In January the Germans carried out a census obliging every adult to answer a multiplicity of questions, from date of birth to profession, family, descendants, religion. Without this document, no ration cards could be renewed. Question 16: Are you French by birth? Yes. Question 31: Are you of the Jewish race? No. Ilse lied throughout. The first sinister outcome was that a new form of war work was introduced, the Service du Travail Obligatoire.89 Every single man between nineteen and thirty-two would have to work in factories in Germany or go to the Russian front. Thousands of Frenchmen were already prisoners of war in Germany in slave factories; now every remaining Frenchman not doing essential work would be taken. The girls in the atelier could talk of nothing else. They were appalled and frightened. Each had a boyfriend, husband or brother who would have to go.
“My Jean-Baptiste is not going,” said Marie-France, running her machine with long violent strokes. “My Fernand will not go. It said on the radio, get out of France. It’s our patriotic duty to avoid conscription.”
“What will they do?” asked Lucie, who was walking out with an Italian.
“Head for the hills and live rough, join the maquis. They’ll fight the dirty bastards. Anything is better than being herded into a train at gunpoint and sent off to face Allied air raids in a German labour camp.”
The others agreed. It was the first time in three years that Ilse had heard anyone speak openly about resisting the Germans. François had been right: people would not fight until they were affected personally. She smiled across at her.
Marie-France smiled back, leant over confidingly. “You’ll see, the bloody Jews won’t have to go,” she said. “They’ll still be hanging around town, lounging about and gambling and hogging all the good things.”
“And providing you lot with work,” said Ilse, surprising herself and them, for she rarely said a word.
Marie-France burst out laughing. “Bravo! You’re not as meek and mild as you look, my friend,” she said.
Towards the middle of January an unknown woman came to the grocery shop while she was at work and left a message that she should go to Marseilles for the January 23rd football match at the Stade Fernand-Bouisson and meet “her friends” at a particular spot on the home side. Perhaps Renée had been released, perhaps François. It was easy to obtain a sauf-conduit from the flirtatious Italian officer at the Préfecture, who stamped everything that was presented to him. Though it was bitterly cold, the sun shone and a crowd of several thousand people had assembled to see Provence play Languedoc. Ilse stood where she was supposed to stand. Nobody came. She took her beret off, loosened her hair. She was easy to recognise. A man pushed past her, turned and asked her several times what the score was. She had no idea. He insisted then on telling her: three goals to two for Provence. Three to two. She stared at him, but could not work out what, if anything, this might mean. Raymond did not turn up. Nobody came. Something must have happened. There was no surprise or disappointment, just a quietening down of the spirit to where it had been before, a numb acceptance.
She stayed until the crowd was nearly dispersed, stamping icy cold feet, studying the torn notices flapping on the outside wall of the stadium. There was a notice stopping all fishing, another stopping all traffic. AVIS: PAR SUITE DE DEUX ATTENTATS GRAVES LE 3 JANVIER CONTRE L’ARMÉE ALLEMANDE . . . TOUTE CIRCULATION EST INTERDITE ENTRE MAR-SEILLE, SEPTEMES, ALLAUCH, PLAN DE CUQUES, PENNES MIRABEAU . . .90 The most recent announced that from January 16th all photography was forbidden and that it was illegal to carry a camera, to draw or paint anywhere near the Vieux Port. LES CONTRAVENTIONS SERONT PUNIES CON-FORMÉMENT AUX LOIS DE LA GUERRE.91
She could not leave Marseilles without making any attempt to discover what had become of her friends. She would drop in to the Bella Pizza in the Colline des Accoules and see who was there. It was the girls’ favourite restaurant. She took a bus to the centre of town and walked down the Canebière. Though it was getting dark, there were still four hours before the curfew started. How quiet the centre of Marseilles was. Where were all the people? There was hardly anyone in the streets. As she approached it, she saw the whole of the Vieux Port was cordoned off. Heavily armed German troops stood on every street corner. Lights were trained onto walls, glinted on their round helmets. Armoured cars with machine-gun reinforcements stood on the corners of the quays. Ilse backed away. Not running—it was never good to run—she walked towards La Sainte Trinité. Her footsteps echoed. The café was locked and shuttered. She banged on the door. At the second attempt old Madame Dumont stuck her head out of the upstairs window and, amazed to see her, hurried down to let her in.
Thousands of police were on the streets, arresting everyone. It had been going on for two days. They had closed most of the bars, including this one, closed nearly all the brothels, hauled innumerable people away. Madame Dumont crossed herself; automatically, Ilse followed suit. They talked in whispers, though nobody could possibly hear. The rumour was that the Germans were going to go through the Vieux Port, in a mass rafle designed to clear the whole place out. Shivering uncontrollably in Madame Dumont’s marital bed, grateful for the simple comfort of another human being, Ilse remembered how in another life, long ago, she had resented sharing a bed with her father. She felt the old woman’s hand reaching out and patting her. “Sleep, ma petite,” she said. “We are warm tonight. Think of those poor refugees and those poor Jews over there, who have nothing. They had no warning of this.” Later in the night, she found the old lady standing over her with a cup of tea. “Don’t cry anymore, little one,” she said. Ilse had not known that she was.
At six o’clock on Sunday morning, as soon as the curfew was lifted, Ilse hurried back to the Vieux Port. A cordon held back the gawkers who already lined the frontier of the forbidden zone. German soldiers stood impassive. She thought of the girls, of Raymond, that surely right now he was leading them out through the labyrinth beneath their feet. But there might be no reason for the Resistance to save girls from a brothel the Germans used. People were coming out of the quartier in a steady stream and massing on the quayside. They carried suitcases, bundles, babies. Some pushed handcarts. In a little while the German troops withdrew. Trucks disgorged young men in black uniforms and berets, crisscrossed with belts and carrying submachine guns. A line of them drew up, facing the crowd aggressively. “La Milice,” said Ilse’s neighbour with a nudge. That was the name of the new fascist militia. The crowd muttered its displeasure and the fisherman standing beside her spat on the ground. Ilse could not look away from the faces of these young Frenchmen, who strutted onto the quay, ordering people around, and who carried themselves so arrogantly, cradling weapons the Germans had supplied.
“Look at that poor old woman, dragging the bundle,” said an equally old woman beside Ilse. “That darling little girl is crying, can’t they see?”
A centre de triage92 had been set up on the corner with the Rue des Tamaris; a selection process was taking place. Red Cross ambulances took away the sick and the old. Like clockwork, running back and forth continuously, trams took people away at gunpoint: old and young, white-faced, drawn-looking, stumbling, afraid. The bystanders by degrees fell silent, as if at a funeral. A motherly woman beside her crossed herself continually. A plump young woman passed, face and hair hidden by a scarf, labouring to keep hold of the heavy suitcase she carried in front of her with both hands. Was that La Grande Louise?
Where was Paul, the barman, Pierrette, Pauline, Marielle? Perhaps they had been taken in the first raid.
“Where are they taking them to?”
“La Gare d’Arenc. They’re putting them onto cattle trucks.”
By five o’clock in the evening the thousands had dwindled to a trickle. Numb, she crept back to the bar. She telephoned Simone at the atelier in Cannes to tell her she was sick. She dared not try to leave. Her papers would never stand up to German scrutiny. Rising early, Madame Dumont brought home the Petit Marseillais, which said that fifteen thousand people had been removed from the Vieux Por
t in the process of “sanitisation.” In the market, people whispered that the trains were so bitterly cold and had taken so long to reach their destination at Fréjus that babies and small children had died in the night.
The morning revealed huge removal vans on the quays. Everything was being stripped out of the houses. Even Boy Scouts had been drafted in, were pushing wheelbarrows piled with mattresses and linen. Some soldier’s wife in Germany would inherit the exquisitely embroidered linen Renée’s mother had collected for the country house of her dreams. Workers were digging out the copper gas pipes and piling them on the quay. Huge notices announced that the death penalty would be imposed on looters. If that was enforced, the Marseillais wags said, the entire German army would have to be shot.
By nightfall, the quartier had been stripped of everything of value. On the next day, February 1st, teams of soldiers carrying explosives and coils of fuse wire assembled on the ripped-up cobblestones where the tram tracks had been at the base of the Colline des Accoules. Ilse watched with the sombre crowd as the men moved up the steep streets laying charges of dynamite. A bugle call sounded at noon. The first thunderous explosions were set off between the Rues Radeau and Saint-Laurent. Huge clouds of choking dust billowed above the buildings as they collapsed. As each explosion rocked the ground, the bells of the abandoned church of Saint-Laurent tolled as if God himself was mourning.
Very early on Sunday morning, Ilse left the bar, walked to the far side of the fishing harbour and, while it was still dark, climbed up the long winding metal staircase to the top of the pont transbordeur. The near side was barred and closed. She went to the far end and stood where the giddy spiral of the metal stair corkscrewed through the top deck, rising to the tip of the structure, and waited near the little bar-restaurant, now shuttered, for the winter sun to rise. Darkness gave way, in time, to a pale yellow haze. A surreal landscape of rubble lay behind a rim of façade. After five days of explosions, the greater part of the collapsed Vieux Port had been bulldozed into nothingness. A few houses had been spared: the Maison Diamantée was one and the old customs house on the Quai Maréchal Pétain. The Saint-Laurent church still stood. The restaurant L’Indo-Chine was gone, of course, with all the other backstreets, along with Renée’s house.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben93
Teeth chattering from the cold, she returned to the Fort Saint-Nicolas end, crept down the giddy stair, heading through the side streets back to La Sainte Trinité. The Catholic world was full of gradations of sins and sinners, penalties and penances. But when people were punished so cruelly, it could not be because of anything that they had done. Sinners and nonsinners suffered alike, she reasoned. It seemed to her that the mercy of God was so infinite that he would not judge them harshly and she should not either. The greater question was why God was testing their faith. Walking past a narrow alleyway, she saw a sign for Snappy’s Bar. It came to her at once that this was the place Raymond had mentioned. She turned into the alley.
A young woman with bright red lips was setting up for the day and wiping tables. A couple of men drank coffee. Ilse ordered coffee and observed her. She had a knowing look to her: in a little while, quietly, she asked after Raymond. The young woman nodded. Ilse waited. Twenty minutes later, when the men had gone, the young woman brought her a tisane she had not ordered. Neatly folded under the cup was a slip of paper with an address not too far away. It was a walk of twenty minutes or so. She decided to take the risk. Her luck held: the streets were busy with people going to work and nobody stopped her. It was a gloomy house in a backstreet behind the station, overlooking the railway lines.
She went into a narrow hallway that smelt of cabbage and dirt, rang the ground-floor bell. Nothing happened, but he must have had a spy hole somewhere for a few minutes later Raymond appeared. He drew her up two flights of stairs, unlocked a bare little room. He was unshaven and had a ragged look to him.
She kissed him on both stubbled cheeks. “Thank God. I thought the salauds had got you,” she said. “I’ve been here a week. I got your message, but I didn’t know how to find you. Are you all right?”
“I’ve moved a couple of times. Nobody is all right. François is out.”
Her heart thundered its joy.
“Someone saw them taking him to the station—he took off his hat. Waved. Our man at the station saw him. He recognised him by the hair.”
“Was he very badly beaten?” He said nothing. “He waved?”
“Like this,” and Raymond reached up suddenly and made a great, flamboyant gesture with his beret, standing and turning round full circle.
“What’s the matter? Was he badly hurt? What is it?”
She felt sick. She had a clear vision of his face purple with blood, the dark hair standing out and between the two the giveaway white halo.
“He wasn’t touched. Listen. Marcel ran for it. They didn’t stop him. I wasn’t sure before. He had the impression they didn’t want to take him. That François didn’t try to run. Something he heard the officer say. There was a full colonel with them. ‘Das ist einer unserer Vertrauensmänner.’94 Do you know what that means?”
She nodded.
“He’s a clever man, François,” said Raymond heavily. “Him and the colonel, that makes two clever men. Of course, he knew everyone in the Vieux Port. Everyone that was.”
Ilse watched his eyes slide away from her. She waited for him to say more. These long silences dismayed her.
“If he was a double agent, they’d have let him go before.”
“Perhaps. Not a mark on him, though. And now he’s out.”
“You can believe that of him? Never. François is a fanatical anti-Nazi.”
Raymond gathered juices in his mouth and spat on the floor.
“Why are you still at large, then, and me?”
“Because they don’t want to pick us up yet,” he said. “There’s enough to do with the triage of the Vieux Port. Or they’re waiting to see who we’ll lead them to. Did anyone see you coming here?”
Ilse shook her head. “You’re wrong. He didn’t name us. He can’t have.” Then she saw that Raymond, because he so loved him, would have preferred him dead rather than a traitor.
“He was released,” he said. “He’s gone away, gone to ground. None of us will have anything to do with him. He knows that. You know the rules. I wanted to warn you. He’ll have betrayed you too. You’d better think about moving on and fast.”
FOURTEEN
Hamburg, February 1943
The two bombed-out families living with them each had three children. The housing authorities had assigned families to every house in their street, an army of sullen supplicants who made them all uneasy. A tribe of urchins ran about the house. When she understood that they had lost their possessions, Sabine thrust a doll into the arms of each child. They ran off to joust with her darlings, ripping out legs or arms in pitched battles. Discarded, they resurfaced in scarecrow versions of themselves. Encountering a tragic orphan on the stairs, Sabine would hover beside it, not daring to pick it up, frozen by the reproach in those staring glass eyes. Then Nicolai had to rescue her, swinging her up on his shoulders. Only Susu, the Italian baby, remained. She sat on her doll’s chair beside Sabine’s bed, eyes turned to the window so she, at least, should see nothing of this carnage. His sister could not play with her one immaculate child. Nicolai understood it: Susu’s perfection magnified the tribulations of the others.
Sabine felt everything strongly. If she thought another child might be hungry, she would refuse to eat. They conspired and connived, keeping bad news from her, evolving stratagems to ensure nobody would go hungry and she least of all. Having no ration cards, the refugees only received potatoes. Lore slipped them lard, onions, anything she could spare. Unaware of this largesse, his mother complained that these women used their kitchen, cooked in their pots and pans and that the children broke so many plates. Nicolai also could not e
at with their pinched faces watching; he avoided them. He and Lore were in the kitchen well before six.
“I’m going to open a jar of jam,” she said, “but don’t tell the others. I saved it for you and Sabine. And I’ve got a bit of dripping.”
The bread, a tasteless mixture of barley meal and wheat, tasted fine with the dripping. He wolfed it down. The pot of jam was labelled in Magda’s sloping hand. With a blink, he could conjure up the pile of sugar, the vast aluminium cooking pots, the hills of damsons, blueberries and raspberries. The treasure of the house was her Rübenkraut95 and gherkins and onions and peas, what remained of them, still locked away in the cellar. Her stocks of flour, sugar and coffee were long gone, as was she. Her brother was missing on the Eastern front and poor Magda had returned to the Eifel to run the farm, leaving Lore to run the house. Around that time his father, in what he termed a supreme example of Wehrmacht wit, had been reassigned to a mountain division, the 5th Gebirgsjäger. “Presumably the mountain men need somebody from the flatlands, to give them a sense of proportion,” he wrote. His division had now been sent to the Eastern front, to the Leningrad region. Letters came from Volkhov, from Mga, from Kolpino. “We are the fire brigade for the Eighteenth Army,” he reported, always cheerful, always resolute. Nicolai tried to believe that he was telling the truth. All through January the grey days, already bleak with cold and hunger, had taken on an apocalyptic intensity as they waited to hear about Russia.
“We salute you, Magda.” Nicolai spread the jam as slowly as he could, waited with his mouth watering to bite into the succulent sweetness. “We salute your sausage and mash, your Eintopf, your wonderful cheesecake, your goose with red cabbage and apple sauce.” By seven o’clock, the jam was gone, the good mood dissipated, the kitchen crowded. The radio played solemn music alternating with an ominous continuous drum roll. The adults sat dumbly awaiting the detail of the disaster. News had been filtering through for months, whispers and rumours of Soviet counter-attacks, of frozen bodies stacked in ten-metre-piles, of enemy action where there should have been none. Now it was upon them. General Paulus’s Sixth Army had surrendered at Stalingrad. The nation was told that there would be two days of mourning; shops would close. His mother cried when she heard the news, seizing her daughter and rocking her on her knee. When he looked at her and her shabby clothes in that chair, he felt the faint quiver of that old prewar life almost hurting, like pressing an old bruise faded yellowy green to test its powers.
The Children's War Page 34