The Agony of France (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 6)

by Richard Wake

  They had taken our identification first and were more than skeptical that Leon was as Christian as the name on his card suggested. And because it was late in the afternoon, and it seemed as if the two Gestapo men were anxious to end their shift, they didn’t bother with any kind of big search of their books of records to see if Alain Kerr and Louis St. Jacques had any prior dealings with the local authorities, or if the names matched up with the birth registers, or anything.

  Like I said, they were in a hurry so they just said, “Drop ’em.”

  “What?”

  “Trousers. Down.”

  We stood and did as instructed. “Pants, too,” they said, and so we pulled them down and they had all the proof they needed after one look at Leon’s circumcised penis.

  “Jew,” the one said. And then he looked at his partner and said, “I told you. You buy the first beer.”

  “But what about the other one?”

  “Fuck if I care. Let them sort it down the line.”

  There was a time, when we were about 20, when Leon and I traded girlfriends for a night — at the behest of the girlfriends — because my Christian girl wanted to see Leon’s circumcision, and his Jewish girl wanted to see the unaltered version. As it turned out, neither girl wanted anything to do with either of us after the trade, but it was still worth a summer of funny stories to us.

  This, of course, wasn’t funny. But it didn’t stop me from saying, “I told you we should have had that fucking thing sewn back on.”

  “Or at least bought a hat for it,” he said.

  Because Leon was Jewish, we both suspected that we would be ferried to Drancy — and, as the Gestapo goon suggested, they would sort out my particulars later on. That’s what was happening. There was a difference in the shack they used for procession, though, a difference from my previous visit. This time, the French gendarmes with the guns were acting as guards outside. In the shack, pushing the paperwork, it was only inmates. The Germans and their rifles were even farther in the distance.

  The Gestapo men who drove us from in the city handed over the lot of us, and our paperwork, and left. The Jews filling in the forms, one by one, as we approached their table, barely looked up. As it turned out, our seven traveling companions were Jews in both their paperwork and their penises. They also had yellow stars on their coats. Leon and I were the only complicated cases, and there were notes attached to our identity cards as a means of explanation. The two inmate scriveners looked at the cards, and the notes, and shrugged and took down the details. One of them called something over his shoulder, and another inmate rummaged around in a drawer and brought back a yellow star and a pin and handed it to Leon.

  “Nice try,” the inmate said. Leon took the star and pinned it to the breast of his jacket.

  “And as for you,” another of the scriveners said, directing the words in my direction. He reached down into a desk drawer on his right and handed me a yellow armband and a pin. It said, “Friend of the Jews.”

  “For you and your foreskin,” he said. I pinned it to my sleeve.

  The paperwork was done and the two inmates behind the table turned their backs to us and had a whispering disagreement. All I could hear was the one of them saying something about “separate groups,” and the other one saying, “Fuck it, it’s late,” and the first one saying, “It’s your ass, not mine,” and the second one saying, “They’ll fix it in the morning.”

  The first one shrugged and pointed to another inmate working in the intake shack, and the nine of us were led away in one group for our first night in Drancy.

  Part IV

  38

  Before the Nazis had their first sadistic wet dream, Drancy was supposed to be a housing block of some kind — and not a fancy one, it seemed. But it wasn’t finished on the inside. In fact, it was barely started. We climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of one of the buildings with our minder, and when we got to the top, we were in a huge, bare concrete room — concrete floors, concrete walls, all of them wet and sweating. They hadn’t yet put up the walls between the apartments, or the walls within each apartment. It was just an open space, with wooden bunks lined up against the walls, and a couple of rough wooden stools and tables and benches scattered around.

  In the middle of the room was an exposed water pipe with a half-dozen taps growing out of it. The water was running when we were there, running into a trough but still splattering from the taps onto the floor, enough to make puddles. Plates and bowls and utensils were in the trough. It didn’t look like enough for the men in the room, and certainly not with the nine additions to the population that we represented.

  “Table for nine,” one of the men shouted when we arrived. “Table for nine. Won’t be just a minute. Have a drink at the bar,” he said, motioning us to the taps. “Won’t be a minute.”

  “May I see the wine list while we wait?” Leon said.

  “Perhaps I could make a suggestion.”

  “I trust your expertise.”

  “The Chateau Neuf de Piss is an especially fine vintage,” the man said. “And quite a good value, too. We have a lot of it in our cellars.”

  “And in your staircases, if I smelled correctly on the way up,” Leon said. Then he and the man hugged. They obviously knew each other. When they separated, the man pointed at my armband. He said, “Who’s the goy?”

  “He’s my goy,” Leon said.

  “Your goy? Bought and paid for?”

  “I’ve been carrying his ass for decades.”

  “I’d normally say ‘fuck you’ and walk out at this point in the conversation, but where would I go?” I said.

  Leon made the introductions. His friend was Karl Werner, a copy editor at his old newspaper. They offered each other the three-minute version of their recent life stories. Ours was more interesting, Karl’s more mundane, but they had brought us to the same squalid place.

  “Speaking of piss,” Leon said.

  “At this time of night, the stairwell is it,” Karl said. “We get a turn at the latrines outside during the day. But given how little we get to eat, it isn’t as if you really need to shit every day. Unless you have the dysentery, of course, in which case you’re shitting every hour on the hour.”

  “So, feast or famine,” I said.

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Karl said.

  He told us that breakfast would be coffee along with a small bowl of fruit and vegetables — “spoiled fruit and vegetables, maybe just this side of rancid.” Lunch and dinner were described as a stew but were, in reality, pretty much broth with the occasional cabbage leaf thrown in.

  There were two roll calls a day, at 7:15 in the morning and 8 at night. Karl said a lot of the inmates had jobs. “Physical labor if you can do it,” he said. “Raking. Painting the buildings. Hauling shit around. I take out trash in the morning. Sometimes we get the kitchen trash. I’ve seen guys fight over the little stump of a head of cabbage. There’s almost nothing on it, but they just suck the flavor out of it.”

  Karl stopped, looked at my armband and pointed at it again. “You know, you’re not going to last through the first roll call.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The goyim — and there aren’t many ‘friends of the Jews,’ as you might imagine — they get put in a room by themselves. It’s in one of the buildings on the other side. In fact, I think you’re the first one I’ve seen in the three months I’ve been here.”

  “So I’m like your own little anthropology experiment.”

  “Yes, I plan to write an academic paper on you: ‘A Foreskin in the Wild.’”

  The arrival of the nine of us had created a bit of a hum of interest in the room, but it settled back within a couple of minutes. Most of the man were lying in the bunks, many two to a bunk. A few others leaned against the walls, or on windowsills, or used the few bits of rough-hewn furniture. The conversation was all in whispers, it seemed.

  “Here,” Karl said. “You two can share my bunk.” He pointed across t
he room. “Bottom bunk, second from the wall. See it?”

  “But where will you sleep?” Leon said.

  “No sleep tonight. I’ve got work.”

  “The trash? In the dark?”

  “Different work,” Karl said. He walked us over to a vacant wall space near one of the windows. Outside, the cinder courtyard with the patches of grass attempting to grow was empty and quiet.

  “Different work?” Leon said.

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Who am I going to fucking tell?”

  “And your goy?”

  “Again, I would say ‘fuck you’ at this point—”

  “All right, all right,” Karl said. He lowered his voice a few more decibels. “The different work is that we’re digging a tunnel.”

  Leon and I looked at each other. He said, “Yeah, right.”

  “No, it’s true.”

  “But how?” I said.

  “You know those Jews working in the building when you first came in?” Karl said. “Look, it doesn’t take an advanced degree in psychology to figure out what the Gestapo is doing. They put Jews in a position of some authority and it kind of turns our people against each other. You can see that, right?”

  Karl looked at me. I nodded.

  “So we don’t know who to trust,” he said. “And we spend a lot of our emotional energy hating our own people instead of the men with the rifles. And some of the Jews they picked to work in the administration, they are hateful, hateful assholes. They’re trying to save their own hides. They’re a little drunk with power. You can see how it would happen.”

  He looked at me again. I nodded again.

  “But not all of them,” Karl said. And then he explained the scheme. There were two Jews working in the administration who were helping the tunnelers. They had managed to supply them with digging implements — small shovels, mostly — and, more importantly, a place to stash them. The tunnel began in the cellar of an unused — and, therefore — lightly monitored building near the perimeter fence. He said the tunnel was about four feet high and maybe two and a half feet wide. They actually had lights to use because all the work was at night. Karl said there were a couple of dozen men who worked all night in shifts.

  “I do it two or three nights a week,” he said. “And we’re doing well. We think we’re getting close. We can only eyeball the distance, but we think we’re close. Maybe another week — we’re not exactly sure.”

  Leon’s mouth was half-open as Karl spoke. Finally, he said, “But really? It just seems—”

  “Like a fantasy?” Karl said. “Like a bullshit dream?”

  “Well—”

  “And maybe you’re right,” he said. “But I’ll take a bullshit dream over no dream any day of the week. Especially when the alternative is just waiting around until they call your name for the next transport.”

  39

  The roll call wasn’t until 7:15 a.m. but the big cement room was alive by 6:30. Half of the men, maybe more than half, were crowded around the windows, looking down into the courtyard at first light.

  Leon and I roused ourselves and stood up and looked around. Karl was standing at a window on the far side of the room. He saw us and said, quietly, “It’s showtime.”

  “What?” I said.

  “A deportation,” he said. Then he turned and looked out the window again, as did we.

  Next to the window was a bit of graffiti that I had not noticed before. I could barely read it in the dim of dawn:

  Lonker Otton

  Lonker Mindel

  Deported on February 11, 1943

  Unknown destination

  Long Live France

  I was just staring at it when Karl began talking. He was looking out the window and offering us newcomers a description of what he was seeing, as well as some background information.

  “They’re over there,” he said. He pointed to the end of the housing block. “The first six staircases — they’re for the people being deported. I’ve been in there on a cleaning detail. There are no toilets, like here, but no chance to use the latrines, either. So there are just buckets.”

  He stopped. We watched as the first group came down the stairs. A few of them carried a small suitcase.

  “They’re all—”

  “Bald,” Karl said. “Yeah, they shave them all, beards and heads. All bald. One small bag is allowed, if they have one.”

  I got a little closer and was able to see out the window. People were throwing things down at the deportees from the windows nearest to them.

  “Bread?” I said.

  “Bread, whatever bit of food they have,” Karl said.

  Some of the deportees leaned over to pick up the offerings, stuffing them into their pockets. Most were quiet, grim. One, though, was wailing. His cries filled the courtyard as he, along with the rest, walked toward a bus. The motor was running.

  “I’m pretty sure they don’t let them sleep the night before,” Karl said. “Some of them, well, they just can’t take it.”

  “What do you mean?” Leon said.

  “I’ve been on the detail that picks up the bodies, too,” he said. “It isn’t that hard to hide a knife here. And you can make a rope out of your shirt, and there are a lot of exposed pipes to hang from.”

  I just looked at Leon. I had lived the Resistance life for several years. I knew fear of the Gestapo. I knew the terror of being questioned in a basement. This was the first time, though, that I had felt the despair — and I could tell just from looking at him that it was what Leon was feeling, too. Despair.

  The guy who was crying walked up the steps into the bus, and it was quieter again. Men came down a second staircase, and then a third, all the same, all shuffling more than walking, all bald and desperate. A group came down from the fourth set of stairs, and they were different. They looked the same, but they were singing. The sound of their voices filled the courtyard, and then everyone in the room where we were standing joined in. We finished “La Marseillaise” when they were inside the bus, and we couldn’t hear them anymore.

  Let us march! Let us march!

  May impure blood

  Water our fields!

  The men coming from the fifth set of stairs were quiet again. There wasn’t much bread left to be thrown their way, it seemed. The group from the sixth and final set of stairs was singing, but a different song. Again, everyone in our concrete tomb picked up the tune, as I assumed everyone else in every other room was doing. And, as before, we finished what they started. “Auld Lang Syne.”

  And then the buses drove off.

  “Where to?” I said.

  “Train station, we assume.”

  “And then?”

  At that point, a half-dozen men turned away from the window and answered my question in unison.

  “Pitchipoi,” they said.

  I looked at Leon. He shrugged.

  “Pitchipoi,” Karl said. “It’s Yiddish. We think it kind of means, well, nowhere. Just kind of an imaginary nowhere. I don’t know how it started, but they were saying it three months ago when I got here, and we say it to every new person who arrives.”

  “Pitchipoi,” I said.

  “It’s nowhere, but in our minds, it has become somewhere,” Karl said. “And now, in your minds, too.”

  Pitchipoi. We had heard the stories, for sure. Some of them had been published in Resistance newspapers, although I had never actually seen one. The best ones said that Pitchipoi was somewhere in the east, a place where they put the Jews to work. The worst ones said Pitchipoi was a place in Poland where they put the Jews to death. Maybe they were both true. Maybe Pitchipoi was a place where they worked the Jews to death. We just didn’t know, not for sure — although I didn’t know a person who didn’t assume the worst. I’m pretty sure everybody in Drancy assumed the worst.

  Soon it was 7:15, time for the morning roll call — followed, Karl said, by breakfast and the line for the latrines. Rain, cold, it didn’t matter, he said — 7:1
5 in the morning and 8 at night, all in the courtyard. It was at night when they selected the next group for the transports. So morning was more relaxed, Karl said, “but not completely. Because if they needed some numbers for a reprisal after a Resistance attack, well, here was as good a place as any to find them. I mean, we’re Jews and we’re already rounded up. Need 10 victims to shoot in exchange for the German corporal who was killed by the Resistance? Just go out to Drancy and count to 10. What could be simpler — although it was never simple. They made a big ceremony out of it — read the details of the crime, and then called for however many lives as reprisals, and then the names, one by one.”

  We were lined up on the cinders, and the dust rose to knee level as we all shuffled into place. A Jew with a clipboard read off the names in our section and we answered, one by one. When they were done, the Jew called out, “Alain Kerr. Step forward.”

  I hesitated for a second. Alain Kerr. That was me, the name on my identity card. Which meant that either I was headed over to the part of Drancy where they put the Christians, or that this was a reprisal without the ceremony.

  I didn’t have much time to think. Another member of the Jewish administration walked me over to a group of three. They were all Jews, and they didn’t seem panicked or despondent, and they seemed to know more than I did. So, not a reprisal. Probably.

  As I made my way, I saw him. I turned and looked back at Leon, and he was staring at me as I walked away. I pointed quickly to my right, and then Leon looked in that direction, and then we made eye contact again. Leon nodded. He saw him, too.

  Standing both in a group but by himself — I know that was impossible, but it was my impression — was Max’s father, Martin. He was still wearing the uniform from the Great War. The Croix de Guerre was still pinned to his breast.

  40

  They put the four of us into the back of a covered lorry, closed the gate, and began driving us wherever. The other three knew each other and chatted easily. They were all tailors. It seemed as if one of them, the oldest of the three, owned his own shop in the Marais, and the other two worked in the back room of other shops. They seemed at ease.