by W. E. Gutman
“The country was anesthetized, rendered stupid,” said author Gilles Ragache. In six weeks, more than 100,000 French troops had died on the battlefield. Twice as many were wounded. While most of the five million conscripts never fired a shot or saw a single German, half a million endured the full weight of war. Their sacrifice enabled the most irresolute civilians and military alike to flee toward the south in one tragic, throbbing exodus.
Inevitably, “national security” -- the catchphrase and clarion call of the diehard elite -- prompted powerful right-wing politicians to issue daily amendments that amounted to drastic amputations on democracy, notably against an independent press that openly espoused liberal causes and which were increasingly seen as willing tools of communism. Many of these measures were directed against Jews.
Enacted on October 3, 1940, a law barred Jews from political office. The next day, an addendum authorized the internment of foreign Jews. In March 1941, Xavier Vallat, a monarchist named to head a commission on “Jewish matters” [the “aryanization” of France] declared with the sinister aplomb of a psychopath that his anti-Semitism “is as moderate as it is enlightened.” He explained:
“There is a Jewish problem everywhere there are too many Jews. Now, Jews are perfectly tolerable in homeopathic doses. But after a while, these interlopers become dangerous, first because they are iconoclasts who resist assimilation, secondly because they scorn those who offer them sanctuary and wind up imposing their will upon them.”
(In 1947, Vallat, an unrepentant anti-Semite received a ten-year prison sentence for his role in the persecution of Jews. Released in 1949, he was granted amnesty in 1954. From 1962 to 1966 he edited the extreme right-wing newspaper, Aspects de la France).
To forgive is to grant amnesty, not grace.
In June 1941, two new edicts denied Jews access to law and medical schools. Jewish dentists, pharmacists and midwives had their licenses revoked.
In May 1942, Jews six years and older were required under penalty of imprisonment to sew a yellow Star of David, bearing in black letters the word Juif, on their outer-garments.
In July, Jews were barred from restaurants, cafés, theaters, movie houses, concert-halls, food markets, swimming pools, beaches, museums, libraries and sporting venues. In December, a new decree ordered Jews to have their identification and food cards stamped with the word Juif.
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France’s debacle and political backsliding produced a vacuum and fed a cynicism readily exploited by flops, opportunists and small-time crooks who had nothing to lose by espousing the enemy’s cause. One of them, Henri Lafont, would play a brief if tragic role in occupied Paris. Driven by gratitude, or stirred by some inner compulsion to atone for his crimes with a single act of daring and compassion, he would save my father’s life and, without a doubt, my mother’s as well as mine. Postwar France would not be as generous, choosing to look at the events surrounding my father’s release from a French Gestapo prison -- and despite his selfless service in the Résistance -- with suspicion and resentment.
93, RUE LAURISTON
The will to exterminate the Jews through mass deportations to the East was absent -- or as yet unarticulated -- in the first days of the occupation of France. Jews were still defined as members of a religious sect, not a race. But by August 1940 the Germans called for the “expulsion” of all Jews and the expropriation of their assets. Two months later, Jewish heads of corporations were fired and replaced by “Aryan surrogates.” Ninety percent of the proceeds from Jewish businesses were seized.
The French were anxious to placate the conqueror. They formed social, commercial and romantic connections. They opened exclusive restaurants and elegant bordellos. They created pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish militias and recruited bullies who were only too willing to do the Germans’ dirty work. The government’s zeal to please the Germans and the enthusiasm with which average citizens espoused Hitler’s mission in exchange for tutelage and protection, made for a remarkable degree of compliance and accommodation. It also created big breaks for the quick-witted, the shrewd and the dissolute.
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Political change gladdens those who think they have something to gain until they realize that they’ve lost everything.
Henri Chamberlain “Lafont” was 45 and suffering from advanced syphilis when he first came to see my father. Considered “handsome” by some (he looked more like a punch-drunk boxer), Lafont was a charismatic con man and part-time pimp. He’d been referred by a mutual acquaintance, Aristide Babin -- “Titi” to his friends -- a gendarme assigned to police headquarters, where Lafont’s sister held a food concession. My father, an intern at the time, earned extra cash and gained practical experience by giving cops checkups and doing basic urine and blood work.
Orphaned at 11, abandoned by his mother shortly after his father’s death, Lafont spends his childhood in misery. He supports himself through shoplifting and other petty crimes. Caught, he is sent to reform school where he refines his skills. He later joins the army and serves without incident. Returned to civilian life, he steals, goes back to prison, is sentenced to hard labor at the penal colony in Cayenne, from which he escapes. Convicted on multiple counts of theft and racketeering, declared persona non grata, he opens a prosperous business under an alias and, overnight, becomes a patron of the Paris police. Exposed, he is arrested in 1940 and soon released as Paris falls. He goes to work for the Germans first as an informer, then as a “foreman.” He opens an office on Rue Lauriston and organizes a cartel made up of mobsters and pimps his friends in the police helped spring out of jail. In 1941 he teams up with inspector Pierre Bonny, a trusted confidant of the Gestapo and once hailed as the “best policeman in France.” The Bonny-Lafont clique, whose crimes are recorded on a plaque at 93 Rue Lauriston, surrounds itself with a strange assortment of perverts, lunatics and whores. Their specialty: black marketeering and the traffic of gold and jewels stolen from Jews.
Working closely with the Gestapo, Lafont and Bonny convert their headquarters on Rue Lauriston and Place des Etats Unis into torture chambers. Their acolytes commit murder and hunt for members of the Résistance. Jacques Delarue (Histoire de la Gestapo, Fayard, 1962) wrote:
”These criminals used torture and exploited the immunity that their Gestapo badges and pistol permits conferred to commit innumerable crimes.”
Pascal Ory (Les collaborateurs, Le Seuil, 1976) wrote that at the summit of his career --
“Monsieur Henri rode in a Bentley, surrounded himself with orchids and countesses and, in his final days, was haunted by blatant megalomaniac fantasies.”
Playing on people’s baser instincts, earning their confidence by showering them with gifts and favors, the two accomplices gained the support of people in high places. Many cozy up to Bonny and Lafont to obtain the release of imprisoned friends and relations. The thugs occasionally set aside their murderous activities to help someone from whom they can later extract favors or support.
*
Lafont’s condition was serious. Massive doses of sulfa, popular at that time, and homeopathic treatments of dubious integrity or efficacy had done nothing to prevent a primary skin lesion, now healed, from storming the bloodstream and hastening the advance of a secondary and potentially fatal infection. A rented microscope had confirmed the presence of the slender and deadly spirochetes in Lafont’s blood and my father knew it was only a matter of time before they invaded the brain and caused catastrophic damage. It took a great leap of faith on my father’s part -- and several million units of penicillin into Lafont’s rear-end once a week for several weeks -- to cure Lafont. Penicillin had only been discovered in 1928, barely seven years before my father graduated from medical school, and mercury and arsenic were still the treatment of choice. From all accounts, Flemming’s wonder drug had not been widely used in Europe at the time and my father felt that he had taken great risks with a remedy still deemed exotic.
“I’ll never forget what you did for me,” Lafont told my father on his last vi
sit. “He was bawling like a child,” my father recalled. “We embraced for a moment or so. I then begged him to be more careful and resist shoving his dick in just any old thing without some form of protection. Lafont laughed heartily, gave me a bear hug and said, ‘I’ll always be there for you if you need me, Doc.’ I was touched but quickly dismissed his exuberance as that of man who had just been granted a reprieve. Neither one of us could have imagined, as we parted, how it would all end for him. I had saved him from one executioner and, in so doing, delivered him to another.”
My father saw Lafont on two separate occasions after that. Lafont invited him to his apartment to celebrate Babin’s birthday. “The place was crawling with gorgeous whores, neatly attired hoodlums and all the cops money could buy,” my father recalled. “We didn’t meet again until five years later. His wife and his brother came to my office a couple of times with some minor health problems. It was through Babin that I would learn of his new vocation.”
*
Men who are for sale but find no buyers are the first to accuse of treason those who have buyers but do not sell themselves.
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With Paris crushed and the Germans firmly in control, opportunities abound for mercenaries, collaborators and soldiers of fortune. Doubling as black market and money-laundering networks, “auxiliary Gestapo” cells recruit hoodlums, crooked cops and spies. Convicted murderers are smuggled out of prisons to act as “enforcers.” Drawn by the prospect of easy money, a number of Jews, among them former scrap dealers and future multi-millionaires Josef Joanovici and Michel Szkolnikoff (the latter was assassinated in Spain after the liberation), joined Otto Brandel, an agent of Admiral Franz Wilhelm Canaris, head of German Intelligence, in schemes that generated over 40 billion Francs. Canaris was later executed for plotting against Hitler.
The marriage between commerce and espionage was so profitable that dozens of “bureaus” popped up in some of the city’s finest districts. In a statement published after the war, Belgian spy Georges Delfanne, also known as Masuy, confessed at his trial that,
“the idea of getting rich by exploiting the situation did not come to mind right away. I was drawn in gradually as enticing offers came my way.”
Soon, all sorts of merchants, bankers and middlemen came knocking at his door, filling his waiting room from early morning until late in the afternoon. The manager of the Claridge Hotel offered Masuy a deal involving the distribution of ten tons of stolen green coffee beans.
General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel ordered Masuy to crush budding clandestine units of French freedom fighters. Over two thousand people were interrogated in his office on stylish avenue Henri-Martin. Interrogation was accompanied by a form of torture invented by a Russian physician and known as the ordeal of the bathtub.
“Used by the Russians [the bathtub] is a crude and barbaric device. In my care, it’s psychology at its finest. You have no idea how fear of torture makes torture superfluous....”
The infamous ordeal, better known as waterboarding, would be resurrected in American torture chambers.
“Waterboarding induces panic and suffering by forcing a person to inhale water into the sinuses, pharynx, larynx, and trachea. The head is tilted back and water is poured into the upturned mouth or nose. Eventually the subject cannot exhale more air or cough out more water, the lungs are collapsed, and the sinuses and trachea are filled with water. The subject is drowned from the inside, filling with water from the head down. The chest and lungs are kept higher than the head so that coughing draws water up and into the lungs while avoiding total suffocation. His sufferings must be that of a man who is drowning, but cannot drown.”
Thanks to Masuy’s intelligence the Germans were able to confiscate 54 radio transmitters and over 20 tons of weapons. Informers also helped destroy at least seven French insurgency networks, many of them, to the delight of Marshal Phillipe Pétain, Freemasons. “A Jew is not responsible for his birth,” Pétain had declared, “a Freemason is: he makes a conscious choice.” The seizures and arrests dealt a severe blow to France and the Allies.
*
Masuy was dubbed “the most implacable foe of the Résistance” but it was Lafont’s band of killers that spread terror. Described by the post-war French press as a “picturesque gangster,” Lafont had escaped from prison with a number of German agents and petty criminals recruited by the Abwehr during their incarceration. At his request, the Germans released twenty-two former inmates from Fresnes Prison, outside Paris. Now headquartered on fashionable rue Lauriston, and sporting the silver braiding of an SS captain, Lafont specialized in kidnappings, torture and, when necessary, murder.
Lafont’s crew was credited with the disabling of an important French underground network and, later, with the arrest of Geneviève De Gaulle, niece of the French general. A fellow student had betrayed her for 100,000 Francs.
Accompanied by his most trusted disciples, among them the noted soccer player, Villaplane, and backed by a detail of Algerian killers-for-hire, Lafont also took part in daring raids against the Maquis. Named after the expanses of dense underbrush where its members took cover, the network of French saboteurs (maquisards) eventually recruited my father as a field physician.
Shortly after the liberation of Paris in 1945, Lafont was handed to the police by his trusted colleague, Joanovici. Joanovici, plea-bargained his way to freedom and lived to enjoy -- temporarily -- the fruits of his rackets.
Many of the “fanatic imbeciles” who had bloodied their hands during the German occupation were lined up against a wall and shot for having followed orders. Henri Lafont was executed for issuing them. He refused to be blindfolded. He is said to have ordered the firing squad to “let the sun shine upon my face until the end. Please aim well. Deal me death if you must but make it swift and painless.”
“Even scoundrels can die like heroes,” a witness remarked.
Men can negotiate everything but their past.
KABBALAH AND BOILED POTATOES
Nothing turns common folk into polyglots like war, annexation, colonization, deportation, expatriation. Born in the northern Transylvanian town of Sighet, a province claimed and reclaimed as shifting fortunes redrew Austro-Hungary’s map, my father had mastered Romanian and Hungarian by the age of six -- not counting Yiddish, spoken at home since birth. He also spoke Hebrew, practiced daily in heder and during prayers, and German, taught in public school and widely spoken by an elite minority who deemed the other local idioms to be lacking in refinement.
A gift for languages is the tribute vanquished people pay.
Though he later conquered French and English, it was Yiddish, with its rich blend of Hebrew and medieval German, its earthy sonority, inflections and colorful imagery with which he felt most at ease.
“Yiddish is the language of folk tales told and retold by my father. In it I hear the gentle lullabies sung by my mother as she rocked the children to sleep, the heated arguments, shrewd observations, snappy repartees, the sardonic asides and words of love murmured with such tenderness and grace as to melt every trace of rancor, dry every tear.”
Yiddish has a sound, an aroma, a taste, a feel like no other language. It’s a tongue full of familiar tunes. Every note in its inexhaustible register is a melody. Now spoken by fewer and fewer Jews, Yiddish has a taste for nimble blasphemy:
May your wish come true when you can no longer enjoy it.
Or for bitter reproof:
When one must at all cost sully something, one can sully even God.
If nostalgia tinted many of my father’s memories, he was careful not to wax rhapsodic about his childhood. His father -- my grandfather -- was seldom gainfully employed.
“He had no real trade. He kept a small candle-making business but he was too proud to work. He spent much of his time at the synagogue or immersed in his precious books -- the Torah, the Talmud, the Kabbalah -- or strolling up and down Sighet’s main artery, deep in thought and attired in fine three-piece suits bought on credit and rarely
fully paid for. He also kept my mother endlessly pregnant. We were nine in a three-room house -- two adults and seven young hungry mouths to feed, seven growing bodies to clothe, seven pairs of feet constantly in need of shoes, ribbons and petticoats and combs for the girls -- Helen, Malku, Lilli -- new knickers and frocks and prayer shawls for the boys -- Yosi, Leibi, Favish and me.
“We ate lots of potatoes; potato soup for breakfast, potato pancakes, salted or daubed with thin layers of homemade plum preserves at lunch, and we often dined on boiled potatoes, sautéed onions dressed in melted chicken fat and moldy crusts of black bread. Meat was a rare and welcome treat. I don’t remember ever feeling full at the end of a meal. It was a miserable existence.”
Lost in inscrutable mystical abstractions, sustained by rigid Orthodox discipline and endless devotions, my father's father seemed indifferent to his family's plight. My grandmother withstood multiple pregnancies, penury and privations with a stoicism and self-effacement that often made my father weep with anger.
“How can you take it, mama,” he asked, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her.
“Shh, it’s alright, son, that’s life, you know. We must accept our lot. We’re in God’s hands. But things will be better, you’ll see,” she’d whisper. “Study hard and maybe you can leave all this behind one day.”
It was shortly after his Bar Mitzvah that my father, in a fit of youthful rebellion, cut off his peyot, the curly ear locks that had adorned his temples since childhood, repudiated his mother’s fatalism, rejected predestination, renounced God and began to defy the nearly insurmountable obstacles of youth, indigence and anti-Semitism. It was also at that time that he decided to become a doctor, “to treat humankind’s tangible afflictions and to snatch my family from the clutches of poverty.” My father would later claim that it was not at all a question of indebtedness -- “Children don’t really owe their parents anything, they don’t ask to be born” -- but a rage against life’s Sisyphean absurdity and an acute sensitivity toward the suffering of others. Engaged and combative, incorruptible and iron-willed, he would spend the rest of his life fighting intolerance, denouncing hypocrisy, speaking for the voiceless and defending the weak. These contests would keep him in a perpetual state of frustration. He understood the futility of his principles and often voiced bitter disappointment at the shortcomings of those in whom he had placed his trust. When he died in 1987 at the age of 83, widowed for over fourteen years, he’d become a misanthropic recluse.