by Richard Wake
“I’ve been thinking about this since you took me in,” Izzy said. “How I would tell people. How to be honest, but to make them understand. Because when the Germans arrived and insisted that we organize to take care of our own, people like me had a decision to make. And I’ll admit that part of it was to protect the morsel of power and influence I had in the community. But most of it was just an objective look at the situation, and the belief that I could help my people through a terrible time.”
“By making lists for the Germans,” I said.
“By arranging for orderly help to the Jews of Paris,” he said.
“By making lists,” I said.
“We had no idea,” he said.
“But you must have known pretty quickly.”
“Not pretty quickly.”
“But before everybody else.”
“Not pretty quickly,” he said again.
I let it go. Izzy went on to describe the first time he suspected. He said it was in 1942, almost two years after the Germans took Paris. He said it was the first time he heard about trains “to the east,” as he said, trains full of Jews jammed into cattle cars.
“They told us about work camps, and then resettlement camps,” he said. “But word filtered back — just a whisper at first, but enough of a whisper.”
“And yet you stayed in your job.”
“I’m here now, aren’t I?”
“And why is that? And why now?”
“Because I couldn’t take it anymore,” Izzy said. He was still crying, but angrier, almost defiant. “And I started to make noise — just a little at first, then more. But it was enough for me to get called in for a chat to Rue des Saussaies. And when I got back, I realized what I had done. I realized I had to go.
“I had to quit — I couldn’t turn over one more list, and it didn’t matter how many people were getting fed in the canteens, or how many children we sheltered in the orphanages. But I couldn’t quit UGIF without the Gestapo coming for me, which meant I couldn’t go home to my family without putting them at a terrible risk. And there was nowhere to hide because the Jews here, well, a lot of them have an idea about the trains now, and about the lists. A lot of them might kill me quicker than the Gestapo. Especially the immigrants — goddamned Communists. They’d kill me as a collaborator without a second thought. I mean, my family has been here for four generations. I fought at the Marne. But here I am.”
His arm swept in an arc around the flat. And then he shoveled in another spoonful of peas.
“So I have no one and nothing, no one and nowhere to go,” Izzy said. “What’s the saying? A man without a country.”
Then he slurped another spoonful of peas.
18
After I left Izzy, I decided I needed to talk to Leon. The flat on Rue du Jardinet was his, too, even if I was paying the rent. It was kept for my protection and for his, so it was only fair that I tell him. But I suggested a walk when I saw him and waited until we were out on the streets before I told him, mostly because I figured he couldn’t go completely berserk out in public.
And I was right. He only went semi-berserk. Only when I pointed out a woman across the street who had stopped pushing her pram and was just staring at us did he regain some semblance of emotional balance. But it was two more blocks before he spoke again.
“Are you trying to kill me?” is what he said.
“It’s just for a few days—”
“UGIF? But why?”
“It was your friend, Rabbi Stein.”
“What about him?”
“He asked me to help Izzy,” I said.
“Buddies, are you? Alex and Izzy. I hope you’ll be very fucking happy together.”
“What, are you jealous?”
At that moment, Leon stopped, actually made a fist, and kind of cocked his right arm. We hadn’t had a fistfight since we were 19 and living in Vienna, an altercation involving a woman named Berta and about two gallons of beer. Neither of us landed a punch — at least in Berta’s telling, after she had gone off with Henry, another of our friends.
Almost as quickly as it happened, Leon’s arm returned to his side and his fingers unclenched.
“Don’t you get it?” he said. “Of course you don’t get it, you’re not a Jew.”
“Don’t play the Jew card with me. Not after everything we’ve been through.”
“It’s the only card that matters sometimes. I mean, Izzy from UGIF? Really? You do know how they fund those canteens, right? And the orphanages and the rest? They take the lists, and the prefecture and the Gestapo use them to scoop up the Jews, and then steal everything of value from the Jews they put on the trains, and a cut of the money goes back to pay for the canteens and the rest of it. It’s not borscht money — it’s blood money. And UGIF is involved on both ends.”
I knew this, kind of, on an intellectual level — but no one had ever explained it quite as Leon had. I didn’t know what to say, so I just kept interjecting, “But the rabbi…” The argument became circular, and then we were quiet again.
Quiet, until I saw the X chalked on the fountain. I stopped and stared and muttered an “oh, shit.” Leon saw what I was looking at, knew what it was about, and said, “For you?”
“What time is it?”
“Ten before five,” Leon said.
I sat on the edge of the fountain. Leon and I kept some operational secrets from each other, mostly for protection. The fewer people involved, the better. We both did our best to share some things only minimally, so if an operation went to hell, at least one of us would be protected. But as I sat there, I decided to tell him. I decided after a quick think and the familiar punctuation: “Ah, fuck it.”
“What?” Leon said.
He knew that I was “dating” a source who worked as a Gestapo typist, from whom we received the four Jewish names and addresses. I explained to him that, in 10 minutes, Alicia would be walking into The Fawn with an urgent message.
“Maybe I should go,” he said.
“I don’t know if it matters.”
“Of course it matters.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m not worried about you seeing her. It’s just that she probably shouldn’t see you. But if it’s what I think it is, it’s more names. So I’m going to need you — you know, like immediately.”
“All right. I’ll stay here. You go for a quick walk. I’ll watch for her — and if I see her go in, I’ll nod when you come back and you can go in for the meeting.”
I described Alicia to Leon and took a walk around the block. It must have been about 5:05 p.m. when I turned the last corner and caught Leon’s eye. He nodded. I went inside.
Alicia was beyond nervous. Her hands were shaking so much that the cup of fake coffee that she was attempting to drink was slopping all over the table. A tiny speck stained her white shirt. But she managed to get out the message, and it was as I had feared: two more names, two more addresses, and the same deadline.
“Tonight,” she said.
I told her to wait for at least five minutes before leaving the cafe. I hurried outside and over to the fountain where Leon was sitting. I wasn’t thinking, just reacting.
“Come on,” is what I said.
“How many?” Leon said.
“Two.”
“One name each, then?”
“No.”
“What?”
“Come on.”
“Where?”
“One of the names and addresses is Max’s family on Rue du Morvan,” I said.
19
The Metro took forever to go the five stops, or so it seemed. And while we couldn’t run — no sense getting stopped and questioned about our display of haste — we walked as fast as we could without drawing attention to ourselves. The flat was three blocks from the station. But when we turned the corner onto Rue du Morvan, we were forced to duck into the first alley, forced by the sight of a police car and an open lorry parked in front of Max’s building.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,
” was all that Leon could manage.
“Let’s try to think,” was all I had.
The shadows and the gathering darkness hid us well — or at least, that’s what we figured. It wasn’t as if we had a lot of options, or really any options. If either of us had a weapon, we could have gone for the grand gesture — guns blazing, hoping to create enough chaos for the Greens to somehow escape without getting ourselves killed in the process. The problem was, neither of us was carrying so much as a penknife. So the grand gesture was out.
Suddenly, there was a scream and Leon saw what I saw: a woman standing up in the back of the lorry, a woman holding a baby, a baby who somehow remained quiet while the woman wailed. The gendarme who was guarding them let her go for about five seconds before taking a menacing step toward the lorry and raising his pistol. With that, the woman fell silent again, and sat back down, hidden behind the vehicle’s wooden sides.
“The Rosens from Rue Saint-Maur?” I said. That was the other name that Alicia had given me.
“Makes sense.”
“Christ…”
For just a half-second, I was relieved to see the Rosens already in the truck. On the Metro, I had begun to feel bad that we were ignoring them to try to rescue our friends. The fact that they had already been picked up cleared my conscience, oddly. The Rosens weren’t going to be a family I dreamed about at night because we never had a chance to help them.
All of that in a half-second. It was followed quickly by a wave of guilt. I mean, what kind of person feels a sense of relief at the sight of a family in the back of a lorry, a family about to be driven who knows where? As I pondered exactly what kind of selfish shithead I was, Leon snapped me out of it.
“How about the drunk thing?” he said.
“One of us or both?”
“Both, I think.”
The drunk thing was a standard bit of diversion. You come out of the alley singing and weaving up the middle of the street. You approach the gendarme at the truck and hope to disarm him — first with the annoyance of your behavior, and then by getting his gun away from him.
It wasn’t much, but it was all we had, until we didn’t have it anymore. Because when the front door of the building opened up, there were two more cops with pistols, plus a boss in a business suit. They were leading Max’s father out the door.
Leon and I took our eyes off the unfolding scene, looked at each other, and said the same two words: “No Max.” And then Leon said, “And no wife and daughter.”
Thank god, maybe the rest weren’t at home. As quickly as we said the words, we turned back to watch. We were maybe three hundred feet away. In a few minutes, it would be so dark that we would be hearing more than we were seeing. But we could still see okay. And what we saw was Max’s old man stopping, and staying to the gendarme, “Just one more thing, please.”
They all looked at the man in the suit, the man in charge, and he shrugged and nodded. One of the cops followed Max’s father back into the building. The boss leaned against the fender of his Citroen and lit a cigarette.
“Should we try?” Leon said. He knew the answer, so I didn’t bother replying. There was nothing we could do. Three men, two pistols — and maybe a third pistol, if the boss in the suit was carrying, too. There was no way. Getting ourselves killed or arrested wouldn’t help anyone.
So we watched as the three worms from the prefecture of police all just stood around looking at each other. One minute became two, and two became three, and three became five, and then the door of the building opened and Max’s father emerged. He was wearing his uniform from the Great War. It still fit well. All the buttons were done up. On his breast was a medal.
“Is that…?” I said.
“It’s dark, but I think so.”
“A Croix de Guerre?”
“He said he was a hero of Verdun,” Leon said.
And then he said it again, this time to the boss in the suit, loud enough for us to hear him.
“I am a patriot of France,” he said. He was shouting. “I am a hero of Verdun.”
The boss looked at Max’s father — or, rather, appeared to be looking through him. Two of the gendarmes began to laugh. The boss quieted them with a glare, but not quickly enough. Max’s father just shouted louder.
“A hero of Verdun,” he said. “Do you idiots even know what that means?”
He looked at one of them, then turned to the other one. They were silent.
“My family has been in France for four generations,” he said. He was really bellowing. “My business has always been honest, like my father’s and his father’s. We have been good neighbors. We have been a burden on no one.”
And then Max’s father stopped and took a deep breath, maybe to calm himself, maybe to reach down deeper for just a few more decibels.
“I am a hero of Verdun,” he said, the words echoing down the darkened street.
At which point, the suit nodded at the gendarme who had escorted the old man from the building. Gently, coming up from behind, the cop took the uniformed arm of Max’s father and steered him toward the back of the lorry. The old man rejected an offer of assistance and climbed into the back by himself. Everyone else was sitting, hidden behind the wooden sides of the lorry, but he stood there in his uniform as they drove off.
20
We didn’t run into Max until the next night. He was alone at a table in The Flip — alone, that is, except for the two empty wine bottles standing sentry on the table, accompanied by a just-opened third. He was somewhere between obliterated and incoherent — that much was clear even from 20 feet away. He was alternatively talking to himself, sitting up and gesticulating, and then slumping back into his chair.
“Your friend is in a bad way.” It was the owner, Henri, wrapped in a filthy white apron.
“Where did he even get the—”
“I think he traded with a guy who just left, a month’s worth of meat coupons for the third bottle.”
“Why did you let him?”
“Not my concern.” The owner shrugged and wiped his hands on the apron, more out of a reflex than the need to clean them. “Besides, he isn’t hurting anybody, I guess.”
“Except himself,” Leon said. After the owner turned and walked away, Leon muttered, “Asshole.”
When we got to the table and Max saw us, he got to his feet and then collapsed into Leon’s arms, just bawling. It was maybe five minutes before he composed himself, and before the owner brought glasses for Leon and me.
“Your mother? Your sister?” I said.
“They were at my aunt’s flat for the night,” Max said. “The only lucky thing. They came home and found me there. I sent them back to my aunt’s… but wait. How did you know?”
Leon went on to tell him that we saw the whole thing. Max had received the basic details from the concierge in the building, how the gendarmes had searched several flats looking for him and his mother and his sister before giving up and settling for Max’s father. Leon was able to add the news that their family name had been on a list, and that we had arrived too late to do anything but watch from the alley. Oh, and the part about the uniform, which brought a new round of tears from Max.
“The old fool,” he said, wiping his eyes on a sleeve that was likely soaked by tears and snot. “The old fucking fool.”
Leon topped off the glasses, and we all slumped back in our seats. The silence was uncomfortable, but I didn’t know what to say. There were too many questions and too few answers — that much was obvious to me. Soon, uncomfortable became unbearable, at least for me. So I said, “Where do you think they are?”
Leon and Max answered together: “Drancy.”
“You sure?”
“It’s where they all go, we think,” Leon said. “We don’t know for sure, but we think.”
“Is there anything—”
“No,” Leon said, and Max slowly nodded in agreement.
“Has anybody ever—”
“Forget it,” Leon said. “It�
�s too well guarded. When they’re in there, they’re in there. The only chance would be when they were being transported to the trains — but there’s no way to get that information, no way to know when, no way to know who was being shipped to the trains.”
“You seem to have thought about this,” I said.
“We all have,” Leon said. “There just isn’t a realistic chance, or even an unrealistic chance.”
“Suicide,” was Max’s contribution, just the one word, before he rested his head on the table.
More silence followed. The hopelessness added to the helplessness combined for an enormous weight, and there seemed to be no obvious way to lift it. These were the worst moments of the occupation. When you were on a mission, even checking a dead letter drop, there was a shot of adrenaline and the feeling that maybe, just maybe, you were accomplishing something. But these were the times, when you felt weaker than an infant, that almost made me understand why Max just traded a month’s worth of meat ration tickets for a bottle of crap wine.
Then he lifted his head from the table and struggled to his feet — and it was a struggle. If the palms of his hands hadn’t been resting on the tabletop, he would have gone down on his ass.
“What?” Leon said.
“I’m going,” Max said.
“Where?”
“To kill a fucking Nazi.”
“With what? Your bare hands?”
“I have a gun,” Max said. That was when Leon and I both stood up and, as gently as possible, put our arms around him and guided him back into his chair. Max struggled a little and the chair skittered out from under him on the bare tile floor, and then he was down on his ass. That was when he began crying again. It took more than a few seconds to get the chair uprighted, and then the boy.
“I’m going to do it,” Max said.
“Where’s the gun?” Leon said.
“Hidden.”
“Hidden where?”
“Just fucking hidden.”
Max wore a look of defiance which, in other circumstance, would have been hilarious, given his level of intoxication. But I was worried, and by the look on his face, Leon was alarmed.