by Richard Wake
So, first a quarter-smile and then eye contact. That, for some reason, seemed essential to me — although I had begun to second-guess myself. If you stood on a random Paris street corner and watched the people walk by, nobody made eye contact with anybody anymore — not with normal Parisians and definitely not with Germans. So would the soldiers think it odd that someone walking by was making eye contact? I didn’t know, but I always thought a quick look in their direction — along with the half-smile — indicated a hint of both ease and respect that I hoped was disarming.
Anyway, that’s how I played it with the kids — half-smile, quick eye contact — and within seconds, we were past them without so much as a comment. The one soldier with whom I made eye contact nodded briefly, and that was that. We were about 10 minutes away, I hoped, and we had passed a little test.
But then, a shout:
“Mister.”
I ignored it outwardly, even as my bowels suddenly made their presence known. We were maybe 50 feet away. I just kept walking and hoped.
“Mister, Mister.” It was a shout this time, and I had no choice. I stopped, and the kids behind me stopped, and we all turned back. One of the soldiers — the one who nodded to me — was walking with a purpose. His rifle was slung over his shoulder.
“Mister,” he said as he arrived. And then he reached into his coat pocket and produced a small cloth bag tied shut with a drawstring. He handed it to me. Inside were two small rubber balls and about 10 metal jacks.
“Look children!” I said, with all the enthusiasm I could muster. I dropped to a knee and opened the bag and prayed that my aforementioned bowels didn’t release.
As it turned out, they didn’t. And after all six children had taken a peek inside the bag, and said, “And what do you say to the nice man?”
After the sing-song of thank-yours had subsided, I mouthed the word “thanks” and the soldier replied with a nod and a quick salute. Then he turned and walked back to his compatriot and we continued walking to the soup kitchen on Rue Greneta. My heart rate had almost returned to normal by the time we arrived.
35
The soup kitchen was bustling. The fare of the day was onion soup, which was a hell of a trick. I couldn’t imagine where they managed to find enough onions to make the recipe. But they did, and there were cauldrons of it, five of them, bubbling on two stoves. And if they didn’t have the cheese to melt on top under the broiler — the onions were miracle enough, but cheese would have been supernatural — the soup was savory and excellent, with the customary slice of bread in the bottom of the bowl.
We were not the first group to arrive from an orphanage, but not the last, either. The orphans were gathered at a couple of tables in a far corner, away from the regular neighborhood clientele — many of them older men and women, with some younger families mixed in. The man with the ladle was referred to by everyone as Reverend Michel, although he was not wearing a collar or anything that looked to me like an ecclesiastical outfit. Instead, he was wearing a blue denim shirt, stained black pants, and an incessant smile.
I had dropped my children with a woman I didn’t know, but who knew me — or at least, knew my function in the scheme.
“Bless you,” she said. “Where from?”
“Czechoslovakia, originally.”
She smiled and said, “I meant, what orphanage.”
I told her. She repeated “16 Rue Lamarck” to herself, as if making a mental notation. Then she said, “You were the first one from there, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. I explained to her how the journey had been uneventful, except at the very end — then I pointed to my five orphans showing the other children their new treasure, the rubber balls and the jacks.
“You should get some soup,” she said. And when I asked if I had the time, she said that there was plenty of time, and that it was important to share my story about the German soldiers on Rue Montorgueil, just to let everyone know. A couple of the others had some things to share, too, she said. She pointed through an open door into a small auxiliary room. I could see a table in there, and two of the other Resistance couriers. The woman said that she was suggesting that everyone stay a half-hour and then leave in the same order they arrived.
“That should space it out,” she said. She turned and walked toward the tables with the children. “So far, so good.”
The soup was so good, and I was so hungry, that I wasn’t embarrassed to scrape the last bits and drops out of the bowl with my finger. As we sat and ate, notes were compared and tips exchanged. Someone had seen a kind of sentry post — a permanent structure — on Rue de Magenta. Someone else had dealt with their own fear of walking past two German soldiers stationed outside of a Metro stop — but, as it turned out, the Germans never reacted to the small gaggle going past.
I asked if anyone else had five orphans, as I had. They all looked at each other and shook their heads — it was just two or three for each of them.
“Five? What happened?” Somebody at the table I didn’t know was asking.
“I guess somebody doesn’t know how to count,” I said. “Five the first trip, four the second trip — but whatever, it’s done. Too late to change anything now.”
Leon arrived in time to hear my story about the balls and jacks. His trip with four children had been uneventful. We compared notes about our routes, deciding maybe to vary them a little, just in case some nosy old man noticed a parade of children through the neighborhood and told a passing German patrol.
I still had about 10 minutes before my half-hour was up when Hannah walked in. She took her soup and sat and the other end of the rectangular table. If I wanted to make eye contact, I had to turn my head hard to the right. And, well, I didn’t.
After a few minutes, I got up to leave. Leon came with me. We used the bathroom and then talked about the best route on the Metro back to 16 Rue Lamarck. We were standing on the sidewalk in front of the soup kitchen when Hannah burst through the door. It was clear that our encounter wasn’t an accident.
“You can’t avoid me forever,” is how she started.
“What’s the point?”
“You need to understand a few things.”
“I don’t fucking need this.”
“Me neither,” Leon said. “I’m out of here.” He pointed. “Metro, that way. We’ll flip the order. I’ll go first, you wait 15 minutes.”
“No,” I said, but Leon was already walking away. I was stuck.
“You just don’t get it, do you?” Hannah said. She was louder, almost wailing. There were two shopkeepers across the street, chatting away the lunch hour, one from a furniture store, one from a shoe store, and neither of them had likely seen a customer all morning.
They looked up when they heard Hannah. I saw them and said, “Will you fucking keep it down?”
“Why? I need you to hear me. For you to protect that goddamned self-hating UGIF Jew, you need to understand.”
At which point, I had had enough. I verbally exploded on Hannah — not with the same volume as her, but with even more intensity. I was pretty sure the shopkeepers across the street couldn’t hear, but they were still entertained by what they must have assumed was a lovers’ quarrel.
“That goddamned self-hating UGIF Jew is a person who wants to make things right,” I said. “He’s a person who needed my help. I will never apologize for compassion. I’m sorry if you can’t find it in your heart, but that’s your fucking problem.”
I stopped. I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue, but my emotions were building and, well, I was all in.
“And here’s the thing,” I said. “Izzy was arrested at the flat yesterday by the Gestapo. Or did you already know that?”
She looked at me blankly. I was expecting her to run through the typical scale of denials, beginning with, “What are you talking about,” and progressing from there. Instead, she just said, “That’s too bad. We should be the ones to punish him.”
“You bitch,” I said. “You sold him out, didn’t
you?”
“No,” she said. And then she yelled, “You take that back.”
“You have to admit, the timing—”
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t sell out your precious piece of shit. There, happy?”
I didn’t have anything left to say. I likely had said too much. I had no basis for my accusation, other than timing and circumstance. And maybe she was right. If she was going to do something, it might have been more likely that she would organize a group of radical anti-UGIF Resistance fighters for a raid of the flat so that the Jews could take care of their own problem.
Whatever — it was done. We just stared at each other for a few seconds, and then she was the first to walk away. As she turned, I thought I saw her flick a tear from around her right eye. Then again, it might just have been a stray eyelash or a speck of dust.
As I turned in the opposite direction, toward the Metro and my next pickup at the orphanage and whatever might come after that, I thought for a second. The whole blowup had taken four or five minutes. In other times, in other relationships, it would have been a fight — a fight about betrayal — that lasted for hours. But there was no time anymore, it seemed, no time for anything. Four minutes, five minutes, fin.
36
The second pickup and delivery, as it turned out, was even less eventful than the first. The orphans were a little bit older — the youngest of the four was eight, the oldest 13 — and just as carefree as the first bunch. It was a nice day and they were enjoying it. I guess I was more relaxed the second time around and maybe that rubbed off on them.
We even played a game as we walked, an alphabet game where the first person had to name a country that began with A, the second with B, and on and on. To make it fair, the eight-year-old boy — with the fake name Pierre — was teamed with me. The 10- and 11-year-olds were each allowed one pass, where they could give their letter to the next oldest. It turned into a laughing riot of whispered hints and questions like, “Is halibut a country?” And it passed more than a half-hour of the two-plus-hour journey.
I was more comfortable sticking to the side streets, and we never saw a German soldier the entire time, even from a distance. Upon arriving at Rue Greneta, we found that there was still enough soup remaining for everyone to have seconds.
All the Resistance couriers stayed around and ate soup and waited for what was coming next — all except Hannah. “She was in and out,” Leon said. “No soup, no goodbye, nothing — just in and out.”
“Thank god,” I said.
“That bad?”
“Worse than bad.” I offered Leon the outlines of the argument, and he just shook his head and got quiet and then, “You know I would never do anything to get your buddy Izzy captured, right.”
“Again with the ‘your buddy Izzy.’”
“I mean, you know, right? I think he’s a dupe — at best, a dupe — but I wouldn’t, well, you know. Right?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said.
“And do you really think she might have?”
“Might have? Yes. She’s, well, you know. I’ve seen a soft side of her, but we’ve both seen the crazy, vengeful side. So could she have done it? Fuck, yes. But did she? I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Then why—”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It just slipped out. I was angry, and I had been thinking about it, and—”
“Been there,” Leon said.
When all the orphans had arrived, there were 49 in all. At a certain point, we were enlisted to herd them out a back door and into the alley behind the soup kitchen, where two tarpaulin-covered lorries were waiting. We divided them into two groups, with each of them permitted to stay with the children from their own orphanage. So it was uneven because Leon and I had brought the biggest group from 16 Rue Lamarck, 27 kids in one lorry and 22 in the other. They were each joined by a woman in a nun’s habit who sat in the back with them, with a driver and a man in a priest’s outfit up front.
“Catholics now?” I said. “I thought they were some kind of Protestants who ran the soup kitchen.”
“It’s multi-denominational,” Leon said. He seemed to have asked somebody.
“So real priests and nuns?”
“No,” he said. “They just borrowed the outfits.”
“So who are they?”
“Those who shall not be named,” Leon said. He shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe we did need the assholes after all.”
“Where are they going?”
“All I know is, south.”
The lorries started with a roar and a couple of belches, and then they were off. I waved at one of my kids hanging out of the back, before I turned to Leon and said, “This is the best thing we have done in a while. It was pure good. There was no ambiguity to it, not an ounce.”
“I know,” Leon said. “Good and evil, black and white. It was an easy choice.”
“No gray area, not even a smidge.”
“I hate the fucking gray area,” he said. “I’m not so naive that I don’t understand that most of life is lived within the gray, but I’m just so tired of it.”
We walked through the soup kitchen and sat with the rest. In about five minutes, it was our turn to leave. It was supposed to be one at a time, but that didn’t really matter. As long as 10 of us didn’t leave at once, it would be fine.
Out the front door and onto the sidewalk, it was late afternoon. The street was quiet — quieter than normal. We were about two steps out the door when I spotted the two German uniforms. They were across the street, talking to one of the shopkeepers who had been a keen observer of the argument between Hannah and me a few hours earlier.
What they were talking about, I couldn’t know — but the fact that the shopkeeper was pointing at the soup kitchen and measuring with his hand, palm down, as if showing the height of various children, gave me a decent clue.
“See that,” I said.
“Indeed, I do.”
“What do you think?”
“I think, if the furniture man had bothered to ask someone, he wasn’t buying the story about the kids having their houses blown up in an air raid near the Renault plant.”
“Not 49 of them.”
“So what do we do?” Leon said. Neither of us were looking at each other as we spoke. Instead, we both stared at the two uniforms and the shopkeeper across Rue Greneta. And when they turned away from the old man and started to walk toward us, we had no time to think.
“Run?” I said.
“Let’s,” Leon said.
And so we did. The alley was about 50 feet away, and I was pretty sure that the soldiers would be startled enough that they wouldn’t be able to get their rifles, which were slung on the back of their shoulders, aimed and ready to fire in time. I was right. We turned to the right, into the alley, into the cool darkness, without a shot being fired — just some shouting in German for us to stop.
At the end of the alley, it opened onto another alley that ran parallel to Rue Greneta. I said, “Split up,” because that’s what you did when you were being chased. But at the end of the alley, my side was blocked — it didn’t go straight through.
“Shit,” I said, and Leon looked over his shoulder and saw the issue, and then we were both running together. We still had a decent lead on the uniforms, and we had maybe 200 feet to get to the next street. In those 200 feet, we would be an easy target for a corporal with decent marksmanship skills. He could stop, take a knee and easily get at least one of us — except that it was counterintuitive for them to stop. At least, I hoped it was.
About halfway to the end, I sneaked a peek over my shoulder. The soldiers were still running. One was yelling for us to stop. The other was fumbling for something in his breast pocket, and then he found it. A whistle.
The blasts he let out filled the narrow alley, reverberating off the stone walls. Still, I thought we were going to make it. I saw the light at the end of the alley and I really thought we had a chance to emerge and then split up and find ou
r way.
I believed it until the big black Citroen filled the opening, and the doors opened on either side, and another two uniforms got out. Suddenly, there was no light at the end of the alley anymore.
37
I couldn’t see much through the wooden slats that made up the side of the lorry, but I saw enough. A street sign said, “Avenue Henri Barbusse,” and that’s when I knew. I remembered it from the last time.
I sat back down on the bench.
“Is it?” Leon said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
About a minute later, the lorry stopped and one of the doors opened up front. Then a chain was unlocked and the gate in the back was swung open. There were nine of us, all with reservations for an indeterminate stay at Drancy.
They had pulled through a gate and when we jumped out of the back of the lorry, we were looking at what appeared to be the prison’s main courtyard. It looked as if they were trying to grow some grass, but the ground was mostly black cinders. On one side, there were long rows of latrines. In the middle, prisoners milled around — unshaven, filthy, some conspiratorially whispering, some wandering zombies.
Leon scanned the tragic tableau for a few seconds and muttered, “Christ.”
“I’ll always be impressed with how you reflexively swear like a Christian now.”
“Yeah, a lot of good it did me.”
“Not to mention me,” I said.
After we had been picked up by the Gestapo, a fairly perfunctory interrogation followed. No, we had no idea what they were talking about. No, we didn’t bring any children to the soup kitchen. No, we had no idea where the children we didn’t know anything about had been taken. We saw no lorries. We saw no nuns. We did have a bowl each of the onion soup, and it was excellent.