I heard the cheers in the chamber. I felt Rebecca’s embrace. Then the huggings of others. Possibly of my family. It was all a blur. I don’t recall any detail. Only one thing I remember. I was singing my grandmother’s song and the Yiddish slid like silk off my tongue, as I recalled every single word.
Part Six
Chapter 37
Now it was all over. But not for Dreyfus. Not for Sir Alfred, as he was again, Palace-redeemed. For Dreyfus there was another trial. Dreyfus versus Dreyfus, that only Dreyfus himself could conduct. Only he could accuse himself; only he could plead his defence, and he alone could pronounce the verdict. And only then, when all that was done, could he walk to the brink with his grandparents. And he would involve his children so that they too would never court the dubious safety of being ‘counted in’. Together they would acknowledge their heritage and its long history of triumph and defeat and its infinite sorrow. Together they would close the chapter on denial. And his own parents, by proxy, would reap that multifold harvest.
Along with Matthew, he took his family back to their childhood village in Kent. He recalled that journey to Paris with his parents, when they had visited the apartment from which they had fled. That same nauseous feeling assailed him as he entered the village. He wanted to make a swift U-turn, for the place sickened him. He saw no beauty in the green fields where he had played as a boy. The village church and all that it stood for was a mockery, but its grounds held his life’s blood, his much-loved lineage, albeit hidden with such deception. But now that lie would cease. He had ordered his parents’ exhumation.
With Matthew at his side, he approached the graves. They were overgrown, weedy and thistled. He preferred them that way. Their pre-trial neatness, their tended flowerbeds nodded assent to the Jesus that sheltered them. The statue had not been repaired. The arm halted at its elbow, and the red paint still daubed the alabaster decay. Dreyfus and Matthew turned away and left the diggers to their work.
They followed the hearse through the village.
‘We will never come here again,’ Matthew said.
The rabbi met them at Willesden Jewish Cemetery and there, in peace, he gave their parents a traditional burial. Thus the first station of atonement had been reached.
Dreyfus had planned his itinerary, and in so far as it was possible, he intended to follow his grandparents’ unplanned route. And from the very date that they had boarded the cattle-trucks on their way to the ovens. The archives had given that date as July the seventeenth, some four days after their capture. It was on July the thirteenth 1942, that his grandmother had gone in search of milk, and on that same evening, breaking the curfew, his grandfather had gone to look for her. On July the fourteenth, neither had returned. Dreyfus did not know where in Paris they had been caught but he assumed that both had been rounded up in the Vel d’Hiv, or in Drancy. He prayed that at least they had embraced each other before the gas.
Dreyfus and his family set out for Paris on July the sixteenth, over half a century later. On arrival they went straight to Rue du Bac where they tarried a while outside the apartment. From there they made their way through narrow streets to a patisserie which in former days had sold milk. Now it was a hairdressing salon, but it was an obligatory station. From there they went on foot to Boulevard Raspail. No window-shopping, no sightseeing. A right turn took them into Rue de Varenne, thence to Les Invalides. And past it, for Napoleon played no part in Dreyfus’s present mission. On to Avenue de la Motte and Boulevard de Grenelle. Here Dreyfus paused. They had been walking in the heat for over an hour. Somewhere along the route they had followed, his grandparents had been captured and their destination was already in Dreyfus’s sight. The Vel d’Hiv, on the corner of Rue Nélaton. In the old days, it had been a sports arena, a gathering place for fun. And when the Germans came it was still a gathering place, but there was little fun in it. The Vel d’Hiv was the site of round-up, the Jews’ first stop on the way to the ovens. It was in Vel d’Hiv that rumour seriously stirred. Stories had long circulated in Paris about the unimaginable fate of European Jewry, but they were too far-fetched to be believed. In Vel d’Hiv those stories seemed less suspect, less unworthy of belief and, but for the crying of children, there was silence in that arena for to speak that rumour aloud was to give it credence.
Dreyfus led his family towards the site. The arena had been razed to the ground, and in its place stood a branch of the Ministry of Interior but, nevertheless it was a compulsory station. On the site of that shameful pitch they rested, but fitfully, for their memories allowed for little repose.
It had been very hot on the day of his grandparents’ capture, unseasonably so, and from stories that Dreyfus had heard, there was but one water-tap in the whole arena. Thousands of Jews were cooped up on that day, and unquenchable thirst carried off many of the old and frail under the merciless sun. Yet death at that place was a kindness, for those who would survive Vel d’Hiv were in line for torture unimaginable. Many contemplated suicide, but were thwarted by the simple fact that there just wasn’t enough room. Dreyfus did not know how long his grandparents had struggled in that arena. Their sojourn would have depended on the size of subsequent round-ups and the availability of the trains to take them to their final destination. Towards the end of July, fourteen thousand Jews were deported from Paris, via the Vel d’Hiv stop-over, so it was possible that his grandparents were amongst them.
‘I’m thirsty,’ Peter said, then regretting it, ‘it doesn’t matter.’
‘It does matter,’ his father told him. ‘We are survivors.’
They went to a restaurant and had their first meal of the day, and then to a hotel to sleep if they were able. Dreyfus tossed and turned for most of the night. He understood exactly what he was doing, and his quest was almost exhilarating, for he knew that it would lead to a personal freedom. He wondered why he had postponed it for so long. Why he had found it so easy to ignore its need. And he was ashamed that he had lived such a long-term lie, that lie he had inherited from his parents. He would deny his children that false estate. Like himself they would seek out the truth, however unpalatable.
The following day, they took the RER to Drancy, Drancy is a mere suburb of Paris and nowadays of no special significance. But in 1942, Drancy was a name to be reckoned with. For Jews it was the gateway to hell.
It was July the seventeenth. Dreyfus was on schedule. It was on this day, more than fifty years ago that, with thousands of others of their kind, his grandparents were prodded like cattle into the freight-trains that would carry them to the rumours of which they had heard and in which they dared not believe. A short walk from the station was the site of the technical buildings which housed those fearful passengers who waited for the trains. They were built in a U-shape, and were destined originally for lower-class housing. But the Gestapo, on Eichmann’s orders, had designated them as a stop-over barracks for the yellow six-pointed stars. The buildings were four storeys high and those who had been thwarted in Vel d’Hiv found room in Drancy to put an end to it all. At the base of the building was a concrete slab, a welcome-mat for those shattered bodies that refused the cattle-trucks to the East. And when their broken relatives had swept away their martyrdom, that same concrete slab served as a playground for the children. No strenuous games. They were too hungry to run or skip. Sitting games and singing. Singing about ‘Pitchipoi’, that name they coined for the place where the trains would take them, the place where they would find their parents again, and eat together and laugh and sing. Though their parents by now, were ash.
‘We’re going to Pitchipoi,’ they would chant. And believed it, because they had to.
Every day the convoys arrived, as yellow star after star crowded the barracks. The children heard tongues that they did not understand. A babel of Polish, Hungarian and Greek echoed through the buildings but ‘Pitchipoi’ was a word that everyone understood, and tried to believe that that place was real.
Dreyfus knew from his research into the archives that his
grandparents had been gassed on arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The date given was July the twenty-first. It was on that day that he intended to arrive at his last station and to walk to the edge with that past that he had denied. It was a journey of about four days and nights from Paris to the ovens. Matching their timetable he would stay at Drancy until five o’clock in the morning and wait with them on the railway sidings. For that was the time that his grandparents would have embarked on their last journey.
The station was empty and the few night workers who passed on the platforms might have wondered at the curious Dreyfus gathering on the sidings. But none of them were old enough to have a sense of déjà vu, else they would have paused and sickened. The Germans were meticulous about punctuality, and as five o’clock chimed from a nearby church, Dreyfus stepped to the edge of the platform with Matthew at his side and together they recited the Kaddish, that prayer for the Jewish dead. Then they made their way back to Paris and the Gare du Nord to begin their overland journey in the path of their forbears.
From Paris the cattle-trucks had shunted to Compiègne. Thence to Laon and the frontier town of Neuberg. With occasional hold-ups, the trucks rattled the thousand miles across Germany to the East, and finally stuttered to rest at Auschwitz. The journey took almost four days which was the time Dreyfus had allowed for his own pilgrimage. And by exactly that same route. It necessitated many changes along the way, respites that were denied to his grandparents who were cooped, unrelieved, with a hundred and ten others in the wagon, struggling for air and space of which there was none. Taking up precious room were two buckets. One for drinking-water, which after a few hours’ travelling was drained dry. The other for a hundred-odd toilet needs which fear had swiftly filled to overflowing. Some passengers, cheating the gas, died on the way, and their bodies were used for seats or leaning-posts. And intermittently there was prayer and song, the former for resignation and the latter for hope. But the ditty ‘We’re going to Pitchipoi’ now carried less conviction, and the children, brainwashed into paradise, sing-songed like weary robots. But there was another song, one of vibrant hope, one that matched the rhythm of the clicking wheels. ‘Cela ne va pas durer ainsi’. This cannot last long. A song that whimpered along the rail-tracks to Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Maidenick, Ravensbruck, Treblinka, Flossenburg, Mauthausen, Lublin, Saschenhausen, Orianenburg, Theresienstadt, Sobibor, all those sad miles of steel cortége, a song sung in Greek, Polish, German, Hungarian, Dutch, Italian, a symphony of suppliant survival that will resound along those rails forever. Four long days of song and prayer, of hunger, thirst and death, so that when at last the doors were opened at the Auschwitz terminal, it was like a deliverance.
Dreyfus and his family stationed themselves at the end of the line at 5.33 in the afternoon of July the twenty-first. The tracks were overgrown with weeds, silent now and almost peaceful. Yet Dreyfus could hear the dogs barking as the truck-doors were slid open. He heard the shouts of the guards and the lash of their whips. He saw the suitcases as they piled up alongside the tracks. His grandparents had had no luggage. The milk, had his grandmother ever found it, had long ago assuaged somebody’s thirst. They had arrived only in the soiled clothes they stood in and shortly, denuded of those, they would die naked as they were born. Dreyfus saw the long trail of weary bones, shuffling into line. If they didn’t smell the smoke they certainly must have seen it oozing from the distant chimney as the rumours at last found their source and confirmation.
Dreyfus led his family on to the ramp, the site of the selection. One look at his grandparents must have judged them too old and too frail for any practical purpose. His grandfather was beyond work and his grandmother beyond experiment. So they were shifted to the right-hand column along with the children and pregnant women. If the register recorded one thousand and twenty-five persons who were gassed on that day, that figure did not include the many foetuses.
Some in the line fretted for their luggage, and the children wanted their toys to take to Pitchipoi. The guards assured them that their luggage would follow but did not add that it would first be sorted for its valuables and then discarded.
Dreyfus gathered his family and led them slowly towards the crematoria. Much of the camp had been destroyed by the Germans for fear of evidence. But what remained was proof enough of Armageddon. The miles of hastily rolled barbed-wire, the ruins of the four crematoria at Birkenau. The flood lamps that freeze-framed the electrocuted bodies on the wire. In the basement, indestructible, were the rooms for undressing and the shearing of hair, and a few gas-chambers where the pain would explode and thereafter cease.
In the memorial museum Dreyfus saw all that he had read about. He knew about the mountain of shoes, the piles of artificial limbs, the kaleidoscope of spectacles. He knew about all those things. But this was a different kind of knowing. It was a knowledge from which one could never walk away. It was proof. Proof undistilled, unpolluted by metaphor or literature. A heap of children’s shoes is exactly what it is, a heap of children’s shoes, and the slightest simile diminishes it. They walked around in silence. The horror was beyond commentary.
There was a last station on Dreyfus’s pilgrimage, and he and his family made their way to the one remaining oven in the camp. There were many mourners in the chamber, but all were alone, for each grief was private, and the room reeked of survivors’ guilt. Dreyfus stood before the oven, his last station, and once again, together with Matthew, he recited the Kaddish. And when it was done, he began his fast. Out of Judaic season, but in the ripeness of his own heart, it would be his Day of Atonement. Or rather, his Day of At-Onement, for at last he could walk with his forbears.
Now his trial was well and truly over. His testimony had been on oath and it was a truth that would fashion the rest of his life, its joys and its freedom, though their burdens would hover forever on the eyelid of sorrow.
Chapter 38
On his return Dreyfus found a number of letters. One was from his publisher.
17 July 1998
Dear Sir Alfred
I have now finished reading your manuscript, which has given me great pleasure. I have high hopes for it. I notice that you have encountered a great deal of anti-Semitism amongst those who crossed your path. I do hope that you do not count me amongst them. I have to tell you that some of my best friends are Jews.
Yours sincerely
Bernard Wallworthy
Author’s Note
In 1894, it was discovered that somebody in the French military had passed state secrets to the German defence attaché in Paris. The honour of the French army was at stake and a scapegoat had to be found. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain, was the obvious candidate. The conspiracy to frame Dreyfus was prompted by the virulent anti-Semitism prevalent in France at the time. Dreyfus was tried, found guilty, stripped of his rank and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on Devil’s Island. In 1901 a new trial was held in which he was pardoned, but his name was not wholly cleared until 1906.
The novelist Émile Zola pleaded Dreyfus’s case in a pamphlet entitled J’accuse, in which he pointed the finger of guilt at high-ranking officers in the army. He was sued for libel and spent one year in prison for his pains.
The Dreyfus affair was reported worldwide. It was a cause célèbre in France. It emphasised the conflict between the republicans, who were pro-Dreyfus, and the right-wing monarchists, abetted by the Catholic Church, who, with no proof, insisted on Dreyfus’s guilt. But above all, it was the power of anti-Semitism in France that dictated the initial trial and its outcome.
This novel makes no attempt to update the Dreyfus story. Rather it is concerned with the Dreyfus syndrome, which alas needs no updating.
B.R.
A Note on the Author
Bernice Rubens was born in Cardiff, Wales in July 1928. She read English at the University of Wales and married young; she worked as an English teacher and a filmmaker before she began writing at the age of 35, when her children started nursery school. Reubens’s firs
t novel, Set on Edge (1960), was threaded with the themes of Orthodox Judaism and family life. The book was a success, which encouraged her to continue with writing: her second novel, Madame Sousatzka (1962), was filmed by John Schlesinger, with Shirley MacLaine in the leading role, in 1988, and her fourth novel, The Elected Member, won the 1970 Booker prize. She was shortlisted for the same prize again in 1978 for A Five Year Sentence.
Reubens was an honorary vice-president of International PEN and served as a Booker judge in 1986; her last novel, The Sergeants’ Tale, was published in 2003, a year before her death at age 76.
Discover books by Bernice Rubens published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/BerniceRubens
A Five Year Sentence
I, Dreyfus
Madame Sousatzka
Nine Lives
Sunday Best
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain
references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1999 by Little Brown & Company
Copyright © 1999 Bernice Rubens
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