‘Very early in the morning you’ll be leaving. You’re going on a train.’
Hartmann did not get far before children began to jabber and shout. ‘Pitchipoï!’ an older one called out in excitement. Some of the others were encouraged by the childish word and began a chant. The younger ones looked bewildered.
Hartmann’s own expression was unconvincing. ‘You are advised to make sure your bags are labelled clearly. I will ask some grown-ups to come and help you. You can take a blanket and any little bits of food you may have.’ He looked down at the piece of paper. ‘Any larger items of baggage will be transported separately.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘The train goes to Poland.’
‘Will we see our parents again?’
‘I . . . think so. I can’t promise, but I think you probably will.’
‘Yes!’ Jacob squeezed André hard in his delight.
Hartmann managed a smile. ‘I must warn you that the journey is long and uncomfortable. You must be brave. All of you must be brave.’
André noticed that the kind man’s voice had gone peculiar. He was starting to cough.
‘Later in the evening, you will move to the departure staircase in the corner of the courtyard near the main gate. Please make sure all your bags are packed and labelled. I’ll be back later.’
Hartmann left quickly, ignoring the volley of questions that followed him.
André at once pulled out Madame Cariteau’s suitcase and began to arrange his possessions inside it. He took the sweater Jacob was wearing and folded it carefully on top of the book about the crocodile. There was nothing else to put in; all their possessions were already safely stowed. André closed the lid of the case to make sure everything fitted. Then he clicked the brass locks open and straightened the contents all over again.
An hour or so later, two gendarmes came into the room and ordered the children downstairs. Those who did not understand or who were too numbed to obey were prodded out by truncheons. André pulled Jacob by the wrist and hurried into the safety of the mass that was descending. Outside, it was still daylight, and André saw a line of people of all ages waiting to be shaved by the camp barbers. Half a dozen of them attacked the women’s hair with long scissors, then ran clippers over their shorn scalps; the men’s faces and heads they shaved with razors. Then it was the children’s turn. André shuffled up along the queue, frightened of what his mother would say if she saw him with a shaved head. He remembered the feeling of her hand as she stroked his skull, allowing the soft, dark hair to trickle out over the webbing of her fingers. Would she recognise him shorn?
The wind coming in through the open end of the camp lifted tufts of fallen hair, mixed with the cinders of the courtyard, and carried them high on to the inner roof and even up to the windows of the rooms, where they made small drifts of grey and black and blonde and brown.
When they were back in their room, some women came with paper luggage labels and some pencils. André, shaven-headed, wrote his name with lip-scouring care, but had to ask the help of one of the women to tie the label on. Then they were ready.
After the cabbage soup, towards nine o’clock, Hartmann came back into the room, accompanied by two Jewish orderlies.
He stood in the doorway and swallowed hard. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It’s time to go.’
There was no movement in the room. The children were suddenly reluctant.
Hartmann spoke very gently into the silence. ‘We have no choice in this. We must go quietly. I cannot promise you that you will find your parents at the end of the journey, but I think there’s a chance. There is hope. Make your parents proud of you now. Be brave and be hopeful.’
One of the elder children, a boy of about fourteen, stood up and turned to face the younger ones. ‘We must trust Monsieur Hartmann. Let’s go.’
Many of the children did not speak French, but something of the boy’s manner convinced them, as though the adult world had been mediated to them by one of their own. Slowly, the fetid bunks emptied and the children trailed their bags out on to the concrete landing.
Down in the freezing courtyard, the orderlies led them to the search barracks. Inside were long trestle tables manned by gendarmes under the supervision of two officers of the Inquiry and Control Section, formerly the Police for Jewish Affairs.
André and Jacob shuffled up in the queue until they came to the table. A gendarme took the case from André and opened it on the table. He took out the adjustable spanner and threw it over his shoulder. He picked up the book and laughed.
‘Won’t be needing that where you’re going.’
This was a phrase they heard repeated along the line of tables as the book fluttered like a broken-winged bird into the the corner of the barracks. When the case was returned to André it contained only Jacob’s sweater, a shirt and a dirty pair of shorts. Then the gendarmes searched their bodies, smacking their bony ribs and running their hands up inside their thighs.
‘Got some money sewn in there, have you?’ said the man, feeling the fabric of Jacob’s shirt. ‘God, you smell horrible.’
The gendarme next to Jacob tore the earrings from a little dark-haired girl. ‘Won’t be needing jewellery where you’re going!’
‘All right, then, get out of it, move along. Go on.’
At the door of the barracks a gendarme marked their backs with a chalk cross.
‘Wait here.’
Jacob had started to weep. He put his hand in Andre’s, which already held a lone tin soldier he had managed to smuggle through.
From a carbon copy of the irreversible list their names were read in alphabetical order, and they were marched off to the south-east corner of the camp, next to the main gate. This section had been separated from the rest of the courtyard by rolls of barbed wire strung between hastily erected wooden posts.
At the foot of Staircase Two stood a gendarme and a Jewish orderly, who ticked their names off another copy of the list as they went through the door.
On the first floor, they were shown into an empty room. There were no beds, no mattresses, no tables; beneath the single light bulb and between the unplastered concrete walls there was only a scattering of straw and two empty buckets. There were more than a hundred children in the room, and the contents of the bucket rapidly overflowed and trickled down the steps.
André turned his head against the wall. He could read the names and messages written there by others on the eve of their departure. ‘Léon Reich’. ‘Last convoy. We will be back.’ And next to his head: ‘Natalie Stern. Still in good heart.’
He broke down and fell to the floor.
Through a window on the other side of the courtyard, Hartmann and Levi were able to watch the people entering the departure staircase in the path of the searchlight fixed on the corner of the courtyard.
Levi said, ‘In the war, did you ever take part in an attack?’
‘Once.’
‘Do you remember the night before?’
The two men looked at each other.
Hartmann said, ‘When time collapses.’
Levi nodded. ‘I wish I had faith.’
‘You’re here because of your faith.’
‘My father’s faith.’
Neither spoke for a long time as they watched the last of the deportees going in. He was a man of about their age and they could hear his violent protestations. ‘I’m a Frenchman! I was decorated at Verdun! You cannot do this to me!’
‘You’re a filthy Jew like all the others.’
The door to the staircase was closed.
Hartmann looked at his watch. ‘About five hours to go.’
From the deportation staircase they could hear the beginnings of the Marseillaise, followed by a boy-scout song, ‘It’s only a short goodbye’.
Hartmann said, ‘You believe me now, don’t you?’
‘About the destination?’
‘Yes.’
‘All logic is against it.’
‘But y
ou feel it, don’t you?’
‘I’m a German. I’m a reasonable man.’ Levi stared into the darkness where the gendarme had turned off the searchlight. ‘I cannot permit myself such beliefs.’
André was lying on the floor when a Jewish orderly came with postcards on which the deportees might write a final message. He advised them to leave them at the station or throw them from the train as camp orders forbade access to the post. Two or three pencils that had survived the barracks search were passed round among the people in the room. Some wrote with sobbing passion, some with punctilious care, as though their safety, or at least the way in which they were remembered, depended upon their choice of words.
A woman came with a sandwich for each child to take on the journey. She also had a pail of water, round which they clustered, holding out sardine cans they passed from one to another. One of the older boys embraced her in his gratitude, but the bucket was soon empty.
When she was gone, there were only the small hours of the night to go through. André was lying on the straw, the soft bloom of his cheek laid, uncaring, in the dung. Jacob’s limbs were intertwined with his for warmth.
The adults in the room sat slumped against the walls, wakeful and talking in lowered voices. Somehow, the children were spared the last hours of the wait by their ability to fall asleep where they lay, to dream of other places.
It was still the low part of the night when Hartmann and the head of another staircase came into the room with coffee. Many of the adults refused to drink because they knew it meant breakfast, and therefore the departure. The children were at the deepest moments of their sleep.
Those who drank from the half dozen cups that circulated drank in silence. Then there went through the room a sudden ripple, a quickening of muscle and nerve as a sound came to them from below: it was the noise of an engine – a familiar sound to many of them, the homely thudding of a Parisian bus.
At once the gendarmes were in the room, moving quickly and violently, as though anxious to have them gone. Cowering, the adults clasped their cases and bundles and stumbled down the dark stairs out into the courtyard, where the sudden heat of searchlights flared up from the guard posts.
Five white-and-green municipal buses had come in through the main entrance, and now stood trembling in the wired-off corner of the yard. At a long table in front of the Red Castle, the commandant of the camp himself sat with a list of names that another policeman was calling out in alphabetical order. In the place where its suburban destination was normally signalled, each bus carried the number of a wagon on the eastbound train.
Many of the children were too deeply asleep to be roused, and those who were awake refused to come down when the gendarmes were sent up to fetch them. In the filthy straw they dug in their heels and screamed. They clung to walls and floors and bits of plumbing; they held on to one another and gripped the cold steps as they were dragged out beneath the thrashing truncheons. For every sound of wood cracking on bone they screamed more loudly in their frenzy not to leave.
The gendarmes staggered down with their arms full of children, blood on their truncheons, out into the sweeping light. Some of them were sobbing as they hurled their living bundles on to the ground and turned back into the building. In the glare of the hurricane lamps at his table, the police commandant’s face was drawn with impatient anguish.
André heard his name and moved with Jacob towards the bus. From the other side of the courtyard, from windows open on the dawn, a shower of food was thrown towards them by women wailing and calling out their names, though none of the scraps reached as far as the enclosure.
André looked up, and in a chance angle of light he saw a woman’s face in which the eyes were fixed with terrible ferocity on a child beside him. Why did she stare as though she hated him? Then it came to André that she was not looking in hatred, but had kept her eyes so intensely open in order to fix the picture of her child in her mind. She was looking to remember, for ever.
He held on hard to Jacob as they mounted the platform of the bus. Some of the children were too small to manage the step up and had to be helped on by gendarmes, or pulled in by grown-ups already on board.
André’s bus was given the signal to depart, but was delayed. A baby of a few weeks was being lifted on to the back, and the gendarme needed time to work the wooden crib over the passenger rail and into the crammed interior.
Eventually, the bus roared as the driver engaged the gear and bumped slowly out through the entrance, the headlights for a moment lighting up the café opposite before the driver turned the wheel and headed for the station.
When the last bus had gone, it was daylight and the cleaners went into the departure staircase, wearing clogs with high soles.
There were people going early to work or taking their dogs to the park on the straight road to the station. They looked curiously on the small convoy of buses that rumbled past, down the broad, empty street. They saw faces pressed against glass and, where the destination should have been, a number.
At Le Bourget-Drancy station there were German soldiers as well as gendarmes. In the milling turbulence of the platform, André Duguay held on hard to his brother and the suitcase which for once he had remembered.
The soldiers prodded the throng down to a siding, where there was a line of boxcars normally used for the transportation of horses. With a screaming of German words, they pushed and herded the sullen mass towards the doors.
Commuters on the main platform looked on, while the gendarmes, who had relinquished their charges to the German soldiers, shuffled from foot to foot and looked away from the local travellers’ puzzled gaze.
Jacob could not manage the height of the boxcar and had to be lifted by an adult. The inside of the wagon was crammed with standing people of all ages. There were two buckets, one of which held water and a cup.
As André clambered up, a German soldier took his case and threw it down the platform, where it joined a pile of bags and bundles that the soldiers told them they would not be needing. A woman in the wagon who spoke German translated to the others.
André and Jacob stood among the taller people, their vision blocked by coats and legs and bulky adult hips. Then a German soldier heaved the sliding door along its runners and bolted it.
It was by now a bright morning, and André could still see a little patch of cloud through an opening in the wagon. Then, from outside, came the noise of hammering, and the last glimpse of French sky was suddenly obliterated.
‘What was all that noise in the night?’ said Charlotte to the proprietress as she settled her bill.
‘The buses. Another load of them.’ The woman counted the notes carefully on the zinc-topped bar and slid them into the cash till.
‘I see. Where do they take them?’
‘To the station.’
Charlotte squared her shoulders and breathed in deeply as she stepped out into the winter morning. She walked a short distance to a large crossroads, where she saw people waiting for a bus. A few minutes later they were on their way, the big engine throbbing, the destination clearly marked.
Charlotte had slept late, and it was almost eleven o’clock by the time the bus crossed the railway bridge and deposited the passengers at the top of the slope down to the station. The next train into Paris was not for half an hour, and she had time to telephone ‘Félix’ on the number she had memorised.
She had no idea what sort of street the rue Villaret de Joyeuse was, though, being in the seventeenth arrondissement, on the western outskirts, it was likely to be filled with large semi-suburban apartment blocks rather than small cafés and cobbled yards. Félix agreed to be there at four in the afternoon to meet her, and Charlotte strolled out through the booking hall and on to the platform.
As she walked up and down, she glanced over to a siding, where she noticed a large number of apparently abandoned suitcases and bundles. After checking to see if anyone was watching her, she walked over to inspect them.
The contents of
the bags had spilled on to the platform. They were mostly old clothes, filthy or torn, odd shoes and the occasional child’s toy. Charlotte wondered if they had been rejected by their owners on some hygienic grounds: perhaps this was a rubbish dump waiting to be cleared. Then her eye was caught by something white that stuck out from under a grey woollen jacket. It was a bundle of unposted letters and cards.
Making sure once more that no one was watching her, Charlotte stooped down on the platform and picked them up.
Some were composed and thoughtful. Some were mere scribbles: ‘My dear parents, they’re taking us to work in Germany. I hope I will see you again soon’; ‘To whoever finds this card. Please, please post it to the right address, to my old Mayor who can save me.’
Others seemed heavy with knowledge. ‘We are being taken to the east. I embrace you, dear parents, with all my heart. Goodbye for ever.’
Charlotte put the little bundle in her pocket and stood up. Towards the end of the pile was a small suitcase with brass locks, canted over to one side, its mouth gaping. Inside was a soiled pair of boy’s shorts. Between the locks, on the front, a leather label that was glued to the case bore the word ‘CARITEAU’.
On the train, Charlotte found a compartment to herself, in which she looked at the letters. She did not like to read their contents too closely, but there was one she returned to twice, despite herself.
It was written in a sloping, educated hand, in blotted pale blue ink, with no crossings-out or corrections. It was the letter of a man to his daughter. The handwriting suggested someone in middle age, and the girl must have been in her late teens or older, to judge from the tone her father had chosen.
‘My dearest little Gisèle,
They allowed us some post last week and I was delighted to receive your card and to know that you and Maman are in good health. I too am extremely well and in excellent spirits. Alas, I am to be deported in the morning by train to a destination as yet unknown. I am going with plenty of old friends from Paris and I am very much hoping that I’ll find Charles and Léonore at the other end.
Charlotte Gray Page 47