Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  As Grandfather Dan was splitting his sides over the fate of Mme de Portes, the others spoke tentatively about Vichy and Pétain and the appointment of Xavier Vallat to the Committee for Jewish Affairs. The only time he was publicly anti-Semitic was when he’d called Léon Blum a Talmudist. That was not too rabid, and now he was insisting that internment ghettos had no place in modern life, so there were some grounds for hoping French Jews might not endure the fate of Germans. It was nerve-racking for the Katzes nevertheless, since Lev and Grandfather Isaac were German by birth and it said so on their French citizenship papers.

  It was not until May 1941, when the round-up of foreign-born Jews began, that the Katzes and Petrucellis started living in dread. Grandfather Grafman received a terrific shock in December when he was one of a thousand Jewish notables rounded up in reprisal for attacks on German soldiers. Fifty-seven were shot, but Pétain expressed his outrage and the rest were let go. In exchange for their freedom, a fine of one billion francs was levied on the Jewish community. There was now reason to fear the next step, which, if Germany was any guide, would be the freezing of bank accounts and the seizing of property.

  Then Vallat was sacked and replaced by Darquier de Pellepoix, whose noble name was invented but whose anti-Semitism was not, and there were real grounds for fear. The great irony was that the safest place for a Jew in France was in the Italian-occupied sector, where the Italians were actually protecting Jews. Synagogues were operating and Jews were going about their lives as normal.

  Moishe Petrucelli knew there’d be a round-up but he wasn’t alone in not knowing when. Fearing it would be soon, Lia Petrucelli sent her two youngest children to stay with the Katzes, since the Katzes at least had French citizenship and that had to be regarded as some protection. The first hint came on July 15th. The Committee for Jewish Affairs had co-opted Jewish women in Paris to prepare thousands of labels by attaching to them wrist-sized pieces of string. Believing foreign men would be rounded up first, Petrucelli went into hiding in a Masonic lodge with several other Italian Jews. He was wrong about the men being rounded up. The door-knocking started at 4 a.m. and Lia Petrucelli, with her two remaining children, must have been among the first people detained.

  It was still dark and the streets were deserted as the gendarmes and authorised civilians hassled the families from their homes. Youths from the Parti populaire français, wearing blue shirts, were among the groups mobilised for the job. Some civilian ‘helpers’ had even been issued with uniforms; the women’s were striped patriotically in red, white and blue. In areas where the Jewish communities were large, armed gendarmes blocked off the streets. Buses were parked in ranks at collection points.

  People were told to dress quickly and take enough provisions for the family for two days. Many a door had to be forced. More than once, women whose husbands had been arrested threw their children through windows and jumped after them. People cried out to warn each other.

  At five o’clock the round-up gangs were in the fifth arrondissement. There was banging on the Katzes’ door. It had been a night of little sleep and much worry. The Petrucelli children were in Allegra’s room, but how did the police know they were there? Or were they knocking up French nationals? ‘Police! Police!’ they called on the other side of the door. Allegra went. The Katzes weren’t there, she said, they’d gone away. She herself was an Italian citizen, an Aryan.

  The police appeared to accept her story and went away. Everyone dressed frantically; little loads of essential possessions were packed. More knocking. What could it be? Another gang to deal with? The Katzes huddled in Allegra’s room while she went to the door.

  An amiable gendarme stood there, a little embarrassed, with him two zealous youths, chucking their chins and cocking their heads. Yes, he was sorry to say, the Katzes were on the list, and he had information they were home. Allegra mustn’t conceal them or he had orders to take her too. It’d be all right. Yes, they’d probably be deported, but they’d be free to come back to Paris after the war. They were lucky. Other people were having their apartments boarded up, but they wouldn’t need to, would they? Not with Allegra living there.

  Why the Katzes? Allegra cried. They were French. French, like the gendarme himself. Behind her the youths had found the family in her room. They stood around politely, gawky in their shiny clothes, while the Katzes and the Petrucelli children filed into the hall. Her dearest friends.

  Well, where were they to be taken? Where? To a lycée, what lycée? Where after that? When?

  Come along now, Madame, don’t complicate things. It’ll all go much smoother if you do as we say. And as they left they kissed her, each of them, on both cheeks. Rivkah, Lev, Simone, Claude and the two young children. She tried to absent each of them, to separate them out, isolate and hide them, but what she could do in her head, she could not do in life.

  ‘It’s because of me!’ she cried after the gendarme, clawing his arm. ‘It has to be because they’ve been helping me, hasn’t it? I’ll go in their place, let me go in their place! They’re French, don’t you understand, French like yourself!’

  ‘The Winter Velodrome,’ he said, ‘that’s all I know.’

  Moishe Petrucelli, in his hiding place, had heard the screaming and shouting of women and children – so it would be all of them, his own, and the families of the men he was with. At eleven in the morning one of their protectors came to tell them Allegra Coretti had phoned. There were buses from all over Paris converging on the Winter Velodrome and others, carrying only adults, headed for the concentration camp at Drancy.

  Outside the Winter Velodrome rue Nélaton had been milling with buses since 6 a.m. Allegra had taken the Métro to La Motte-Piquet and done her best to find a vantage point where she could watch them disembarking. She was certain she must have missed the Katzes as she explored the streets around for somewhere to conceal herself and watch. Rue Nélaton was out of the question; it was guarded by mounted police and the houses there opened right onto the street. There was a railway bridge to one end of the street, but how would she climb that and watch unseen from there?

  It was about 8 a.m. when some workers at the Citroën factory in nearby rue du Docteur-Finlay started turning up for work. One of them told her they could see into the Velodrome from the factory, and let her come up with him. Three-quarters of an hour later she saw the Katzes, all of them, arrive. She waited another hour. No sign of Lia Petrucelli, but since everyone arriving appeared to have children with them, it seemed likely that family groups were going to be held here.

  She tried to think out what to do. The men at the Citroën factory were sympathetic and volunteered to take things into the Velodrome if they could.

  It was worth trying, but a better idea started forcing its way forward. She was going to try to convince a sympathetic lawyer she knew to bluff his way into the Velodrome, saying he needed the Katzes and Petrucellis to testify in court. They’d witnessed a crime, that was it, a crime.

  She rang up from the factory, but the man couldn’t be found and she would have to ring again later. She had a place from where she could see the buses arrive and another from where she could see into a small yard where there was a tap and people were queuing for water. She could see lots of people she knew, families she’d helped. She watched all day. By the time the factory was ready to close its doors for the night, the little yard with the tap in it was a quagmire. She had seen every sort of person arrive, those who couldn’t walk came on stretchers. Surely not? Surely not! People learnt later that even the dead had been rounded up.

  It did not last for a day, or the two days for which the families had been requested to prepare. Those detained in the Winter Velodrome on the 16th of July 1942 had to stay there for a week. The Winter Velodrome was built to take fifteen thousand spectators for an afternoon’s sport, not seven thousand people required to live there for a week. Of twelve lavatories and twenty-four urinals, only half could be used from the outset. At the end of the first day, battered by full summer
sun on a glass roof, the place was stinking, the urinals were overflowing, the lavatories blocked. The tap in the yard overlooked by the Citroën factory was the only source of water. Children started to go down with infections and adults began to lose their minds.

  On the third day, by which the Citroën workers were throwing bread into the yard and trying, but rarely succeeding, to deliver packages from relatives and friends during their lunch break, Claude Katz was evacuated with appendicitis.

  The Rothschild Hospital had long been a source of information about French concentration camps and deportations, because it was there that men from the camps were taken in cases of acute illness. At the end of a day during which Allegra felt she was being stonewalled whenever she tried to contact the lawyer, somebody brought the news that Claude Katz was there. Claude lived on for four more days, too ill to do more than struggle for her life. Allegra was torn between being at her side and trying to find the lawyer to get the Katzes out. But the shutters had come down on the lawyer; people pretended they didn’t know where he was or that he would be unable to see her, and she felt cast out and helpless. More so when Claude, beyond help, died of overwhelming infection.

  There was indecision among the Germans and bickering between them and the Vichy French over what was to happen to the children. Were they to be deported or not? Vichy said no, then said if children were to be deported, their mothers must be allowed to stay with them. There was also the question of seven hundred francs per deportee to be paid by the French to the Germans, some of whom were of the opinion that the French didn’t deserve to have their Jews removed for them. While great men fought over the niceties of deportation, conditions in the Winter Velodrome deteriorated to hell on earth and officials were refusing to work inside. Relocation of the inhabitants became a necessity.

  Whether to appease Vichy or simply to solve their own problems, the Germans ordered that both adults and children be taken to the concentration camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. From there the parents would be taken a few at a time to Drancy, and from Drancy they would go direct to Auschwitz. French officials would accompany them to the borders of the Reich. As for the children, they would follow when permission was granted by Eichmann. On the 29th of July that permission came.

  After the war there were two opinions given on the decision of the Vichy French to agree to the deportation of the children. If they were ignorant of the extermination program, then it may have been done as a humanitarian measure to unite the children with their parents at the fabled Jewish state in the east. If they knew of the existence of Auschwitz and had any idea of its purpose, then Vichy wanted the Germans to do for them a job they might well have considered doing themselves, had the fascists won the war.

  That German concentration camps were brutal was known seven years before the fall of France; people had been shot attempting to escape, they’d been shot for being disorderly or disobedient. Foreign journalists had visited Dachau and knew these things to be true. By the end of 1933, Hitler’s first year in office, the Nazis had established sixty-five camps, but Himmler complained of inefficiencies. Inefficiencies in camps for political prisoners and stateless people? What was meant by that? In what way could such camps be inefficient? Were there not enough mail bags being made, or whatever it was that political prisoners and stateless people made? Or did inefficiencies mean that the inmates weren’t getting enough food, shelter, warmth or equipment to keep the camps running smoothly? Or were the inefficiencies in that area which is forever with us, the area of processing people? Perhaps it wasn’t the inmates who were inefficient at all, but their jailers.

  Moishe Petrucelli was smuggled out of France by the Resistance the day Eichmann passed a death sentence on his wife and children. Allegra Coretti had left Paris by then. Her aim was to stay alive long enough to see her friends delivered from hell. It was not to be. With her Italian identification papers, she headed for the Italian occupied zone. Who knows whether she made it? More is known about the SS and the trouble they had commandeering closed trains, which, they complained, were being used to take soldiers to the eastern front instead of for the important job of deportation. Even supposing Allegra did reach the Italian sector, the fall of Italy saw a sell-out of the Jews and political subversives in the area. Informers were paid well by the SS, and it doesn’t take much to rationalise the forfeiture of someone else’s life for your own survival.

  The fate of those in the Winter Velodrome, of course, was more Rose’s story than Viva’s. Viva said she resisted knowing about it until she and Dadda eloped and they went to Europe.

  ‘We tried to find out about the ones whose fates weren’t known,’ she said, ‘but there was no trace of them.’

  It was well after midnight in Harry’s beach house when Viva finished telling me her part of the story. And Checkie, I asked, did she know the things Viva had told me? Did she know that Dadda was her father?

  Viva said Checkie grew up thinking she was Harry’s child. She knew now she was not, but when we first knew her she had understood herself to be Harry’s child.

  ‘Harry’s very proud of Checkie,’ said Viva, ‘and she loves him.’ Checkie was not told of her paternity until Viva left with Dadda.

  Harry told her, but he told her in a protective, gentle, fatherly way. Harry had then groomed Checkie to take over Siècle from him. As far as the Trust was concerned, Harry declared himself out of it when Dadda and Viva married, but before he withdrew, unknown to Viva, he and Reg Sorby had revised the Trust charter. Exempt now from the core collection were the works by Henry Coretti. This was because Harry and Reg thought Stella, Allegra and I should at least have a claim on them. Among these were the paintings Dadda had left with Rose for Checkie.

  When Harry said Viva and Checkie already had enough, he meant they had all the Halletts, the Sorbys and key pieces by other painters.

  Viva tried to convince Dadda to join the Trust in Harry’s place, but Dadda wouldn’t. He agreed with Reg and Harry that Stella, Allegra and I should now have the paintings that had been destined for Checkie, because Checkie was already extremely well provided for, her future assured as the eventual trustee for the Siècle collection. Not only would she be trustee, she would inherit a house in Toorak and the beach house when Harry died.

  Dadda hadn’t left an official will: rather, Gosper and Co. had cobbled his intentions together from letters and other things ‘in black and white’. We, being hot-headed, impatient and hurt, had never had our demand to see a will granted. In fact, in spite of some good advice, we’d compromised ourselves again and again legally.

  Viva felt bitter about the Corettis. It was one thing to have the most important of the Halletts, but quite another to have Dadda’s first Australian paintings.

  The Trust collection had been the joint idea of Viva and Harry, and between them they had decided it should include Dadda’s paintings. This was partly to keep Dadda’s presence in their lives low-key: they could distance themselves from him by including important pieces of his work with important pieces from other painters. In this way his work would always be available to Checkie, should she want to give it special attention. And on the whole, it seemed a good deal more worthwhile to create a collection such as this than to sit on important works of Australian art, knowing what they represented and yet doing nothing with them. The Trust and the story of Siècle and its painters would make a valuable cultural gift to Australia.

  When Siècle was the restaurant with the lollipop awning, Viva and Harry had amassed quite a lot of work, but they didn’t have a suitable place to store it. Then Laurent fell ill with cancer, and a decision had to be made about the restaurant. They decided to scrap it and buy up something for Rose and Laurent to live in so they could also caretake the paintings. This had prompted Harry to buy the brick duplex where Rose now lived, the collection being housed next door. Because Siècle was richer in assets than in cash, Rose and Laurent were given the right to sell certain of the paintings, always excepting the Hallett
s and the original collection of Corettis.

  When Dadda first showed at Siècle in 1961, Reg Sorby bought out the entire show and made it over to the Siècle Trust, partly as a gesture to his patrons and partly to avoid paying tax. There were already so many paintings in the collection, however, that the house next to Rose was overflowing.

  When Viva and Dadda eloped and Harry moved to Harcourt Lane, they began to store the overflow of paintings above Siècle.

  Then Rose and I made friends. Dadda had already told Rose that we didn’t have any of his work and he didn’t know how to give us any without causing offence. Rose talked it over with Reg, and Reg, who didn’t give a damn about offending people, started to manoeuvre work away from the Trust. He hid the core collection of Corettis up here, in his rural retreat. His idea was to hide them until some solution could be agreed upon. But The Brolga didn’t want me on the Trust, she wanted Dadda’s work to go to Checkie alone.

  Checkie told Viva that Reg was hiving off the Corettis and this culminated in a row during which Dadda started taking trips to Japan and to the desert. Dadda was on Reg’s side, but Viva was adamant about the paintings he had left for Checkie and, indeed, had a letter he’d written at the time saying that the paintings were all he had to give.

  When I asked Viva if it was true she had scattered Dadda’s ashes on Leslie Hallett’s grave, she said, ‘Yes. And I’ve written in my will that my ashes are to be spread there too.’

  ‘Who by?’ I found myself asking, suddenly angry with her. ‘Not by me.’ I thought of Checkie turning Bridget Kelly away from Dadda’s exhibition, of her rallying to the cause of David Silver when it suited her, of Viva manipulating David into taking legal action against us instead of helping Allegra salvage her dream, of Dadda’s death and the stupidities over the will – we had read the situation as the human drama it was, they had read it as a brittle testament. Technically, they were right, but emotionally, what were they? And then, too, I thought of Checkie’s tears at Allegra’s funeral. What were they all about? I thought of her taking Uncle Nicola’s diamond ring off Dadda’s finger and handing it to her mother. ‘I don’t want your ashes to lie with Dadda’s.’