Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  How would it change the equation if they included women between the ages of twenty and forty-five? And why not throw in the critically ill, who would die anyway if they were left behind? The children would be entrusted to Jewish social services. A Jewish social service agent reported that the Jews had been taxed to pay for emergency clothing for several thousand children. Everyone agreed that this plan was thoughtful, humane, and showed admirable foresight.

  That spring there were several tedious meetings to decide what to do with the Jews’ house keys. Who would guard their possessions? What about their fat juicy pets? asked a general who thought his question funnier than his colleagues did. Someone muttered that the pets could be handed over to the concierges, and the general asked: were the concierges allowed to eat them? The Jews could bring one suitcase apiece. This passed without debate, with a show of hands, especially since it was understood that this was German policy. It was more sensible to safeguard the Jews’ property in situ rather than to risk it getting lost in transit.

  Several meetings were spent on the question of how the Jews would be transported. The police insisted on unanimous assurance that a fleet of late-model buses with sealed windows would be outfitted and ready to roll for Operation Spring Breeze.

  Meeting attendance slacked off until word got out that a new deadline had been set. Eichmann wanted all the Jews, or a high percentage, out of France by late July. Otherwise there would be drastic repercussions. No one wanted to speculate about what these punitive measures might be. They would be held responsible. Meanwhile the experts kept downgrading their estimates of able-bodied Jewish adults. Another deadlock ensued when the Vichy government was still reluctant to deport the French-born Jews along with the rest.

  Late in June, the committee heard that Eichmann was coming to Paris to look into the logjam and speed up the process. The delegates might have been excited if it hadn’t been represented as the equivalent of the principal coming to chastise the class.

  Even so, they were disappointed when Monsieur Eichmann decided not to meet with the entire assembly but only with a select few. They reported back that Eichmann had given permission to let 11,000 children travel along with their families as a humanitarian gesture. Consequently, the minimum age for male deportees was lowered to two, with the acknowledgment that in the upset unavoidable during the transfer, it might be hard for officials to determine the precise age of babes in arms, and younger children might be sent by mistake, of course along with their parents. Or should the families be separated? This was tabled for future discussion.

  Though the decision to include children elicited mixed feelings, the motion passed without debate, partly because it solved a lot of problems. Mainly, the problem of how the Jewish social services were supposed to take care of the children when there were no more Jews? The French couldn’t feed their own kids, let alone hungry Jewish mouths.

  Eichmann had suggested July 14 as the target date. But he saw the logic when it was pointed out that Bastille Day might be a tactically unwise occasion for the roundup. A sizable fraction of the non-Jewish population might be in a restive state due to the celebrations.

  By now the Paris police and the military were asking the civilian committee members if they had any idea how big a job this was. The propaganda department argued that it would be traumatic for the average Parisian if the city center was the scene of heart-wrenching dramas, terrified children torn from the arms of desperate parents.

  One council member suggested that the populace might not be all that upset to see their Jewish neighbors disappear. One major real estate investor said they shouldn’t underestimate the effect on the average citizen (especially the lower classes) of all those nice, newly vacant apartments going on the market at reasonable rents.

  After that they discussed a plan to separate families with children from childless Jews, so the families could stay together at least temporarily, thus sparing the average Parisian more tragedy than was necessary to witness. The French police spoke up for the occupying army to be more visibly involved; with their natural gift for classification, the Germans would be better equipped to determine which Jews should go to which detention centers, the childless Jews straight to Drancy, the families elsewhere, to be determined.

  For the first time since the committee’s inception, everyone talked at once. Until the mayor’s voice rose above the noise, asking where the hell they planned to warehouse thirty thousand Jews until they could start moving them out?

  After all the discussion, after the hammering out of fine points, more than 13,000 Jews were rounded up by the French police in the early morning of July 16, 1942. The unmarried and the childless were sent directly to Drancy and from there to Auschwitz. The others were brought to the Vélodrome d’Hiver. In the heat of July, the glass-covered greenhouse (its ceiling painted blue for camouflage in case of a bombing raid) sheltered the Jews, among them 4,000 children.

  Unlike the committee members, many of the Jews had heard the BBC broadcast on which it was explained what had already happened to 700,000 Jews in Poland. The parents and older children knew they were going to die.

  The stadium lights shone round the clock, and there were frequent loud broadcasts of German military songs interrupted by public service announcements informing the transit-camp residents of medical symptoms that warranted immediate attention.

  The field and the track were off-limits except to the very sick. There was a great deal of illness: scarlet fever, measles, diphtheria, hemorrhages, appendicitis, gangrene. Families lived in the bleachers, diapering their babies and putting their kids to sleep, and the little ones urinated on the heads of the children sleeping below. The parents took turns sleeping or trying to sleep. No one slept much, except for the narcoleptics, who slept all the time. No water, no sanitation, terror, childbirth, despair, disease, suicides, infanticides. There were screaming fights for the watery soup ladled directly into people’s hands by the Quakers and the Red Cross.

  Neighbors who lived near the Vélodrome reported not sleeping for nights. And these were people who had learned to sleep through motorcycle races, circus music, the cheering of sports fans. These more normal, soothing noises would resume several weeks after the removal of the Jews and the necessary sanitation department cleanup.

  By then the Jews had been shipped to transit camps in France, and from there to the east. For most of them this meant Auschwitz. According to the orders handed down by the Vichy government, the children were to be taken from their parents, by force if necessary, and sent off on separate convoys.

  Fewer than 200 adults and none of the children returned. The survivors belonged to the small group of 2,500 who came home—a fraction of the 76,000 French Jews who had been deported.

  Do we know that Lou Villars suggested the Vélodrome d’Hiver? We do know that Bonnet was present at the meetings during the time when the committee was stalled over where to “warehouse” the prisoners. We know that Lou Villars was working as Bonnet’s driver, that he told her about the problem and asked her advice, and that she’d given athletic demonstrations in the Vélodrome. Since then, she’d gone to the stadium for boxing matches, bicycle races, hockey games, the circus, and political rallies. So the Vélodrome would have occurred to Lou more readily than to Bonnet, who had no interest in sports and avoided germ-ridden crowds.

  There were many reasons why Lou Villars might have thought of the stadium where she’d appeared at the start of her failed career. What welling up of anger would those memories have caused, what resurgence of the resentment inspired and intensified by every time she’d been cheated, lied to, betrayed by those she’d trusted?

  Why not tell her boss that she knew about a space where thousands could be housed? Why not seem savvy and smart? And why hadn’t anyone else thought of the Vélodrome? Why did they need her to suggest it? Didn’t they like sports? Had the French patriots forgotten the massive rally that had been held at the stadium to celebrate the release from prison—to which he had been
unjustly sent for writing and printing the truth—of the national hero Charles Maurras, the first to prove that Christ was not a Jew and to alert his fellow patriots to the Jewish lies spread by Hollywood films like Ben Hur.

  Do we know that Lou Villars didn’t do it? Surely there will be readers who will say: Didn’t this woman do enough? Wasn’t it enough to tell the Germans where the Maginot Line ended? Must she also be responsible for the suffering at the Vélodrome d’Hiver?

  What would Lou have said? She would have said that if she didn’t do it, someone else would have—and gotten all the credit. Someone else would have suggested the Vélodrome or somewhere smaller and darker, much worse for the families in transit.

  Was she responsible for their deaths? Did she pick up a gun and kill even one Jew? All she’d done was mention a place with a large capacity. And it was just a suggestion. What they did with it wasn’t her fault.

  I have already written about the explosive combustion that can occur when two damaged or incomplete individuals combine to form an entity more dangerous than either one alone. We have seen how, with Lou and Inge, this demonic partnership resulted in the breach of our country’s defenses. And now Lou’s growing closeness to Jean-Claude Bonnet, a charged intimacy she hadn’t had with a male since Armand de Rossignol’s death, drew her ever more deeply into a world of terror and pain.

  On Christmas Eve, Lou drove through a snowstorm until dawn as Bonnet raved about a priest who’d pinned a Jewish star to the blanket swaddling the baby Jesus in his church’s Nativity crèche. Let his Jesus save him from the firing squad! Let his pervert pope get out of bed with the Führer long enough to intercede for some pedophile monk in Montmartre.

  Bonnet said, “I didn’t just say what you may imagine you heard me say.”

  Lou took a sharp corner and headed toward the Canal St. Martin.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  Angry at himself for having revealed too much and eager to shift the blame onto his listener, Bonnet said, “You know, you’re very good at getting people to say more than they mean to.”

  Was Bonnet praising or criticizing her?

  “Thank you,” Lou said uncertainly.

  Then he said, “I have another job I think you would be good at.”

  On the nights when her services weren’t required by the Gestapo, Lou lay awake in her room and watched the endangered innocents reaching out to her for help. Dressed in white robes, a solemn procession of imperiled souls marched across the darkness. She saw the children who would be killed if the fanatical Resistants blew up a train because a German official was on it. She saw the farm families who would starve if the Communists stole their land, as they had in the Soviet Union; the hardworking French people enslaved by the greedy Jews; French mothers and infants torn apart and sold.

  Finally she saw the Resistants themselves, those deceived and deluded girls and boys. She was saving them as well, from themselves and each other.

  She didn’t want to hurt them just because they imagined they could keep their secrets from her. She got no pleasure from the harsh tactics it often took to extract vital information. Nor did it please her to hear about the Resistants executed by firing squads or shot, in cold blood, in their homes or hiding places. She mourned these unfortunate French youths who had been tricked and lied to, and who didn’t deserve to die.

  Late one night, at a bar, a French cop suggested that Lou got a sexual thrill out of bloodying the pretty girls. Lou landed two punches, blackening both of his eyes, until his pals pulled her off him.

  But when Lou worked with the prisoners, she was never angry, nor did she think that her methods were gratuitously violent. She had a system she followed closely, rules for what she would and wouldn’t do. She never once got carried away or did more harm than she’d intended.

  She didn’t have to nearly kill the prisoners in order to make them talk. She only had to persuade them that they no longer had any control, that their lives and their loved ones’ lives depended completely on her. Fighting the temptation to compete against herself, to see if she could crack a prisoner faster than she had the night before, she never once forgot that this holy work was not to be taken lightly: her prisoners were human beings who felt pain, just as she did. She often thought of Joan of Arc, and it made her proud that the power had been taken back from those who had tormented and burned the Maid of Orléans.

  Was it wrong to make one person suffer to prevent harm to many? When Lou pondered that, which she tried not to, it gave her a headache. She’d leave those questions to the philosophers and do what she did best.

  She was surprised by how much trouble it took to get prisoners to reveal things they once would have told her and Inge for two glasses of hard cider. But it made sense. Time had passed. Positions had hardened. You had to sacrifice for your country. A war was being fought, inside and beyond the border. No one could pretend not to be affected. The Resistance was blowing up bridges and assassinating citizens on busy streets, even on the Métro, where passengers should feel safe.

  No one was asking Lou to put on a uniform and put herself in harm’s way. She never once killed anyone. At least no deaths are on record.

  Her bosses relied on her to help make sure that the right side won and innocent people weren’t hurt. Lou did one thing, and she did it well. She could make prisoners talk. She had no interest in what some of her colleagues enjoyed: the detective work and arrests. She disliked the interrogation methods—the dental extractions, the ice baths, the skull crushing, the application of electrodes—that required specialized techniques or more than one technician.

  Thanks to the rigorous documentation kept by the French office of the SS, only some of which was burned before the Allies liberated Paris, we know exactly when Lou showed up at the headquarters on the rue Lauriston, how many hours she worked—occasionally through the night—and how much (decently, but not generously) she was paid.

  Books have been written about the culture of La Carlingue, where the torture chambers employed a receptionist who combined the duties of a doctor’s nurse with those of the madam of a brothel. It was her job to avoid traffic snarls, to make sure that all the rooms were occupied and no space was wasted. We know there was a physician on call, a descendant of Madame Tussaud, of the wax museum Tussauds. The joke was that the wax-museum guy was called in to rule on whether a prisoner was living or dead. Music was played to drown out the prisoners’ screams. The German officers and the French police once got into a fistfight about whether to play Wagner or Piaf.

  Among Lou’s new coworkers were many old pals from the Gasparu-Chanac gang. Every so often Clovis Chanac dropped by, though mostly he preferred watching to dirtying his tailored suits with the bloody punching and kicking.

  As the Occupation dragged on, the gangsters thrived. They were among the few Parisians smiling on the street. Who would have dreamed they’d be paid by the state to do what they’d done for fun when it was illegal? But now that they had to work harder to exceed the limits of acceptable gangster behavior, the criminals grew competitive about their reputations for senseless violence. Crazy Pierrot Gasparu became famous for carrying the heads of executed Resistance agents in a leather briefcase specially designed for him by Coco Chanel.

  Several studies of the Gasparu-Chanac organization have been published, moderately informative histories that for some reason fail to mention Lou Villars, whose career paralleled that of the gang, but on a higher level. Lou was the only woman on the staff at rue Lauriston. Everyone knew that her gender was partly why she’d been hired. It was believed that the prisoners would crack sooner when they suffered the shock and shame of pain inflicted by a female, especially when that woman dressed—and was as strong—as a man.

  There were only two victims, both now dead, who wrote accounts of being interrogated and tortured by Lou Villars. Both agreed that Lou dispensed with the savage beatings that her colleagues favored. Nor, they noted, was Lou a fan of the near-drownings and pretend hangings po
pular among the jailers who liked staging dramas in teams.

  Lou was known for using her cigarette lighter to get information and for working slowly, partly because (again the records show) she was getting paid by the hour. All her life she’d hated snitches, so it was unsurprising that she respected the prisoners who refused to talk. When they confessed and implicated their friends, she had no problem turning them over to her colleagues.

  Lou’s lighter became notorious. Prisoners dreaded the moment when it appeared from her pocket. This was the elegant love token she’d received from Inge, the first present she ever got. The fury and the sense of betrayal that it inspired now so transfixed her that she seemed spellbound as she applied its flame to the skin and hair of the male and female prisoners.

  The lighter was engraved with Lou’s initials, LV. A popular joke—the letters stood for laide et violente, ugly and violent—was typical Resistance gallows humor.

  Lou’s voice would grow more threatening. Then she would begin inflicting a series of burns, mild as mosquito bites. Suddenly, Lou flicked her lighter close to her victims’ eyes, asking if she should bring the flame closer. Sometimes the smell of singed eyelashes caused the prisoners to faint, and Lou would douse them with water, a process she called—her joke—putting out the fire. This technique nearly always got results. Lou rarely had to call anyone’s bluff, not even the hard-core fanatics.

  Using this method, Lou Villars prevented a hijacked munitions convoy from reaching Clermont-Ferrand. She found six Jewish boys hiding in a convent and a British agent on his way to a meeting place where he was captured along with the Resistants smuggling him out of the country. It never failed to amaze Lou how many lives could be saved, how much destruction could be averted, how much good she could do with the minimal energy required to light one cigarette.