by Gene Wilder
Tom pulled his chair next to hers, put his arm around her shoulders, and kissed her for such a long time that a crowd started to assemble around them. When Tom and Anna looked up, the crowd yelled, “Well done!”
“I’m so embarrassed,” Anna said.
“Thank you ladies and gents,” Tom said to the crowd. “Very kind of you. Our next performance will be in approximately ten minutes.” The audience applauded. Some were holding hands as they went back to their seats.
Tom held Anna’s hand and looked into her beautiful blue-green eyes. “After what he’s gone through for me, I just want to get Gilles out, Anna. I think the war is coming to an end soon and chances might be better now than they would have been a few months ago. Please trust me, dear. I will come back. If I didn’t it would ruin our marriage. So show me how tough you can be by staying here and waiting for me.”
Anna put her head on his chest and said in Danish, “Okay, min kaereste mand.” (Okay, my dearest husband.)
FORTY-FIVE
Brian Lewis held one of Tom’s arms and Claude Breton held the other as they approached the main gate to Camp Oberkirch. Brian and Claude were wearing dusty German uniforms. Tom was wearing typical French working clothes, with patches sewn over a few holes in his pants. He struggled and yelled at his “German captors” as he tried to get away.
“Laissez-moi aller vous connards muet. Je n’etais pas exploser quoi que ce soit!” (Let me go, you dumb assholes. I wasn’t trying to blow up anything!)
A guard came up to them. “What have you got here?” he said in German.
“A piece of junk. We caught him trying to blow up the railroad tracks nearby,” Brian answered in German.
“Give him to me. I know how to handle his kind,” the guard said. He slapped Tom three times across his face and kicked him in the balls. Tom slumped over.
“You both did good,” the guard said. Brian and Claude watched as the guard grabbed Tom’s arm and pulled him through the gate and into the death camp.
Tom, still in terrible pain, was pulled past the factory where POWs were working. He also saw that Oberkirch was a much larger camp than he had imagined.
“You’ll soon be in the factory with the other shits, and you’d better not try to work slow or I promise you will regret the punishment,” the guard said in German.
They arrived at several rows of POW barracks. Tom was pushed into the first one, which turned out to have hot and cold running water. He was sure that the beds were just old army beds that had begun to fall apart.
As the guard was leaving he said, “Obersturmführer Franz Stangl will see you shortly and you had better behave with him,” he said in German.
“Merci bien,” Tom muttered.
Twenty minutes later, after Tom washed his face and mouth with cold water and sat on his lumpy bed, Franz Stangl walked in. Tom stood up.
“What is your name?” Stangl asked in English.
“Mon nom est Charles Aznavour.”
“Oui? Monsieur Charles Aznavour? Voulez-vous chantez ‘La Mer’ pour moi, s’il vous plaît,” Stangl said in perfect French.
Shocked that Stangl could not only speak perfect French but also knew of Aznavour, Tom wasn’t sure what to do. So he began to sing: “La mer, qu’on voit danser le long des golfes clairs—”
“That’s enough. So you speak French, a little German, and … some English perhaps?”
“Yes, sir, because I live in Alsace,” Tom said.
“I see,” Stangl said. “Do you have many other Resistance friends from Alsace?”
“I teach music, sir. I’m not a fighter, I play the cello,” Tom said.
“I see. Come with me, Monsieur Charles Aznavour,” Stangl said as he walked out of the barracks.
Two guards were waiting outside to assist Stangl in case of trouble. With great difficulty, Tom tried to walk standing straight up as he followed him to the large factory that he had passed on the way to the barracks. Once inside the factory, Tom saw that hundreds of POWs were making long pipes on metal tables.
“Over here!” Stangl shouted.
As Tom approached Stangl, he saw Gilles Piccard facing him. Gilles’s body and face were so thin and his eyes looked as if they, too, were standing at attention, until he saw Tom. But Gilles didn’t make a sound.
“Do you know this man?” Stangl asked Tom.
“I don’t know him, sir … I think I met him once or twice,” Tom answered.
“Where?”
“In Alsace, sir. Waiting in line at the butcher shop, probably.”
“Do you know his name?”
“I only met him once, maybe twice. We didn’t exchange names.”
“And what is your real name, Monsieur Aznavour?” Stangl asked with the hint of a smile. “I’ll give you one minute to remember it.”
“Edmond Rochefort,” Tom answered.
“Good,” Stangl answered. “Now, I’ll ask you again.… Do you know this man?”
“I don’t know him, sir. I met him, I think in a butcher shop or in a line someplace, at the cinema maybe. I don’t honestly remember.”
“Gilles Piccard, do you know this man?”
“As he says, sir, I think we did meet someplace, but I don’t know where it was. He is certainly not a friend of mine, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, what I mean is, do you kill German soldiers together or blow up railroad tracks together. Things like that?”
“If I knew him, I would say so right now, so I could avoid any more beatings,” Gilles said, looking Tom in the eye.
Stangl looked at them both as if he were deciding. “All right Piccard, go back to work. Rochefort, go with those two guards and get your prison clothes. I wouldn’t want you to ruin your beautiful pants.”
* * *
WHEN TOM came back to his barracks that night, after eating something called dinner, he found a cello resting near his bed. A few minutes later Commandant Stangl walked in carrying a bow.
“The idiots brought you the cello I had in my office, but they forgot the bow. The cello was from one of the prisoners we had who died a few weeks ago. Maisky was a good musician. Would you please play something for me … Bach, if you are acquainted with his work?”
Tom took the bow from Stangl, sat on the edge of his lumpy bed, and placed the cello between his legs. He felt the strings several times, looked up at Stangl, and then played the Prelude from Bach’s “Cello Suite No.1.”
Stangl didn’t smile and didn’t look at Tom as he played. He just turned his head to one side as he listened. When Tom finished, Stangl got up, nodded his head up and down a few times and said, “Thank you. I’ll have my officers pick up the cello and bow. Auf Wiedersehen.”
FORTY-SIX
During his second day of working in the factory, Tom met nine friends of Gilles Piccard. Each one passed by slowly and said, “Bonjour La Mer.” Tom smiled and realized that the nine men who greeted him must have been Gilles’s French Resistance friends.
While Tom was working, if it was clear that no one was near enough to hear him, Tom spoke softly to one of the friends. “Why in the world are we installing pipes onto the ceiling and through a wall?”
“In order to kill people in the gas chamber they’ve built next door,” the friend answered. “The gas is supposed to go through these fucking pipes and through the wall, but I don’t think it will go through because we’ve been loading stones into the pipes to block the gas. If you want to help us, then make sure the bastards don’t see you putting stones in the pipes.”
A guard came by and said, “If you talk to each other again instead of working, you won’t get food tonight.”
“That would be a pleasure,” Tom said to himself.
* * *
WHEN SIX hundred male prisoners sat down to eat dinner in the commissary that night, Tom decided it was safe enough to sit near Gilles.
“One of your friends told me about filling the pipes to block the gas,” Tom said softly while he ate his small share of s
tale bread with a thin and grainy sour soup. “It sounds like a good idea but where do we get the stones?”
“On the ground all over the camp,” Gilles said. “Put the bigger ones in your pants and the smaller ones in your shoes.”
* * *
OVER THE next few days, Tom’s body got weaker. He thought he would become stronger from all the pipe lifting, but maybe building muscle takes more time. Instead of sleeping better, each night he was sleeping less—partly from exhaustion and partly from dreams of Anna, looking so beautiful, and then being whipped and raped by Nazis, which would cause him to wake up immediately. Then he would lie in his rotten bed wondering if he would ever see her again.
On the day of the big gas chamber test, all the prisoners were given a short break and allowed a cup of water while Stangl’s next-in-command, Kurt Hubert Franz, took joy in explaining to the prisoners what was going to happen.
“Thirty Jewesses have undressed in a clearing in the woods, which has been roofed over,” Franz said with a smirk. “Right now they are being herded by the SS into our new gas chamber. When the doors have been closed, we shall see if all of our hard work will be successful. Come outside,” he announced.
The prisoners were guided out of the factory by the guards and placed in front of the gas chamber doors, which had been closed. After fifteen minutes the doors were opened and the women’s corpses were removed by a group of Jewish workers. Eighteen-year-old Katrina Deen was the youngest victim. Some of the prisoners threw up. As Tom watched the women’s bodies being carried past him, he felt so humiliated that he couldn’t move his feet, until a guard finally shoved him into motion with the butt of his rifle.
* * *
TOM LOADED more and more stones into the pipes. Whenever mealtime came, Tom felt that the food was almost not worth eating. Some of the prisoners went outside and ate the grass. After two weeks Tom began eating grass regularly. Soap, toothpaste, and toothbrushes were unheard of.
Tom came into contact with what he called a few of the Jewish Lads, who were treated brutally by the officers. Tom, with Gilles’s nine friends, would steal any food they could and leave it hidden where it could be seen by the Jewish workers in the factory. If Tom and his friends were caught stealing, they knew that the punishment would be severe.
One afternoon, while Tom, Gilles, and the nine Resistance friends were working in the technical camp along with some other prisoners, an SS officer started beating a particularly frail Jew, who was maybe sixty years old. Then he was pushed into one of the other prisoners. The Jew was so outraged that he walked up to the SS officer, insulted him, and then spat in his face. The officer was so outraged that he quickly pulled out his gun, but when he saw that the other prisoners surrounded the Jew and wouldn’t move without a fight, he returned his gun to its holster.
Tom became aware of partisans from the local town who were willing to accept a small amount of money to work each day in the camp. They were also willing to sabotage the Nazi efforts. One of the partisans offered to smuggle in some radio parts—which Tom was desperate to get—in return for chocolate and cigarettes, which the partisan craved and which a few prisoners—who were not French or Jewish—received from their families.
After a few days, Tom believed he had enough radio parts to send messages. But on his way back to bed Tom saw that all of the prisoners in the area were being searched. He couldn’t just drop the radio parts that the partisan gave him because it would certainly be seen, and he couldn’t run because he was being watched by an SS officer, the same officer who Tom had seen beating up the frail Jewish man.
The radio parts were discovered and Tom was grabbed by a guard and taken before a senior officer who was sitting behind a large desk. When he refused to give away the partisan’s name, Tom was beaten and thrown into a cell, where his hands were tied together behind his back and then suspended from the ceiling for thirty minutes. He was certain he was going to die. But despite having several fractured ribs, plus hands and arms so injured that he was afraid it was the end of cello playing forever, he was taken back to his barracks and allowed to live.
Why? Tom couldn’t understand it. There was no reason. When he lay down on his bed, the only image that came into his mind was Anna’s pink bow.
FORTY-SEVEN
Given one day to rest, Tom was ordered back into the factory. Franz Stangl greeted him that night, just after Tom came back to his bed to lay down.
“I heard that you were disturbed by the killing of those thirty Jewesses. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Tom said without fear.
“Here is a lesson for you to learn. Poles, Gypsies, Dutch, French, and Russians were not killed. But Jewish Poles, Jewish Gypsies, Jewish Dutch, Jewish French, and Jewish Russians will be eliminated. You can tell that to your friends.”
“I will. I promise you that,” Tom said.
“Good,” Stangl said. “And would you like to know why you’re still alive?”
Tom sat up. “Yes, I would like to know why.”
“First of all, on the day we met you told me that your name was Charles Aznavour, whose music I am very familiar with. He is also Jewish. I’m sure you knew that, but your arrogance probably assured you that I wouldn’t. Second, the guards told me that you are circumcised, so I knew for sure that you were Jewish. Third, because you helped feed the Jewish workers. And fourth because you got the radio parts from a partisan whose name you were brave enough not to reveal.”
Tom was astonished by what he was hearing, but even more baffled by why he was still alive.
“So—” Franz Stangl said like an egotistical history professor, “why are you here? Why am I even talking to you? The simplest reason is because I admire you for your courage, even though I’m sure you hate me. But the true reason … is that, like a good German, I love music. When you played Bach for me I realized that you were quite a good cellist. And when I found out that my next in command had you suspended with your hands tied behind your back, I ordered him to have the rope cut down immediately. So you don’t have to thank me for being alive.… You must thank Schumann, Beethoven, Wagner, Mendelssohn, Bach, Mozart, and Richard Strauss. They were also good Germans, and they are the reason why you are a living Jew in a German concentration camp. Auf Wiedersehen.”
FORTY-EIGHT
The next day, a German engineer declared that they were going to carry out a pressure test on the pipes that would carry the gas to the gas chamber. The prisoners stood frozen. “Oh, merde!” Gilles said. “No chance these pipes are going to pass the test. Not now with all those stones we’ve stuffed in there.” All the prisoners looked at the smiling faces of the officers. “Those bastards know what we’ve done,” Gilles said.
The officers started lining up all of the prisoners against a wall, ready to shoot them when the test failed. Some of the prisoners started to pray, some hugged each other. Then the sound of the air raid siren suddenly blasted throughout the factory. All of the officers and guards, and then the prisoners, ran out of the factory and into the air raid shelter outside. When they heard the bombs starting to fall, Tom, Gilles, and their French Resistance friends sat together in the shelter, holding hands.
After twenty-five minutes, the attack was over. Everyone went outside and the prisoners saw that the bombs that hit the factory had also blown up the gas chamber. Amid the quiet, “Bravos” and “Fantastiques” whispered by his friends, the only words that went through Tom’s head were: Colonel Hartley.
The camp was being bombed regularly now, day after day. Tom and Gilles and their friends stole pistols and ammunition from the dead and dying officers and guards. They shot the ones near them who were still alive. Their strategy was to kill as many of the SS as they could and then walk out of the main gate, except Gilles was discovered missing. Tom feared for the worst until Gilles returned looking frustrated.
“Where the hell have you been?” Tom asked. “I was afraid you were killed or captured.”
“I went to Commandant Stangl�
��s office to shoot him, but he wasn’t there. Let’s get out of here.”
When they walked out of the prison and into the open camp, there were more SS officers and guards waiting to fire at all the prisoners on sight. With Gilles’s help, Tom ran toward the woods as fast as he was able to, but he kept falling.
Brian and Claude shouted to them from the woods: “Here! Over here!… To your right! DON’T STAND UP—THEY CAN SEE YOU IF YOU STAND—CRAWL!”
Brian continued screaming while he and Claude fired their submachine guns at every SS officer and Nazi guard in sight.
Tom and Gilles tried to crawl on their knees, but the bullets were coming too close to their bodies. “LOWER!—CRAWL ON YOUR BELLIES!” Brian shouted.
“Sur le ventre!” Claude yelled in French.
Tom and Gilles began to crawl on their bellies as fast as they could, pulling their bodies forward with their hands and pushing with their feet without raising their bodies. They inched their way until they finally reached the beginning of the woods, but they kept crawling until they heard Claude yell, “Bravo!” When they were in far enough, they both stood up and hugged each other. Then the four men made their way deeper into the woods.
Three hundred of the six hundred prisoners who tried to escape made it out of the camp that day and into safety.
FORTY-NINE
Tom was sitting on a table in the doctor’s office a week later, wearing only his underwear, when Colonel Hartley walked in.
“You look a wreck,” the colonel said.
“Thank you, sir. And thank you for sending the RAF to bring us home.”
“You’re very welcome,” Colonel Hartley said. “You’re a lucky son of a gun. Doc says your ribs are fractured, not broken.”
“I knew that, Colonel. I was a medic, remember? What about my hands?”
“He said that if you take it easy for a while and start eating again you’ll be as fit as a fiddle. Maybe even a cello.”
“Colonel … how did you know where and when to bomb?”
