude. For me, it was like a return to happier times, but our status had changed considerably: my father had been forced to give up his position, and what few possessions he had. Until the crushing defeat of the French army in
May 1940, he drove coal trucks, coming home every night as black as a chimney sweep. Improbably, I found myself back at the Collège Lafayette that I had attended from 1934 to 1938, even though my father, when he came to collect me from my grandparents’ house in Normandy where I had spent the last holidays before the war, had told me that I would have to give up school and go out to earn a living, just as he had been forced to do twenty years earlier. It was dark, I remember the starlit sky above my head, I was watching for German planes when he told me that he had decided to find me a position at the Post and Telegraphs. I bridled at this, the last thing in the world I wanted to be was a postman. My categorical refusal, together with the disgust of the headmaster of the Collège Lafayette, who was happy to have me back, won my father round and I was allowed, for a time at least, to continue my studies. Obviously, we were well known in this little town, and known to be Jews, though the people of Brioude did not seem to attach any special importance to the label. My father had many friends who refused to turn their backs on us with the advent of the Vichy regime’s so-called ‘État Français’ and the sinister quaverings of Maréchal Pétain. The defeat, and the division of France into the Occupied Zone and the area known as the ‘Free Zone’, saw a number of Jewish refugees arrive in Brioude, almost all foreigners, who had no legal protection. For me, as for Aragon in his poem ‘L’Affiche rouge’, their names were difficult to pronounce, more difficult even than my own. More often than not, when asked my last name, I spelled it out rather than saying it, and did so as quickly as possible, L-A-N-Z-M-A-N-N. I still do so today when I realize that my fame is not universal and has not reached the person I am speaking to, usually by telephone. I was amazed by the number of children in every family, by the extraordinary capacity for work and the talent of their parents, whether tailors, furriers, cobblers, by the ease with which they adapted to the most difficult conditions and by the self-evident affection they bore for each other. One gifted Jewish boy of Polish extraction was my classmate and soon became my friend. He was so brilliant, so far ahead of the class in every subject, and unaffectedly arrogant, knowing himself to be superior – how could he be otherwise? – that he aroused naked envy among the sons of Auvergne farmers and shopkeepers who made up most of the pupils at the school. Once I found him tied to one of the plane trees in the schoolyard, the other boys circling him in a vicious war dance, thumping him and uttering savage incoherent cries, which he met with his permanent smile of defiance and superiority. The boys at the Collège Lafayette were neither hateful nor anti-Semitic as those at the Lycée Condorcet had been. This was something different: Freiman was being made to pay for his brilliance. I rushed over, hurling abuse at his tormentors, who respected me as I had been at the school a long time. I managed to free him without throwing a single punch.
One day in the summer of 1942, Freiman, his family and most of the foreign Jewish refugees in Brioude were rounded up in dawn raids by the French police. Suddenly, they were no longer there; it was an extraordinary shock, an abrupt, incomprehensible absence, one that was felt throughout the little town, of which they had very much become a part, and which they had enlivened by their presence. My father, although I was unaware of it, was already a member of the Resistance, and he had had false papers made for us that we might need if we had to travel or had to show our papers in a sudden raid, as, month by month, the distinction between foreign Jew and French Jew was becoming increasingly slender. I remember I was Claude Bassier, born in Langeac, or sometimes Claude Chazelle from Brassac-les-Mines; the details of our false identities, including the dates and places of birth, could be verified in the local registry offices: employees and secretaries at the town halls had agreed, at great risk to themselves, to authenticate the false papers. Today, they would be called ‘Righteous Gentiles’, but they weren’t thinking about such things: I never knew their names, they didn’t care about posterity, they did what they did out of solidarity, modestly, in the name of simple humanity.
Why, at the beginning of the 1943 school year, after I had passed the baccalauréat, did my father enrol me as a boarder at Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand under my real name? He had agreed to let me carry on with my studies – a career as a postman was not for me – but he felt that a university would be too dangerous, while a boarding school would afford me the best possible protection. Just as I did not know he was already a member of the MUR (Mouvements unis de la Résistance) when he sent me to the lycée, he certainly did not know that I had already been a member of the Jeunesses communistes for four months. It was a chance recruitment, our family was broadly left-wing but I had not read Marx or Engels or Lenin. In practice, being at a boarding school under a name other than my own would have been difficult, perhaps impossible and fraught with greater dangers. What is certain is that the headmaster of Blaise-Pascal, the deputy head, the chief supervisor and some of the teachers all knew about Wormser, Hélène Hoffnung and me. The very fact that they had allowed us to enrol was in itself a guarantee of our safety. Jean Perus, our head teacher, taught us literature, and after the war I found out that he too had been a member of the Parti communiste and had been actively involved in the Resistance, but there was never a word or a wink of complicity between us. He was a wonderful teacher and I have never forgotten the scornful curl of his lips when he would refute some interpretation of ours with a single sentence. He also forever cured me of comparatisme on the day when, asked to analyse a passage of Rabelais, I stupidly made a reference to Bergson, whom I had barely read. The scorn in his famous scowl turned to contempt: ‘Mon petit, Rabelais didn’t know Bergson.’
One of the missions the Party had conferred on ‘mon petit’ was very dangerous: collecting cases of revolvers and grenades from Clermont-Ferrand station. This I did with Hélène Hoffnung, whom I had recruited myself and who, like me, was a member of the hard core of the Jeunesses communistes. Hélène was well aware of the risks involved; she was also inventive, daring and possessed of extraordinary sang-froid. To fool the Milice sent out to hunt for supposedly Jewish faces in the streets of the city, Hélène, at my request, did her best to hide as much as possible her stubbornly Semitic features. I asked her to soften the proud Hebraic profile of her nose with a fringe of red curls and to wear lipstick that was neither too prim nor too flashy. We would set off together at dusk for the station, in a tender or a passionate embrace, like two happy students in love, each carrying a little suitcase. I was scared to death. At the station, we went to the agreed platform and stood at an appointed spot, looking out for the train. Our suitcases, set down at our feet, were exchanged for others of the same size and colour, though much heavier, with the speed and skill of a magician. Everything happened without a word and so quickly that I cannot remember the face of any of the Party couriers who delivered the weapons. However, at the same station Hélène and I witnessed a number of lightning swoops by men wearing the long gabardine coats and soft caps of the Gestapo: barely had their prey stepped from the train when those waiting for them suddenly drew pistols and they were seized, handcuffed and dragged off by waiting officers. It was a terrifying sight: the poor wretches would immediately realize that they had fallen into a trap, they paled and one could already see in their sallow faces the unrelenting torture they knew they would have to endure. ‘Gestapo’ (the Geheime Staatspolizei: ‘Secret State Police’) was then and will forever remain a synonym for terror, for good reason. In the interrogation rooms of the Gestapo, there was no Corporal Lynndie England taking photographs to send home to family and friends, no war trophies, no staged photographs of humiliated prisoners forced into pornographic or scatological positions for the camera. Abu Ghraib Prison was, certainly, both grotesque and vile, but physical torture was not practised there: no fingernails ripped out, eyes gouged out, bones broken, no escalating panoply of lethal violence intended permanently to break its victims if they did not die under torture. The Gestapo scorned images, it worked in secret – with the real, not the virtual. At the train station, Hélène would gaze a
t me lovingly, impassive, apparently unconcerned by the possibility of arrest that terrified me, she hugged me, kissed me full on the mouth as though we had just been reunited. We then set off with our heavy suitcases, enraptured with each other, walking straight past the uniformed and plain-clothes officials who infested the station to begin our slow journey back through the town, to the meeting point where the suitcases disappeared with the same magical sleight-of-hand as they had appeared. Every passing patrol, every suspicious movement was a cue for a kiss – more or less deep depending on the degree of danger. Since ‘Rouge Baiser’ – kiss-proof lipstick – was a rare commodity in those far-off days, we always arrived back at the lycée, our mission accomplished, smeared with the signs of flagrant passion, although there was never anything sexual between us: we were two trained militants in the Parti communiste français, the Party that would later christen itself ‘the Party of the 75,000 Martyrs’.
The Patagonian Hare Page 3