by Bruno Arpaia
The camp commander had climbed up onto the booth and stood clearing his throat. He was short, thin, and French to the last. He wore the moustache of a miserly aristocrat, and the longer he spoke the more evident it became that he didn’t know what to say. He seemed disconcerted, at least as much so as the three hundred men who’d been ripped from their exile and dragged like prisoners to an empty castle surrounded by barbed wire and foot soldiers.
‘So why are they keeping us in camps?’ Benjamin asked himself under his breath.
‘They’re going to put us to hard labour,’ answered Sahl. ‘You’ll see, building roads, repairing bridges.We’re prisoners. Prisoners of war, remember that.’
‘It’s just not possible.We’re German Jews, persecuted, we’re victims of Hitler. It’s not logical; it doesn’t make sense.’
‘Silence!’ cried a corporal from the ranks.
Benjamin fell instantly silent. He watched the commander who was still speaking, his breath gathering in little puffs of vapour. But Benjamin couldn’t concentrate on the words. He wanted some time to himself, to sit and rest, but when the speech was over, he had to line up to see the doctor. The wind carried the scent of damp countryside and the river that ran beyond the road. But his nostrils seemed to tingle rather with the odour of his own past: his father’s smell, tea and pastries in the living room of the house on Nettelbeckstrasse, his school companions on the steps of the college. He was there, but he wasn’t there, even as, half-naked, he pulled Doctor Abrami’s diagnosis from his briefcase to show.
‘It’s my heart, you see.’
‘Okay. Excused from work,’ he was at last told.
That’s how life in the camp began. It was a disaster at first. Nothing worked. It was six days before they had straw to sleep on, and before a basic kitchen was set up, and before blankets were distributed. And it wasn’t the soldiers taking care of these things; it was the prisoners. ‘Not even in jail,’ commented Sahl sardonically over thirty years later, ‘did those men forget they were Germans.’ The discipline, the orderliness, the gumption was a sharp contrast to the inefficiency of the French. The inmates established a cleaning rota for the bunks and built a kind of latrine, found the straw and blankets, fashioned mugs and procured jars with evaporated milk. They also organised courses on the difference between Freud and Jung, between Trotsky and Lenin. In no time, from nothing they built a community, from chaos and anxiety, they made a society. A leader emerged in the form of a man who had been a supervisor in big warehouses where he’d learned to give orders and organise his personnel. No one knew where he’d come from, just that he was the right person for the job in the right moment. A stamp collector set up a post office; a painter who was a gourmand became head chef. Even Benjamin started giving lessons, hanging his head in that way of his, walking as he spoke. He was paid for his lectures, one button or three Gauloises. But that wasn’t the only kind of money circulating in the camp. Sahl wrote his poetry in a little notebook a soldier had smuggled in, and sold it for three nails and a pencil.
Of course, getting by wasn’t easy.You had to adapt yourself, be quick and flexible. Benjamin wasn’t really the type. He was methodical, in love with his rituals, a systematic man, catapulted into a situation that escaped him and upended all logic. Walter lived in details, and from the minutia he’d always been able to fabricate a world. Here at the camp, the days wove together into a series of absurd details that even the needle of his mind would never manage to thread. ‘He didn’t know how to adapt,’ Lisa Fittko would say years later. ‘I think that old Benjamin could only face a cup of boiling tea after he’d formulated some kind of theory about the cup.’
Benjamin had always taken life in small bits, and now life was taking its revenge. He was confronted with the problem of procuring bread and a blanket for himself, of finding shelter from the cold or the rain. And still he was stunned, dis-oriented, as if he’d lost the compass he’d used up until then. Fortunately he had his friends. Hans Fittko taught him to sew and helped him negotiate the price of his courses and rounded up food for him. Max Aron, his young disciple, hung a potato sack off a spiral staircase creating a lean-to where Benjamin spread his straw pallet. It was that privacy that saved him. Because the worst part of the camp as far as he was concerned was the closeness of the small rooms. He was never alone, and was exposed to every sound and the stench of the other prisoners.
At noon they’d all go down to eat in the courtyard, gathering under the half shelter of a corrugated iron sheet. The days of pâté were gone. Now they ate onions or a glutinous broth with scraps of meat or potatoes floating in it. Other prisoners came from a nearby camp that still didn’t have a kitchen to eat under their roof. Kesten was among them. With his high fore-head and heavy brow he seemed desperately in search of someone to speak with. He approached Walter.
‘Do you remember me, Doctor Benjamin? I’m Hermann Kesten, the writer. Do you remember? You even reviewed one of my novels.’
Old Benjamin stared at him, searching his memory. He certainly did remember him. It must have been around 1929. At the time he’d liked the irreverent approach that Kesten had toward his protagonist Josef Bar. He looked him over as he tried to fish a potato from his bowl.
‘Those were other times,’ he said.
‘Right,’ said Kesten, staring at the line of black on Benjamin’s neck. ‘How absurd. War finally broke out against Hitler and we’re locked up here, unable to do anything, not even write.’
Was this perhaps what was really torturing Benjamin? One evening he and Sahl stood watching sheep graze lazily on the other side of the barbed wire. It was almost sunset, a storm of swallows swooped through the sky.
‘You know what I’d like,’ Walter said. ‘To be able to just sit at a café and pass the day scratching my belly.’
Sahl nodded and looked at the darkening sky. The ground was being swept smooth by a gusty wind.
‘No. I don’t believe you,’ he finally said, rupturing the silence. ‘Instead of sitting there doing nothing, you’d start working on something.You’d write.’
Walter reflected and smiled. ‘Maybe you’re right. I wouldn’t be able to do nothing. One always needs to have something to think about. It’s the same here. You know what I’ve decided? I’m going to stop smoking. If I want to survive, I have to concentrate on something difficult.’
Survive. It was easy to say. Back in Paris, Helen, Gisèle, Sylvia and Adrienne were all keeping busy. It was already October and they still hadn’t figured out where to bring their friend’s case. They were constantly coming and going from the Sûreté, the Préfecture and all the other military stations. They wrote long hopeful letters asking him if he needed cigarettes, chocolate, a sweater. But he read between the lines and saw they were discouraged.
But old Benjamin withstood it all. He had a few books, his friends, his lectures, a pencil and a pad for his notes. He even participated in a performance they mounted one Sunday morning for the soldiers and prisoners. He recited the chorus from ‘The Voice of the Granary’, and then an actor read several of Sahl’s poems. When the great room of the castle filled with the verses of Elegy for 1939, composed the day the war broke out, three hundred bearded, ragged men wiped their eyes. Sahl ran to the bathroom because he couldn’t bear the sobbing that his own words had provoked. There was a man already there, who’d fled the room shortly before.
‘What good is it? What is this for?’ Sahl nervously asked. ‘Songs, poems, the commander doesn’t know a word of German and he’s a criminal. He couldn’t care less about the Geneva Convention. Do you know what he’s done? He sold us to a factory, five francs for each of us a day. They’re sending us out to work tomorrow – to pave an airfield.’
After that, life in the camp grew more difficult. Every morning at six, Benjamin watched his companions, chilled to the bone, as they headed out to the airport under the watch of four indolent soldiers. It was an hour-long walk and they were all still wearing the summer clothes they’d worn that day t
o the Colombes stadium – all of them in tatters now, too lightweight to protect them from the stinging autumn wind and rain that so often accompanied them. When they returned at night they were stinking and bone-tired, their shoes in pieces. They cursed the work, their destiny, the lack of food and the idiocies and incompetence of the French.
‘They didn’t even give me a shovel,’ complained Abrahamski. ‘They made me dig with my hands.’
‘If I had known, I would have given you my shovel,’ said Hans Fittko, shaking his head forlornly. ‘They had me dig a hole two metres deep and then ordered me to fill it back up with the same dirt.’
That’s how it was. And sometimes worse. The papers didn’t always make it there and they were forced to live off the bobards, the gossip – the boches have broken through the Maginot line, they are already at the gates of Paris, or not, that the Allies were about to launch an offensive . . . There they were, slowly swallowing time, hunger, cold, exhaustion, asking themselves why and for how much longer, waiting for letters that never came, fanning little flames of hope – and thinking about how the few real Nazi prisoners were protected by the Red Cross and treated with kid gloves.Whereas they, anti-Nazis by choice and conviction, were being treated like human waste, the scum of the earth.
Apart from the declared Nazis, there were two other prisoners who forged a comfortable life for themselves. They were filmmakers and had proposed a film called Vive la France! to the commander. In order to do the research, they would have to go to the library in Nevers. Certainly it was a long trudge, every day for three hours, but they were willing to make the sacrifice. The commander was moved and gave them special armbands so that they could leave whenever they wanted. They came back at night, half-drunk, still tasting the delicacies of cuisine française. They were welcomed into the enclosure by the curses of their fellow prisoners. But the real torture started at bedtime when they would talk out loud about the dishes they’d sampled in all the local restaurants. Benjamin would shake in his little shelter, his empty stomach grumbled and he plotted how he could get an armband too. It became his obsession. He plotted about it for days and then one evening took Sahl by the elbow and dragged him into a corner.
‘It’s about the armband,’ he whispered. ‘No, don’t laugh. I have a plan.’ He wanted to propose a literary magazine to the commander. ‘Of the highest level, naturally. A journal for the camp. It would be for the intellectuals but then we can use it to show the French who we really are, these people they’ve locked up here as enemies of the state. Come to me tomorrow at four,’ he concluded, looking furtively around. ‘We’ll have the first editorial meeting.’
The next day, under the stairway, hidden behind a sack of potatoes, five of them gathered. There was Sahl and Benjamin, Max Aron (who’d become a personal secretary by now), Hans Fittko and another prisoner Sahl didn’t know. They were all kneeling on the ground, heads together, sipping thimbles of aquavit bought off a soldier.
‘My friends,’ began Benjamin. ‘The important thing is the armband. It is a matter of survival. Only those who get an armband will make it out of this camp alive.’
He was very serious and spoke with the sombre tone of someone defending a philosophical thesis from unjust, calumnious attacks. The armband had been transformed for him into the symbol of survival itself. It was the detail that became his new point of departure. The armband could become the foundation of an entire new world.
‘Now, what are some of your ideas for the first issue?’
They suggested articles about books being read in the camp, a statistical chart of the prisoners, representing the many different social levels of the émigrés. Max Aron proposed an article about the Sunday-morning performance. Sahl chose a theme he knew would be received well.
‘I would like to write,’ he said, ‘about how a society is born from nothing. A kind of sociology of the camp, beginning with building a latrine and arriving at the cultural superstructure we are now constructing with this journal.’
‘Good, very good,’ said Benjamin as he took notes on his pad.
After that they met twice a week, drinking aquavit from a thimble and reading aloud the articles that were being developed on the back of envelopes. But the journal was never published and they never got the armband. November came instead. The first snow fell. The courtyard of the camp was transformed into a giant icy swamp and no one spoke of going home.Walter’s letters grew more frequent and more desperate. Adrienne Monnier wrote that she’d gone to Benjamin Crémieux, but that the best person to talk to would be Henri Hoppenot, director of European Affairs to the Foreign Minister. In the meantime, Horkheimer had brought on Georges Scelle and Maurice Halbwachs in the States. On November 6, Helen Hessel told him she had a meeting in Tours with Jules Romains who promised he’d write to Henri Membré, secretary of the French PEN Club to have him intervene on Benjamin’s behalf. In the end it finally seemed that things were moving. They just had to keep trying and hope that their efforts didn’t damage his case. But Benjamin wouldn’t be the first to go home. Kesten came to lunch one day in the middle of a biblical storm, hail beating heartily against the roof.
‘Good day, Doctor Benjamin,’ he yelled.
You could read in his face that he was very pleased but was trying not to show it so that he wouldn’t upset everyone left behind.
‘They’re letting you go,’Walter said gravely as he looked him in the eyes. It wasn’t a question. Thunder shook the earth and cracked the sky.
‘It’s true,’ said Kesten. ‘I leave tomorrow. Our friends at the PEN Club managed to secure my release.’
Walter’s face lit up and a gloomy blue flashed in his eyes. Wasn’t the PEN Club agitating on his behalf too? This was the right path. Perhaps it was too early to lose hope.
But his salvation didn’t come only from there. On November 17, Gisèle Freund wrote him a short postcard. ‘Dear friend,’ it went, ‘I just received a telephone call from our friend Hoppenot telling me that your case was decided yesterday by the Commission de criblage. You are free and we anxiously await your arrival. I hope that your commander receives word immediately. It is definitive! So you must remain calm and brave.With affection, Gisèle.’
His friends embraced him. Max even seemed to cry, hiding his face against the wall.
‘If you see Lisa, tell her I’m well,’ whispered Hans Fittko in his ear.
That night old Benjamin tossed and turned under his blanket. When he fell asleep he dreamed of walking with Doctor Abrami down into a large cave where there were many people sleeping on beds. There was one lovely woman, she moved quickly like a flash. Walter saw her, but not with his eyes. He watched her with his mind as she pulled up the blanket. The dream might have lasted several minutes, but Walter knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep anymore. He put on his glasses, stood and went to the window. He stood there for hours looking at the pale sky, the fading stars peeking out from behind the clouds. Then the night got soft, the clouds began to redden and blanch, a flock of kites lifted suddenly into flight spinning in wide circles over the castle and the camp.
Chapter Twenty-four
Only nine hours? That’s all it takes to get to Mexico from Italy. How about that. In my day, a trip like that would have taken at least two weeks. But this is better. The time you save, you can spend listening to my stories. There you have it. For once, for at least once in your life, you can listen to someone who can tell you a whole story from beginning to end. Lucky you, to have stumbled upon me.We don’t have much longer to go before we get to Benjamin. Be patient. Where were we? Oh yes. We were in the Septfonds camp. I already told you about that. Except that when the war broke out it went from bad to worse in days.
You didn’t need to be a fortune-teller to figure out what the Germans had in mind but the officers in that camp couldn’t see the forest for the trees. How surprised they seemed by the idea that after Poland, Germany would set her sights on France. No, war was the only thing they seemed clear on. Their war; our fault. They red
uced our rations even further. The discipline got stricter. General Gamelin came in person and threatened to send us back to Spain if we didn’t enlist. It was his sticking point – the Legion, and for many it started to seem better than the hunger we were suffering in the camp. Luckily Mariano had his ideas clear. One morning after the raising of the flag, and after we here harangued about volunteering, he raised his hand and stepped forward. He’d got thin and looked tired, but he still had that gleam in his eyes and those pupils that fixed on you like magnets.
‘We want to fight the Germans,’ he explained in the middle of a great silence. ‘But with dignity. Not as mercenaries.’
Mariano talked and I translated. Everyone was looking at us. I could barely speak but I kept going, trying to focus and not make any mistakes.
‘Let us join the French army,’ he went on. ‘We’ll have the same duties, of course, but also the same rights, equal to you French. Then, yes, we’ll fight.’
They didn’t listen. The commander just looked at us hatefully, he was almost smiling with disgust. ‘That’s enough. Fall back into line.’
It was evident they didn’t know us. They thought the fear of returning to Spain, the hunger they were inflicting on us, would have driven us to choose dignity. But, of the twenty thousand soldiers, only fifty joined the Legion. They had to backtrack, invent another strategy to dismantle the camp. Work brigades: made up of Spaniards and commanded by the French. But they wanted us to disarm landmines. It was better, but all of the promises that they made lasted just until we got to the famous Maginot line.
We headed out at the beginning of November, crowded like animals into the freight cars, transported for days and days going from one region to another until we got to the Sarre-Union station in Mosella. It was late at night, there was a fog coming down on the tracks and over the low grey buildings. The shadow of a smokestack melted into the sky. They made us get out in silence. The darkness was dense and the air smelled of gas. A dog howled in the distance beyond a bridge and behind a blot of black fortifications.