by Richard Wake
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know where we’re going?”
The three of them looked me up and down, each of them fixating on the “friend of the Jews” armband. The young ones half-sneered and said nothing. The older man, I don’t know, seemed genuinely appreciative of my predicament — at least, that’s what I thought I was able to read in his eyes. Anyway, he was the only one who answered.
“Bassano,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve never seen it, mind you,” he said. “But from the way it was described to me by the Jew guard this morning, it’s like a department store for stolen Jewish goods. Whatever that means.”
“So, three tailors?” I said.
“Mending stolen clothes?” he said. “Maybe making clothes from stolen cloth. I have no idea.”
“But what about me?”
“If you can’t sew, or cut a pattern, my guess is that you’ll be hauling a lot of shit around like a pack mule.”
The two younger guys laughed. So did I, just to be sociable. But then I thought about Leon, and his buddy Karl, and Max’s father. And if being on my own was a frightening prospect — and it was — this transfer seemed, at least on the surface, to offer more possibilities than they had inside Drancy. And that included their cockamamie tunnel.
We drove for about a half-hour, maybe a little more. I could tell we were back in the city, just by the occasional glimpse I was able to get from between the slats on the side of the truck. I had no idea where, though.
“Do you know where in the city this place is? What did you call it?”
“Bassano,” the older guy said. “And no. No idea.”
Soon enough, we were there. And if Drancy was hell, this place was decidedly north of that. Or at least it seemed that way on the outside. My time in Paris had well informed me that such appearances could be deceiving. The Gestapo, after all, tortured and imprisoned people in a beautiful home on the fabulous Avenue Foch. So you never knew.
This place, though, this Bassano. Or, as one of the young tailors said when they opened up the back of the lorry, “My God, it’s a damn mansion.”
The guard walked us around the back to what must have been a servants’ entrance. He banged twice on the door, passed us off to the guard who opened it, and left. The guard walked us up a back staircase, up and up to an attic with a slanted roof. It was crammed with bunk beds, lined up in rows that were maybe two feet apart. The person on the top bunk would be claustrophobically close to the roof. But they were beds, and they did have mattresses.
“Toilet down there if you need it,” the guard said, pointing to the far end of the space. We all took turns. It was when I got back that I noticed the guard was not armed.
He walked us back down the stairs, which ended in a kitchen where nothing was being cooked. The guard saw me looking around and said, “Food comes from outside. Three meals. Not terrible.” Then he walked us down another set of stairs into a cellar that was brightly lit by a dozen bulbs hanging from the ceiling.
There was one man sitting at a work table, sewing something by hand. A pile of garments, maybe four feet high, sat next to him.
“The tailors,” the guard said, pointing to the three of them. “He’ll show you what to do.”
The man doing the sewing looked up, and the guard said to him, “Anything to go?”
The man pointed to a smaller pile. The guard looked at me and said, “That’s you.” I picked up the clothing — four men’s suits — and walked back up the stairs with the guard, up to the kitchen and then through into the front of the house.
It was, in fact, a mansion. Except the big rooms were not set up as a home, or as a place for entertaining. Instead, it was, as the old tailor had said, like a department store. A big room — probably a ballroom of some kind — was arrayed with furniture: sofas, tables, chairs, everything. A second room, obviously a library, had been stripped of its books. Instead, the shelves were full of clocks and ashtrays and delicate porcelain figurines and other assorted rich people’s crap. Another room, probably just a sitting room of some kind, was filled with trestle tables that had been loaded down with china and silverware.
I lingered outside the door of the china room for a few seconds and took in the scene. Inside was a German officer and a corporal. I couldn’t tell the officer’s rank, but it was up there. He wasn’t a young man. The corporal was obviously eager, a clipboard in his hand and his nose entirely up the old man’s ass.
They stopped at one of the long tables piled with plates and whatnot. The officer picked up a piece, a dinner plate, and held it up and looked at it through the sunlight streaming in through a window. He put the plate down and nodded.
“An excellent choice, sir,” the corporal said. “The whole set?”
The officer nodded again. He looked bored. The corporal scribbled something on the clipboard, then on a tag of some kind.
“To the Berlin house, also?” The officer nodded. The corporal placed the tag on the pile of dinner plates.
“Come on,” the guard said, and we were soon up the grand staircase and into bedrooms that had been transformed into clothing departments — men’s and women’s, casual and formal. I left the suits with another prisoner in charge of displaying them.
‘One more,” the guard said. He walked us to the end of the hall where a final bedroom was filled with children’s clothing and toys. That was the first time it really hit me. Furniture, silverware, lamps, men’s suits — that was one thing. For some reason, they seemed like mere objects. Yes, I knew they had been stolen from Jews, and that their owners had disappeared — but somehow, they were still just goddamned ashtrays to me. That last room, though, and the little sailor suits and wagons — they weren’t things. They were lives, young lives, unexplored lives, interrupted lives, maybe ended lives.
I had seen so much during the occupation and been hardened by the horror of it all. But this…
My breath caught.
“Come on,” the guard said. “I don’t like it in here, either.”
41
It did not take me 24 hours in Bassano to realize just how easy my escape would be. There were only four guards in the whole place. One sat in the kitchen, by the back door. A second sat next to the front door. The other two wandered around — although, truth be told, the wandering seemed to consist mostly of lingering over meals, then playing some indecipherable card game at the kitchen table, then taking turns grabbing a nap in a tiny spare bedroom on the second floor that must have been where the nanny had slept; it had a connecting door to the room now used to display children’s clothes and toys.
The front door and back door guards carried pistols in holsters on their hips. It was boring enough duty that they, too, occasionally dozed. It wouldn’t be hard to approach them, mid-doze, and either knock them out with a right hand to the chin or just blow by them and make a run for it out the door. In either case, I calculated my chances of escape at north of 50 percent — and that was without planning, with just a stupid, brazen whoosh.
But when I asked one of the Bassano veterans about escapes — he had been there about six weeks — he said, “Leave? You’re joking, right?”
There was a vague sense that an escape would be met with reprisals, but it was unspoken, at least to me. It also was unnecessary, it seemed. Everyone sleeping in the attic — a dozen men and a similar number of women, the two ends of the room separated by a hanging bedsheet — had started their journey in Drancy. They knew what that was, and they knew that Bassano was better. For many of them, like the tailors, the work was skilled and familiar. For the rest, well, there was a toilet and a bathtub and a mattress and meals that included bread that was still edible. The hours were long, the work of loading and unloading lorries was hard, and the conditions at night were cramped, but there was heat and light and running water and a level of civility. We passed around books that were in the house, and the occasional newspaper, and it was just a world apart — so why attempt to
run and risk a lorry ride back to the sweating concrete and cinders and morning deportations at Drancy?
So, for the rest, it wasn’t a hard decision, and it wasn’t a hard decision for me, either — even if my decision was the exact opposite of theirs. There was no way I was leaving Leon inside of the Drancy barbed wire without at least trying something — and while I was at it, I guessed that adding his buddy Karl and Max’s father wouldn’t complicate things too much. If it had to be only Leon, it would be only Leon. But the plan rattling around in my head would accommodate the other two just as easily. At least, I thought it would.
First, though, I had to leave Bassano. After watching for a day, three different opportunities presented themselves. The easiest, it seemed to me, was at dinnertime — mostly because it was just about dark when the food arrived. Despite there being a big kitchen in the mansion, our meals were prepared off-site and driven over in the back of a lorry. One of the tailors said he heard that the food was cooked by UGIF in what used to be a school cafeteria in the neighborhood. Whatever and wherever, it came in large tureens and metal serving trays that took two men to carry. Each lorry arrived full of food and with three men. The way it worked was, two men would wrestle a big tureen to the front door, come inside, and walk it back to the kitchen. Then, whatever prisoner was handy would go outside and, while the guard watched, help carry in the next load and leave it just inside the front door. The original two men would take it from there to the kitchen, and the prisoner and the other UGIF guy would go back to the lorry for the next load.
There wasn’t much to it — except that the guard at the front door, between the first and second loads, stopped watching and instead followed the tureens into the kitchen. This was going to be his dinner, too, after all, and he was curious. So, after the first load, there was no one guarding the front door.
It was too easy, but that’s what it was. All I needed to do was linger near the front door around delivery time, so as to be available for duty, wait for Herr Hungry Harry, or whatever the guard’s name was, to follow his nose back to the kitchen, and skidoo, disappearing into the gloaming.
About 15 minutes before the expected time, I went upstairs with one of the merchandise tags that I had palmed from a stack in the tailor shop. On it, I wrote “gray suit, dress shirt, belt, necktie, socks, black shoes,” and put in my own sizes. Then I wrote an address on Avenue Foch along with the name of some fictitious general. I went up to the men’s department on the second floor and handed it over.
“He’s not coming for a fitting?” the woman prisoner said. I thought her name was Edna.
“The Gestapo must have their own tailors.” I shrugged.
She quickly riffled through the rack for a suit, then a shirt, then the rest. She neatly folded the garments and shoes, wrapped them into a single brown paper parcel, and attached the tag with a string. I picked it up.
“They know they’re Jews’ clothes, right?” I said.
“I’m sure,” she said.
“But—”
“Nice clothes. Free clothes. Case closed,” she said. Then she turned her back to me and straightened up the racks she had just gone through. When I got down the stairs, I could see the lorry pulling up with the food.
“Dinner’s here,” I said to the guard. I pointed out the window. He got up to peek out and then looked back at me. “Come on, now. Put that down somewhere.”
I placed the package of clothes on the floor, right next to the guard’s chair. He opened the door in a few seconds and the two of us waited for the first two men to bring in the tureen.
“Ahh,” the guard said, when the arrivals got within sniffing distance.
“A surprise,” one of the UGIF men said. “Actual meat in the stew, and a decent amount of it.”
“Beef?” The guard was questioning the aroma.
“Lamb,” the second UGIF man said.
I walked out to the lorry. There was an enormous tray, heavier than anything the previous day. I groaned as we lifted it.
“It’s actually good,” the man from the lorry said. “Turnips, mashed up, and with some mashed-up carrots mixed in. Legitimately tasty.”
We carried it up the four steps to the front door of the mansion. The first two haulers were back from the kitchen, ready to take the handoff. Just as the night before, the guard must have followed them into the kitchen and stayed there for the unveiling.
It was too easy, but this was the moment. My carrying partner headed back to the lorry. I paused, or hesitated, for just a second, then scooped up the parcel of clothes from the floor and began running. My UGIF partner had already gotten to the lorry and reached inside for the next serving tray. He saw me as I was about to fly by and stopped. His mouth was open.
“Arrivederci,” I said, pretty much over my shoulder as I ran.
“Good luck, fool,” he said.
I had run for about 30 seconds when I began to hear the insistent, repeated blowing of a whistle. But, in an alley, I was out of my work clothes and into the suit in under two minutes. I walked toward what I thought was the Seine — you know how you can just smell the water sometimes, almost taste it? As it turns out, I was right. At the Pont de l’Alma, I thought about crossing and just getting lost in the streets of the Left Bank. But then, no — it was still too close. The Metro made more sense, and the Alma-Marceau station was right there.
So that was the play. But before heading down the steps, I looked out into the river at the Zouave statue in the middle of the water, the one where people measure the height of an impending flood by how much of the soldier’s body was covered by the river.
In this case, the soldier’s feet were dry. I offered a quick salute and then walked down the steps to the ticket booth.
42
My plan was a variation on something I had pulled in Limoges a few months earlier. The key to its success is that I was a native German speaker, even if my German was Viennese. We were all one big Aryan family, after all, and there was enough intercourse — literal and figurative — along the Austrian/Bavarian border that there was almost no distinction.
So with my language skills, and with a stolen German uniform, and with some forged papers, it could all work. The one thing I had learned up until that point was that you had to think big. Brazen was better in many circumstances than marginally crooked. The biggest lies were often the least questioned. That’s what I hoped, anyway.
First, I needed the papers. The best Resistance forger then working in the city — they tended to get caught, then jailed, then sometimes released, so it was an ever-changing list — was a little Freddy. The problem was that, like most of them, he was interested in being a patriot only when the price was right — and I didn’t have a centime at the moment. I did have money in a bank account, but I did not dare access it, seeing as how it was under my real name — Alex Kovacs — and because, well, let’s just say that the name Alex Kovacs appears in several Gestapo ledgers. To attempt a withdrawal would be to risk a phone call to the nearest Gestapo barracks from the bank teller. Besides, my Alex paperwork was hidden in the flat, and visiting there also was a risk that I was hoping to avoid. I would risk it if necessary, but I had one other play.
JJ was a forger on Rue Reaumur. He was not as good as the best — his specialty was ration tickets, not identity cards or other official documents — but this was not going to be a complicated job. And he owed me a favor. Actually, he owed Leon a favor — Leon had shepherded his cousin and her son out of Paris to Toulouse, and then Spain, in 1942. When he received the postcard from Lisbon that they had arrived, JJ promised Leon, “Anytime, anything.” And, well, when I knocked on his door, I was there to collect.
He listened and agreed immediately. Then he motioned me toward the cellar stairs. The basement was clean and the work table itself was pristine, with bright lights and a large magnifying glass on a stand.
“If anybody ever came down here, I’m a stamp collector,” he said. Then he winked and pointed to a cabinet. “Th
ere are a couple of sheets in the top drawer.”
In the drawers below that, though, he began to root around. “So just a plain letterhead, right?”
“That’s it. Nice paper, not too nice, just the address.”
“What was it again?”
“84 Avenue Foch.”
That was one of the high-level Gestapo headquarters buildings, I knew from previous experience. I knew the address, and I knew the name of not only the big boss but also his main adjutant — or at least I did six months before. The problem was that I had no idea if my information was still current, so I decided to go with a fake adjutant’s name. Better to lie and give a fictitious name and say, “I don’t know, he must be new,” than to give a real name that might be a friend of a friend who had been transferred to Stalingrad. The bigger the lie, the better.
JJ had this little printing contraption — I guess it was a press, but you couldn’t fit more than a few lines of type, so I’m not sure what value it had in real life. In this life, though, it was enough. I just needed one line: 84 Avenue Foch. JJ dropped the letters into slots, inked them up, put the paper in place, and pressed down on a lever. The result was perfect on the first try.
“First press, beautiful. A good omen,” he said.
While the ink dried, I wrote out the letter. I started with the word “please” but then crossed it out. This was the military, and these were Germans, and there was no room for “please.” This was an order:
Release the following prisoners for interrogation:
Louis St. Jacques
Karl Werner
Martin Green
Then there would be room for a signature and the name of the captain I had made up. When I showed it to JJ, he seemed disappointed.
“This is it?”
“What do you want, an epistle?”