Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  Gustav and I shook hands, wondering if we should hug each other. We had both become men, and neither of us showed any trace of those years of childhood we had shared.

  Gustav had always seemed a child who was too coddled and spoiled, although his parents were stricter with him than mine were with me. We felt closer at this moment than we had during our childhood.

  The three of us had lunch and remembered the past. Vera reminded us about some of our mischievous actions, and we spoke of nothing that could disturb our reminiscences. We went back to the drawing room after lunch.

  Gustav lit his pipe and offered me a cigarette, which I accepted.

  “I’ve been investigating for a couple of months and I don’t know much, but I hope what I do know will help. You want to find your father and your sister, and I want to find my Aunt Katia. The destinies of all three of them were connected during the war.”

  Gustav’s tale shocked me and showed me a Samuel I didn’t know. Suddenly my father had acquired aspects of character that seemed to me almost unbelievable.

  Samuel and Katia were in Paris on the day that Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned. Two days earlier, on June 14, 1940, Marshal Pétain’s treachery had come to a head and France knew the shame of seeing German troops marching down the Champs-Élysées. Until that moment the Jews had had a bad time of it; now their only job became survival.

  On September 27 of that accursed year 1940, the Germans ordered the Vichy government to take a census of all the Jews in the Occupied Zone of France. Your father decided that neither he nor Dalida would register in the census. “They want to know how many Jews there are so they can treat us like cattle. I won’t let them degrade me like this,” he wrote to my father in a letter. Don’t ask me how it got through to him, because I don’t know. What I do know is that Samuel and Dalida left the house they had lived in, and rented another one in a quiet street in the Saint-Michel area. The hardest thing was to get rid of the laboratory. Samuel met with the manager and told him that he was leaving France and that he would sign papers to give the man the right to manage the business while he was gone. His precaution was not of much use, because the Vichy authorities decided to confiscate all Jewish property. Your father had been careful and had a large sum of money set aside, as well as some paintings and other valuable objects that he gave to Katia to look after. He refused to allow Katia to live with them.

  “You are not completely Jewish,” he said, to which my aunt replied: “I have at least half a pint of Jewish blood.” But not a lot of people knew that. The friends of my parents and my aunt in Paris were people like us, Russians who had fled Russia after the revolution.

  Katia rented a house near Montparnasse and decided to stay in Paris, come what may.

  In October, on the third, I think, France passed a “Jewish statute.” All the Jews became second-class citizens from that moment on. What am I saying! They stopped being citizens entirely.

  Samuel wanted to fight in the rearguard, so together with David Peretz, the son of Benedict Peretz, the man who had helped him so much in the past, he started a Jewish Resistance group. They were not the only Jews in the Resistance, there were others: Solidarité, Comite rue Amelot, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants. Some of these groups had good relations with the Maquis and worked with them. In the end, they were all engaged in the same fight.

  I don’t know how, or via whom, but somehow David Peretz found out about a Russian exile who made his living as a forger. The question was whether the man would help the group, and especially, if he was trustworthy, as he had arrived in Paris before 1917, which made him suspicious. But they decided to take the chance, as neither Samuel nor Dalida could risk being caught without documentation. Samuel decided to meet with this man.

  He lived near Montmartre, in a narrow little alley. A woman opened the door to him, her hair black and her eyes so wild as to be frightening. He said the phrase that he had been told would be the password, and she asked him in, but as soon as he went into the house she took out a pistol and covered him.

  She took him to a back room with no windows and made him sit down. Then she stood in front of him and began her interrogation. Samuel realized from her accent that she was not French. He found out later that she was named Juana and was a Spaniard.

  She had been in a militia during the Civil War, and she was a committed anti-Francoist who had seen her husband die on the Aragon front; later she lost the child she was expecting. The rest of her family, her father and her uncles, were shot shortly after the end of the war. But she found this out only later, as she fled the country to escape a prison from which she knew the only exit would be to end up dead in a ditch. Juana did not wait to be found and went to France, where she crossed over from Catalonia at a place called Cerdaña, regularly used in later years by anti-Francoist forces.

  They arrested her in Perpignan and took her to a concentration camp from which she escaped; she reached Paris several days later, where a relative looked after her. Her relative, a distant uncle, I believe, was a printer, a Republican who had helped those who asked him, and who had fled in 1938 before the war was definitively lost. When he reached France, he started to work with the Resistance.

  Juana met Vasily via her uncle. He had escaped from Tsarist Russia, but when the October Revolution took place he did not go back to Moscow, because he had made himself a good living working as a printer in Juana’s uncle’s print shop. Pedro, Juana’s uncle, had come across Vasily one evening working in the print shop late at night, almost in the dark. He was forging papers for people who could pay him to, most of them criminals. Pedro didn’t hand him over to the police and the Russian became his faithful servant. The war meant that the two men joined forces to work together to help political groups that had problems with the law.

  Juana must have been satisfied by the answers Samuel gave to her questions, because she allowed Samuel to see Vasily.

  Samuel found himself in front of a man of medium height, with mocking blue eyes, who addressed him in Russian. They spoke in this language for a good while until Juana interrupted them angrily.

  “Either you talk in French or you don’t talk at all,” she said, and Vasily accepted this insistence with a smile.

  “So you want several passports, including one for you and one for your daughter, and you want to have them by yesterday. My colleague and I are not miracle workers.”

  “I’m not asking you to work miracles, all I want is for you to help save lives, not just Jewish lives, but French lives as well. Aren’t you opposed to the Nazis?”

  “Yes, Juana’s uncle has managed to convince me that money isn’t everything, and here you have me, Monsieur, leaving my business to go to ruin while I work for free. Of course, you can pay, or am I wrong?”

  He was not wrong, Samuel would have given all he had for those passports. But Juana stood up and gave Vasily a slap across the face.

  “Pay? Don’t even say that as a joke. You will do what I ask and you will work night and day if you have to,” she said in a menacing voice.

  “You see, Monsieur, it is impossible to resist the wiles of women. She is the boss here.”

  Later Samuel got to know Vasily well and found out that behind his cynical mask there was a man who was willing to do everything for liberty, even risk his life for it.

  Samuel and Dalida’s new passports turned them into Monsieur Ivanov and Mademoiselle Ivanova, father and daughter, from Saint Petersburg, victims of the revolution.

  Vasily warned them:

  “If they arrest you with French passports they can check if the identity on the document is real, but if you only have a Russian passport there is no way to check this with the Soviets. You have to claim to be committed enemies of Stalin and admirers of Hitler. Hitler is your only hope of ever going back to your homeland.”

  Samuel’s first order from Vasily was for fifty French passports for fifty Jews whom he
wanted to get out of France to Lisbon, and from there to Palestine.

  My father, Konstantin, took charge of chartering the ships. It was not an easy task. Europe was at war and all he could get his hands on were some leaky old tubs that would scarcely stay afloat. My father used all his influence to get permission from the British authorities for these men and women to be allowed to disembark in Palestine. My father ended up working with the British Secret Service. He sent the reports he had from Samuel and Katia to his friends in the Admiralty.

  To these first fifty passports there were quickly added more. With Juana’s help, Vasily and Pedro worked without stopping. The woman seemed not to be afraid of anything, as she had lost everything that gave meaning to her life.

  You must know, Ezekiel, that your sister refused to stay in London with us, just as my aunt and your father had done.

  Dalida became a link for another Resistance group whose leader was French. Armando, they called him, but no one knew what his real name was. He had a great deal of fame among the Resistance members, and he was very lucky at escaping from dangerous situations. He came and went from Paris to the French border along the Bidasoa River and near Perpignan. Collaborating with other Resistance groups, he helped people pass clandestinely over the border from France and then travel onwards to Portugal. And not only Jews. Armando also worked with the Comète group, which was dedicated to repatriating Allied airmen who had been shot down over France, Belgium, and Holland.

  Sometimes Dalida went with various groups of Jews to the border. They did not normally travel in groups of more than four or five people. It would be suspicious if there were more of them. They traveled with false documents as a family claiming to be going south to visit relatives and to look for a place of greater safety during the war. Your sister took them to a farm where they stayed until Armando’s men could take them over the border into Spain.

  I don’t know how many trips Dalida made, but she helped save many lives.

  Katia also was useful. It was not hard for an exiled Russian countess to have the doors of the most disgusting collaborators in Paris opened to her.

  At the end of 1940, Katia received a call from the police. They wanted to know what she was doing in Paris, what her work was, and above all whether she sympathized with the Nazi Party, and if not, whether she was a spy.

  I don’t know how my aunt managed to pluck up the courage, but she came out of the interrogation with flying colors.

  “Countess, how long are you intending to stay in Paris?”

  “As long as you gentlemen will let me. Where could I go? I lived in London, it is true, but I did not feel comfortable there as my friends knew of my Nazi sympathies.”

  “So you . . .”

  Katia did not let the policeman continue and carried on speaking herself.

  “All I want, Monsieur, is for the Führer to win the war and give my country back to the authentic Russians. I know it will mean dealing with the Soviets, politics is like that, but I pray that Hitler will one day become emperor of Europe.”

  “And are you comfortable in Paris?”

  “If what you want to know, Monsieur, is whether or not I can pay for my own upkeep, then the answer is a definite yes. I fled Russia with sufficient money so as not to have to beg in the streets.”

  “And are you a Jew, Madame?”

  “Monsieur! I’ll have you know that there was a Jewish problem in Russia before the Führer came along. No, Monsieur, I am not a Jew, the Lord save me from such an evil fate.”

  Men were never able to resist my aunt’s beauty, and although she was by then more than seventy years old, she had an elegance and a presence before which it was difficult not to surrender. So it was not difficult for her to introduce herself into the upper circles of the Pétain government; she also started to deal with its officers, who thought her inoffensive and slipped occasional pieces of information into her ears. Information about roundups they were planning, or which Resistance members they were following . . . Armando analyzed this information carefully, worried that at any moment they might find out the truth about Katia and use her to set a trap.

  She went from one side of Paris to the other in her black Mercedes with a chauffeur who was one of Armando’s men. They carried weapons and explosives, they delivered letters, they hid money.

  One afternoon Katia left the house with one of Armando’s men and a package containing explosives. She bumped into the police officer who had interrogated her and with whom she still had some dealings. He was with several members of the gendarmerie and an SS officer. They were asking everyone to show their documentation and to open their bags. Katia saved herself by a miracle. She went straight up to the police officer she knew and greeted him effusively.

  “Monsieur, what a pleasure to see you here! Are you working? I don’t want to distract you . . .”

  No policeman would dare ask for documentation from this woman who was speaking so animatedly with one of their bosses. Even so, the SS man asked her what she was carrying, and Katia replied with a smile:

  “A bomb, Monsieur, what else would it be?”

  The Frenchman laughed at what he thought was a joke, but the German was serious.

  “Allow me to present Countess Katia Goldanski . . . Madame, this is Theodor Dannecker, the real master of Paris.”

  “What a great responsibility to own a city like Paris! Look after her, she’s a unique city, a real jewel in the crown of the Third Reich.”

  They exchanged a few pleasantries, and then the two men walked with her to her car and Katia left, giving thanks to God for having saved her.

  The network she was a part of had a few safe houses; even so, they were always on their guard. In David Peretz’s group, in which Samuel and Dalida and Katia were all fighting, and in Armando’s group as well, vigilance was the price to be paid for survival.

  It was via Dalida that the two groups ended up working together. She had been the first to contact Armando, and it had not been difficult to win his confidence. In other circumstances, Dalida might have been intimidated by this forty-year-old Spaniard, with his wrinkled face and strong hands. But your sister was not fooled by Armando’s appearance; his voice made it clear that he was not a brute, it was the voice of a cultivated man that did not fit with his appearance.

  They met at Vasily’s house. Dalida had gone to hand over photographs for passports that Samuel intended to use to save a Jewish family. When she arrived, Juana sent her through to the back room, where a man was arguing with Vasily.

  He had his back to her and didn’t see her come in. Juana didn’t introduce them, and Dalida pretended to not be the least bit interested in this man and in what he was doing there. She stayed quiet and listened to the discussion.

  “I told you I needed the documents for today!”

  “You’ll have them in a couple of hours,” Vasily said, without raising his voice.

  “And what do I do now? I have to leave for Marseilles in less than an hour. I can’t wait, and it’s too late for me to find someone to pass along the documents,” Armando complained.

  Dalida looked at him and said:

  “I could take them.”

  Armando turned around, surprised and angry at this young woman’s interruption.

  “And who are you? Are you mad? I said I didn’t want anyone else here when I came around.”

  Juana stood up to Armando.

  “I make the rules here. It’s my house. No one comes in whom I don’t know, and let me tell you that this girl is a Jew, and part of a Jewish network, and with as much reason as any one of us not to trust anybody.”

  “And she’s so innocent or so stupid as to offer to do a job for someone she doesn’t know. How old are you?” Armando asked, looking Dalida up and down.

  “I’m about to turn twenty,” she said calmly.

  “And why should you do this job fo
r me?”

  “Because you can’t do it and you said there are men in danger who need these documents.”

  “And why should you care?”

  “I care about anything that has to do with defeating the Nazis.”

  Juana smiled. It wasn’t that she was surprised at Dalida’s attitude, she knew that she carried messages for David Peretz’s group, but to put everything at risk for a man she didn’t know showed that she was braver than she had thought.

  “There aren’t that many options. Either she goes, or you can wait,” Juana said bluntly.

  “How do I know that . . .”

  Dalida interrupted him.

  “You don’t know anything, you don’t know if I can do it, if I will get lost, if I will be late, you don’t know what I will do if they arrest me, you don’t know if I will talk . . . I cannot promise anything, just that I will try, I will try to be in the place you tell me at the time you tell me, I will hand over the packet and try to make sure no one follows me. And that is all.”

  Armando found Dalida intriguing. She looked like a young girl in the flower of her youth, but she seemed far more self-possessed than most people her age.

  “Alright.”

  Armando left, not knowing if he had made a mistake. She had to be trustworthy if she worked with the Jewish group, but he didn’t know anything about her, except that Juana, Vasily, and Pedro all vouched for her. It was a guarantee, but no guarantee is sufficient for those who live outside the law.

  Dalida left the print shop carrying a bag that contained four French passports for four Spaniards who had escaped from a concentration camp and who had come to join the ranks of the Resistance.

  She walked fast, but not so fast that she might attract anyone’s attention. It was a long way from Montmartre to the Champs-Élysées, where the bar was where she had to hand over the documents, so it would take longer for her to get back home than she had planned and her father would be worried about her.

  An hour later, she arrived at the bar. She walked in without caring about the men who looked at her curiously. She went to the bar and spoke the countersign: “François sent me for bread.” The barman looked at her oddly. He had expected Armando, who was this slip of a girl? He gestured to her to come behind the bar. When she went into the kitchen, a man grabbed her and held a knife to her neck. She felt that the point could dig into her neck at any moment, but she didn’t move.