Asylum

by Moriz Scheyer

  Holding the photograph in front of him with both hands, he seemed to be thinking very hard. His ears burned. Suddenly he started to sob in despair, and ran away.

  After that, whenever I had to write letters, Herschel was nowhere to be seen.

  At the beginning of July we heard that a number of invalids above the age of 55, who had already been examined three times by the doctor from the Prefecture, were to be released. It was not the first such rumour that had circulated, and I gave it little credence. One evening, however, after his report to the camp commandant, Friedezky said to me, with great happiness: ‘I believe that you will be able to go home tomorrow.’ I remained sceptical, if only to avoid too great a letdown.

  But the next morning the Adjutant-Chef called for me and said, without any explanation, ‘One o’clock in front of the camp command, with your paquetage.’

  Now I did believe–with the result was that I was completely unable to pack my bundle. Everything fell out of my hands. Friedezky and Pollak saw to the paquetage for me. It was a last act of friendship, and one performed quite without envy.

  I was indescribably happy; at the same time I would have dearly loved to hide my face from the others, whom I had to leave.

  After even a few days in a concentration camp you begin to look like a tramp, a clochard. Or, indeed, like a convict. Neglected, unwashed, ragged. You often hear people say: ‘He looks like a criminal.’ Such phrases are bandied about by the fortunate–those on the outside–and they are bandied about quite thoughtlessly and irresponsibly. After eight days, each and every one of them, too, would ‘look like a criminal’.

  On the day of the ‘Examination of My Situation’ I had been wearing a tie; this, of course, was long since in ribbons.

  Just before I left the hut, a young fellow inmate called Anton Bilder came up to me, a labourer, whom I know only very slightly. ‘Quartier Latin,’ he said, addressing me with some embarrassment, ‘if you are going home now, you can’t turn up in front of your wife without a tie on. Here,’ and he pulled a brand new tie out of his pocket, ‘I have brought something for you.’

  Once more the thought went through my mind, with burning remorse: how much we neglected–before the great persecution came upon us–how much human goodness we simply passed by, careless, arrogant…

  At 1 p.m. we were lined up in front of the camp command: twenty out of 1,800. We and our paquetage were subjected to a meticulous examination. The captain then appeared and made a short speech, in which he emphasised that we had had an extraordinary favour bestowed upon us, and warned us that we must show ourselves worthy of it.

  In other words: we were offenders who had been granted a pardon, and we were being warned not to offend again. But what was this offence that we must not commit again? The offence of being Jewish?

  Friedezky, Stern and Pollak had got permission to accompany me as far as the camp command. I took my leave of them.

  We then marched, in rows of four, with two gardes at our head, on past the last barbed-wire fence, and out of the gate.

  In the street were a couple of children who smiled at us and shouted, ‘Bonne chance!’

  Our escort took us to the central square in Beaune, and then turned back. We were free. We nonetheless did not dare to sit down in a café. The ‘look of a criminal’ was still with us–it was inside us.

  One hour later the bus from Orléans to Paris came by. It seemed quite possible that I might not survive the journey in this overcrowded vehicle.

  At eight in the evening we were in Paris, at the Place Denfert-Rochereau. Half an hour later I rang the bell of our apartment.

  It was my wife who opened. She cried out loud.

  After which it was quite a while before any of us–she, Sláva or I–could utter a word.

  16

  Another stay of execution

  IN THE PERIOD IMMEDIATELY AFTER my release, I experienced a kind of second childhood. Ordinary things were wonderful to me–things like a bed, an armchair, a plate, clean laundry, warm water, a lavatory. I had to get used to these pleasures all over again. But I may say that since that time I have not got so used to any of them that I take it for granted. The concentration camp’s School of Humility taught me that lesson, too.

  And yet I could not be completely happy in my ‘freedom’. A criminal who has completed his sentence is free. A Jew under the Swastika has never completed his sentence; it has been at best suspended. True, they had given me a document of release at Beaune; but this was just a piece of paper.

  One fine day in September the entire 11th arrondissement was sealed off by police, and a furious hunt for Jews commenced on the streets and in the houses. Anyone who could not provide proof of his Aryan status was taken to the concentration camp of Drancy, which had already acquired appalling notoriety. It was there that the two German monsters, Brunner and Bruckner, competed with each other in torture.

  By a great stroke of luck I happened not to be in the 11th arrondissement on that particular day. But the raids became more and more frequent, now in one place, now in another. Metro stations, too, were sealed off with increasing frequency while searches for Jews took place. It soon reached a point where no Jew leaving his house could be certain that he would return to it in the evening. And of course home was not safe either. Nowhere was safe.

  I thought sometimes of my comrades in Beaune, and said to myself: at least they have it all behind them; nothing more can happen to them.

  Alas–we shall see what could still happen to them.

  What were we to do? I was so tired, so worn down, that left to myself I would have resigned myself to my fate, and let events take their course. Let what will be be. My wife, however, was not going to give up, and she insisted that we try to reach the Unoccupied Zone. In the end I agreed. A relative of ours, Mrs Rosa Ornstein, and two couples of our acquaintance, named Ciprut and Dreyfus, decided to join us in the adventure.

  An adventure which began in Paris itself: Jews were strictly forbidden to leave their place of residence, or to use the railways. There were almost daily police checks on travellers at the railway stations. Any Jews caught there went straight to Drancy. And, compared with Drancy, Beaune appeared to have been a paradise…

  We decided to try our luck on 10th November 1941. A passeur, ‘Monsieur Pierre’, had agreed to smuggle us over the Demarcation Line at a cost of 3,000 francs per person. His ‘mission’, though, began only at the Line itself. That far we had to get on our own.

  With one small piece of hand luggage each, we once again abandoned our ‘home’. Once again we did not know where we would spend the next night. In Drancy? In a prison on the Demarcation Line? In the Free Zone?

  I will confine myself to a brief summary of these events. At the Gare d’Austerlitz we were fortunate enough to board the train for Bordeaux. There was indeed a police squad hunting for Jews that morning, but fortunately they were on another train. We had been told to get out at Coutras, about an hour before Bordeaux: there the passeur would be waiting for us. We could, of course, have encountered another police check at any point on the way, and the shortest stop at a station seemed to us to last for ever. Finally, however, we arrived at Coutras in one piece, where we were met–after going through every imaginable precaution–by Monsieur Pierre. There were a number of Germans hanging around on the platform.

  17

  ‘Zone libre’

  AND SO THE EXPEDITION BEGAN. First, several kilometres in a car to the edge of a forest. Then three hours on foot by secret paths, through thick undergrowth and woods. This area was known to be patrolled by police with dogs.

  During a short rest the noble Monsieur Pierre requested that we make a small extra payment, of 200 francs per person, for the car that would take us from the Line to the small town of Mussidan, about ten kilometres away. We paid. The passeur had thus taken almost 2,600 francs from our group alone.

  We finally arrived at a street, which we crossed at a run. Monsieur Pierre came to a halt, and announced sole
mnly: ‘You are now on the soil of Free France!’ There was at least no additional charge for this brief announcement. A car was waiting for us in front of a farmhouse, and at nine in the evening we were in Mussidan.

  Next morning we had to report to the police. We had incurred a penalty, because we had not acquired a visa de départ; which is to say that we had not in advance advised the Germans, from whom we were fleeing, of our flight.… At the end of our hearing the official smiled as he asked us: ‘Who was the passeur–Monsieur Pierre?’ I assented. ‘How much?’ he then asked; ‘3,000?’–‘No, 3,200.’–‘I see.’ He noted down the amount. It was obvious that the police were silent participants in this business.

  We had been asked to which département we intended to go. We wanted to get to the Koflers’, who lived in Voiron, in the Isère. It was explained to us that we would have to stay provisionally in the Dordogne, since the permission of the Prefecture of Isère would have to be granted first. A gendarme would now accompany us to Ribérac, and hand us over to the court with the relevant jurisdiction, which would decide the punishment for our lack of visa. From Ribérac we would then be brought to Périgueux, and there the police would assign us to a compulsory temporary residence within the département…

  This, then, was the Free Zone. Still, at least we could breathe again; and to be spared the sight of Germans was in itself a release.

  We had sent a telegram to Pierre Vorms, who had settled in Guiraud, near Belvès in the Dordogne, informing him of our arrival in Mussidan; and on the very same day we had the joy of meeting our old friend and his wife. They came with us to Ribérac.

  Here we were brought before the procureur in the courthouse, who began by giving us a fearful dressing-down, and talked of the need for appropriate punishment. If this exodus of Jews to the Free Zone doesn’t stop soon, he said in conclusion, completely different measures will have to be adopted. We then had to pay bail of 3,000 francs per person, as the case against us would not be heard for at least a month. Finally, we had to pay for an ‘advocate’: another 500 francs each.

  We then drove, still accompanied by gendarmes, to Périgueux. There we were received at the Commissariat Spécial by a commissaire, an Alsatian by the name of Mincker, who made it abundantly clear by every word and look that he bestowed upon us, how much it pained him to have to deal with these Jews. He nonetheless refrained from open insult, and even, on Pierre Vorms’ request, condescended to give us Belvès as our compulsory temporary residence. (Belvès is a small town on the train line from Périgueux to Agen.)

  The next day, then, we were able to travel–this time without gendarmes!–to Belvès, where we rented a room in the Hotel Sarthou.

  We no longer had a home; and our only possessions at the moment were the most basic necessities in terms of clothes and linen. But what of that: we were in the Free Zone! We had escaped from the Swastika–or so we believed.

  What a fond illusion.

  Belvès is a small, cosy, old-world town picturesquely situated on a hill, seeming to cling on to its steep slopes. From whichever direction you approach, it presents an enchanting prospect, reminding one of certain hill top towns in Tuscany. The surrounding country is enchanting, too; it is a part of the Périgord that casts its own peculiar spell, one that never seems to wear off. The landscape, with its wooded hills and slender, elegant rows of poplars in the valleys, has a lovely, though somewhat harsh, attraction. The air is mild, but strong; the light clear, but full of subtle shades. You are not quite in the South, and yet you already sense its presence. ‘Midi moins le quart’10–‘a quarter to the South’–is the local expression. A little bit of the earth that you can’t help falling in love with.

  We had nowhere to call home any more; but within a short space of time we began to feel almost at home in Belvès.

  Of course we could never have guessed, then, all that we still had to go through. And we certainly could never have guessed that, here in Belvès, human beings would come into our lives of a kind that we had never before encountered.

  Human beings to whom, in the final reckoning, we owe the fact that we are still alive. Without them we would have perished a long time ago.

  And yet it is not just our physical survival that we owe to them. If there had not been human beings like this, too, along our path, I believe that I would not have been able to endure the misery, the depression produced by the horrors of Hitler’s world. How well I could understand Stefan Zweig,* whom I was bound to by long, long years of friendship. I learned of his death one day in Belvès, through a newspaper report, which consisted of a single line: ‘The Jewish author Stefan Zweig has committed suicide in Brazil.’

  True, he was living far, far away, in Brazil. True, he was fêted and honoured in his exile. True, too, that he was at the peak of his fame and his creative powers. And yet, one day, he could not carry on any longer, and departed voluntarily from this life. Incomprehensible? No. The Age of Hitler had finally ground the ‘Jewish author’ down. The Brazilian authorities gave Stefan Zweig a state funeral. But before that he had gone to the grave in the deepest despair, and taken his deepest convictions into that grave with him.

  Belvès is a small place, and we didn’t go out much. We were nonetheless able to form a picture of the mentality of the ‘Free Zone’ at this time; in fact, life in a hotel was in a way rather informative. In addition to the long-term residents there was a constant flow of people passing through; and the conversations one would hear in the dining room were quite revealing in this respect.

  Those in the zone libre had not been made to feel the consequences of the War very acutely; even food shortages were much less significant here than in the occupied territory. There was also, of course, the fact that the population was spared the physical sight of Germans in uniform.

  The result was a fairly widespread feeling of indifference. People had adjusted to the défaite; it was an accident of nature; no one could be blamed for it. Pétain’s propaganda dressed up the humiliation in the high-sounding slogans of the ‘Révolution Nationale’, all of which ended with the same refrain: ‘Give Marshall Pétain your support, and everything will be all right!’ Whatever went on in the rest of the world, even in that very nearby part of it, the Occupied Zone, was of little concern to people. Their attitude was one of accommodating themselves to the défaite as comfortably as possible, rather in the way that one accommodates oneself to an apartment which is undeniably smaller, but nevertheless quite acceptable.

  Nor should it be forgotten that the zone libre, too, bristled with all varieties of collaborative fauna–all prepared to make common cause, and common business, with the German Reptile. Nor, indeed, that Vichy, capital city of treachery, was in the zone libre too.

  About a month after our arrival we were sitting down one evening at dinner in the hotel dining room. Someone had turned on the radio, on which Vichy was broadcasting the ‘Radio-Journal de France’. Suddenly we heard the report: ‘In Paris there has been another attack on a German solider. The occupying powers have arrested twenty-five hostages, Jews and communists, who will be executed tomorrow, if the guilty party does not come forward.’ The speaker then carried on: ‘The French government has furthermore decided to place all foreign Jews who entered France after 1936 in concentration camps, irrespective of whether they are in the Occupied or in the Free Zone.’

  Our fellow diners paid no attention at all and continued their meals calmly. What concern was that of theirs? For us, though, the breathing space was over–yet again. This one had lasted just a month.

  So, then: this was it. The release from Beaune-la-Rolande… the flight across the Demarcation Line… all for this. This was the freedom of ‘France Libre’.

  Once again, we had simply exchanged one trap for another. And once again we began to live from one day to the next, from one hour to the next. Again the constant expectation of the moment when they would come to get us. Whenever we saw a policeman, a shiver went down the spine: ‘Now–this time this is it!’ The ge
ndarme would pass by; we would breathe again. It had not been this time–it had been put off a little longer.

  And so the days went by, and the days turned into weeks. Christmas… New Year 1942. We were still in our room; we still had a bed to go to at night. But the uncertainty allowed us not one moment of peace.

  In the main street of Belvès there is a hairdresser’s by the name of Tabart. One of the assistants who sometimes served me there seemed rather to stand out–a handsome lad of about eighteen, with strikingly fine, delicate features and deep brown eyes.

  One time we started talking. The young man was called Jacques Rispal;* his father was a decorator, and his mother ran a hardware store in Rue du Fort. I spoke to Pierre Vorms, who had previously set up an amateur theatre in Belvès with some of the youth, and he described ‘Jacquot’ Rispal as the most gifted member of his troupe. ‘That boy could really amount to something,’ was his opinion.

  I began to be interested in the young man. On a couple of occasions he visited me in the hotel in the evening, and we talked about everything under the sun. I was struck by his intelligence, his interest in cultural matters, his open outlook. But above all I sensed in the boy a truly fine human being. Here was sensitivity, idealism, an unerring–often furious–sense of justice, not to be deceived by any propaganda. There was, too, a profound goodness of heart, and a remarkable capacity for empathy with others–all the more extraordinary in one so young, one who had not yet experienced any real suffering. He hated the Germans, hated anti-Semitism; and he expressed these sentiments openly, not only in the presence of Jews and refugees.

  One day he invited me to visit him at his parents’ house; and after this visit the boy’s character seemed to me less inexplicable. His mother was an attractive, elegant woman, who combined the most heartfelt generosity with the greatest tact and sensitivity; his father a true revolutionary at heart, and had for many years been a militant communist.