Alex's Wake

by Martin Goldsmith

  Dear Günther, dear Rosemarie, many thanks for your kind and interesting letter. I’m sure you want to know right away what our current emigration prospects are, and so I will begin with that. The authorizations received from Washington, even for those under the German quota, are slowly increasing in number. Thus one day we might also be among them. In any case, we are obtaining the necessary documents so that in case of a “Convocation” we don’t lose any time. We have already received the police certificates of good conduct from Martigny-les-Bains and Montauban, but we are still waiting for the extract from the police records for which we have already paid the Vichy fees. ‘Wait!’ continues to be our slogan.

  When we received your letter I was lying in the infirmary, silent as a fish. A very capable young specialist from here removed my tonsils on April 24th. For a couple of days I was not allowed to speak or eat anything except ice. But in the meantime I’ve recovered quite well, which I owe in large part to the Quakers, who saw to it that I had canned milk and sugar. I am glad that it’s finally been done!

  I can understand why you are happy to have made such a good start with the Southern Symphony Orchestra, but I am also very curious to hear about your other activities. The things you write about Negroes in the southern states is very interesting. I can well understand that it would seem strange. Here in southern France one also sees quite a few Negroes who seem to enjoy equal rights socially. Besides the many altogether smart-looking black soldiers, one sees various colored people with fine facial features and hands who often seem to be involved in a variety of intellectual professions. As for my personal attitude toward Negroes and other colored people, I have always tried to see primarily the human being in every homo sapiens. I must admit that it has always been especially unpleasant for me when, as a ‘captive,’ I had to obey a black guard. But perhaps that is also a natural reminder of an ever-present national consciousness.

  However things stand, we have to be thankful at least to be here, where to be sure we’re not safe and where we are concentrated in camps, but without being subjected to anti-Semitism or persecution. What a lot we’ll have to tell one another once we’re all sitting around the same table again!! How much longer? Sometimes I think it will all be over sooner than we generally suppose, at least in Europe. But I can’t understand why you spent two days in Philadelphia at the invitation of a former colleague, whereas you didn’t even take two hours to see the beautiful city of Washington! We hear again and again that something can actually be accomplished there through the personal intervention of relatives. Possibly those involved had ways and means you don’t have. But the chance that you could have interested someone in our case was surely not so remote that a stay of more than two hours would not have been worthwhile. You have to admit this is true and you must understand that we were very disappointed!

  There’s still a lot I could write you, to say nothing about the things one can only say face to face! I don’t want us to have to go through another winter under these conditions, especially when I think of Father, but there have been frequent periods when he had even less resistance than he has now. Please let us hear from you regularly. We wait so anxiously for word from you, and the days when we receive good news are always the most beautiful! Love, yours, Helmut

  In early June, George and Rosemary returned to New York. Almost immediately, George wrote to Washington, requesting a meeting with an immigration official to discuss the case of his relatives in France. Within ten days, he received a reply, informing him that an appointment had been arranged for the second week in November. On June 7, Max Markreich again petitioned the Refugee and Immigration Division of Agudath Israel. In filling out yet another lengthy form, he wrote on the line marked “Destination in United States and Purpose of Entrance”: “New York, later Middle West. Beginning of a new life.”

  A few days later, my father received another envelope from Les Milles that contained letters from both Alex and Helmut, dated June 9, 1942.

  Dear Günther and Rosemarie,

  Your description of the city of Columbia, its landscape and people, interested me very much. It reminded me somewhat of the novel “Gone With the Wind,” which of course takes place for the most part in and around Atlanta (Georgia). Fortunately, I can report to you that we are both well. Helmut has recovered from his tonsil operation and has recuperated. For about 4 weeks now he has been working 5 days a week in the Quaker kitchen which was recently set up for about ⅓ of the camp inmates. His bonus, on top of the basic portion of food, benefits me too. For about the same time I have been on barrack room duty for about 60 people living in our room, for which I get a small payment with which I can buy about 1 kilogram of dried peas a week. I pick up and distribute meals and bread (more than 38 stops) and receive a food bonus, although in many cases it’s scarcely worthwhile but still does make a difference. After having been so worn down at the beginning of spring, I now feel better and weigh, dressed, about 120 pounds. That’s still far too little but I hope to be able to catch up again. If I can’t gain more weight, I don’t think I will be able to live through a fourth winter.

  About 8 days ago we received 2,150 Francs through the Quaker office in Marseille, without any indication of who the sender was. Since I assume you are responsible, I thank you very, very much. With the money we bought, because it was urgently necessary, a suitcase, a pair of used shoes for Helmut, and a hat for me—for I haven’t had one for two years.

  Dear Günther, I don’t wish to sound ungrateful for this gift, but it occurs to me again that if you really knew our situation you would have helped us even more long ago. You had decent engagements for months, and if you had put away 50 cents for us every day during that time it would have helped us immensely. You surely want us to come over; but if I am no longer able to support Mother and myself because of ill health and lack of strength, then I don’t want to become a burden to my children. You have seen to it that we received another affidavit, for which we are grateful. But if you had personally gone to the State Department Immigration Office on your way through Washington in May, we would probably have had our visas long ago and perhaps we’d be in the same position as others on whose behalf personal efforts were made.

  I have described our situation for you several times. This will be the last time. If you don’t move heaven and earth to help us, that’s up to you, but it will be on your conscience. It won’t be long before Helmut, who is still growing, will no longer be able to exist under the present conditions without permanent damage—this is a fact, and no words need be wasted on it. I find it very touching: often he has literally divided his last piece of bread with me. I have been very frank today, and I would regret it if you were angry with me, but an honest word can also be binding rather than divisive.

  In the last few days we have had hot weather here; the vermin plague, in particular fleas and bedbugs, has become very severe. Helmut, undaunted, continues to work at the big cooking kettles in spite of the heat. Today he had a day off and slept almost all afternoon after going to his book-binding course in the morning. It has been reliably reported that those over 60 will be released if 9,000 francs are deposited for their livelihood. But I want to stay with Helmut in the hope that the hour of freedom will ring for us in the not-too-distant future. For today, many loving regards and good wishes. Yours, Father

  On the back of the first sheet of Alex’s letter were these lines from Helmut:

  Dear Rosemarie and dear Günther,

  Since Father has already reported to you in detail, I just want to add my warm regards and good wishes. I’m sure we’ll get a letter from you in the next few days; we’re eagerly waiting for it! Perhaps we shall receive the long-awaited Visa! Father is counting on it. Oh, what stories we could tell you then!! I’m sure I don’t have to emphasize that Father and I help each other out wherever we can and on the whole we are good friends.

  That’s all for today. Next time I’ll write more! Yours, Helmut

  If everything suddenly works out,
we could arrive at your place a few weeks after this letter reaches you!

  It would be the last letter from his father and brother that my father would receive.

  For some months, French Minister of State Pierre Laval had made no secret of his distaste for the so-called “undesirables,” the foreign refugees, most of them Jews, who had made their way into France since the persecutions in Germany and Austria in 1938 and the massive German defeat of the Low Countries in 1940. In a memo sent to French diplomats, Laval declared that “the population of Hebrew stock has reached an excessive proportion”; they “form a manifestly dangerous element” who “engage in the black market and in Gaullist and communist propaganda, constituting for us a source of trouble to which we must put an end.” “The only way to conjure away this danger,” Laval concluded, was “to repatriate these individuals to Eastern Europe, their country of origin.”

  The French conjuring began on Jeudi noir, Black Thursday, July 16, 1942. On that day and the next, the police in Paris rounded up more than thirteen thousand Jewish men, women, and children who were not yet French citizens and took them to a number of assembly points. These included police stations, gymnasiums, schools, and—most infamously—the indoor bicycle track called the Winter Velodrome, Vélodrome d’Hiver, or the Vél d’Hiv. From there, these undesirables, each allowed no more than two suitcases, were sent off on packed trains to the East.

  Within a few weeks, it became apparent that all the hopes marshaled for months by the inmates of the camps within what was still referred to as Unoccupied France had been hanging on the thinnest of threads, and that the thread was now to be severed. In early August, Joseph Schwartz of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee cabled to the Joint headquarters in New York from his post in Lisbon the ominous news that all exit visas for Jews had been suspended. On August 6, James Bernstein, the European director of HIAS, the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America, sent the following cable to New York:

  FOREIGN OFFICE ORDERED ALL VISAS PREVIOUSLY GRANTED CANCELLED STOP NEW APPLICATIONS MUST GO THROUGH FOREIGN OFFICE NOT PREFECTURE AS FORMERLY STOP SITUATION REFUGEES UNOCCUPIED FRANCE TRAGIC STOP

  The Vichy government had begun the process of delivering about ten thousand foreign Jews into the hands of the Nazis, most of them from the Centres National de Rassemblement des Israélites, the National Centers for the Gathering of Jews. Two of these centres were Rivesaltes and Les Milles. On August 5, René Bousquet, the secretary general of the French police and the man whose friendship with Emil Poult had brought Alex and Helmut to Montauban two years earlier, sent a confidential memo to all local authorities in the Unoccupied Zone in which he outlined detailed instructions for the operation. The dispatch forbade the deportation of Jews of more than sixty years of age.

  Nevertheless, on the afternoon of Monday, August 10, both Alex and Helmut were among more than 270 Jews—those whose last names began with the letters A through G—who were ordered to assemble under the hot sun in the courtyard of Camp des Milles. They were then marched about a quarter mile to a railroad siding and loaded into boxcars. An eyewitness reported, “They were cattle cars, strewn with bunches of straw. In each car, a jug of water and a bucket to serve as a toilet.” Another witness, Pastor Henri Manen, wrote in his journal, “All around me the police are ghostly pale. One of them will say to me the next day, ‘I have been in the colonies, I have been in China, I have seen massacres, war, famines. I have seen nothing as horrible as this.’”

  The cars’ doors were sealed tight, with so many men in each car that it was impossible to do anything but stand packed together. The train stayed motionless all night in the stifling August heat. The next morning, August 11, the train rolled north to—in the words of author and Holocaust historian Susan Zuccotti—“a camp in a town on the outskirts of Paris that was soon to become a familiar and dreaded word in Jewish households: Drancy.”

  MONDAY, JUNE 6, 2011. The Provençal sun, so elusive during our days of rest in Saint-Rémy, shines brightly this morning out of a deep blue sky. At 10:00 a.m., we drive up to the gates of Camp des Milles and, after giving our names to a guard, are waved through to a parking area adjacent to a bustling building site. Like Rivesaltes, Camp des Milles is being transformed into a memorial museum; unlike Rivesaltes, it enjoys substantial government and corporate support, with a glossy brochure boasting words of encouragement from Elie Wiesel. Last week, Rivesaltes was a vast, empty, lonely expanse; today at Camp des Milles, it is hard to avoid workers in hard hats and bright yellow vests as they swarm through the courtyard and the interior of the old brick factory.

  I pause as I get out of the car and gaze silently for a long minute at this hulking building, essentially unchanged from when Alex wrote his last letter to my father almost sixty-nine years ago. He existed here as a prisoner for thirteen hellish months. I have come here at my leisure. Yet again, I find the contrast to be nearly unbearable.

  A pretty young woman on the staff of the Fondation du Camp Des Milles, Katell Gouin, comes out to greet us, followed soon after by Odette Boyer, the director of the memorial project. They will take us on a tour of the factory and the proposed museum. As a prelude, they hand each of us a hard hat and a fluorescent vest like those worn by the construction workers and ask us to select a pair of steel-tipped boots to wear as we make our way through the rubble-strewn site. Katell carries a flashlight. Properly outfitted, we walk across the courtyard and into the dark interior of the brick factory.

  We pause to allow our eyes, so recently splashed with sun, to become adjusted to the gloom. I use that time to once again try to transport myself into the past, to experience this place as my relatives did when it both sheltered and confined them seven decades ago. We set off single file down a corridor until Katell shines her flashlight above our heads to an archway on which we can make out Greek-style masks of tragedy and comedy flanking the words Die Katakombe. These decorations are what remain of the little theater devised by the internees in the factory’s main brick oven. Katell tells us that there were additional designs on the theater’s interior walls, probably some paintings by Max Ernst, but that they were destroyed when The Catacombs was reconverted to a brick oven after the war.

  We walk another few yards to the workshop where bricks were once molded, a high-ceilinged space where the camp’s courses and lectures were offered. Here, I reflect, Uncle Helmut studied bookbinding, learned about Homer and Goethe, and discussed Macbeth, for whom in his agony life became “but a walking shadow,” an image that must have held particular resonance for Helmut in this twilit world of flickering candles. Katell directs our attention to four smaller ovens, which served as sleeping quarters for some of the camp’s inmates, and I find myself thinking about the awful irony of these poor unfortunates coming to an early familiarity with ovens. We then climb the wooden stairs to the factory’s second floor, where hundreds of men—Alex and Helmut among them—made their humble beds of straw night after endless night. Which corner was theirs, I wonder, what little portion of this dim dusty expanse did they claim as their refuge when they returned after a day working in the kitchen or wandering the courtyard to lie on their backs and gaze at the blue painted windows as they hoped against hope for their liberation? I lean wearily against a concrete pillar and gratefully feel Amy’s comforting hand in mine.

  Katell again leads the way as we clump back downstairs and emerge, blinking, into the brilliant sunshine. We trade in our work boots for our own shoes, return our vests and hard hats, and follow Katell into a separate building that once served as the guards’ dining room and today is known as the Room of Murals, a reminder both humorous and poignant of the notable array of artists who were imprisoned here. Each of the room’s four walls displays colorful frescos rendered lovingly and in great detail, the subject of which is food, bounteous food.

  The Banquet of Nations, one of the remarkable frescos painted by one of Camp des Milles’s inmates more than seventy years ago, now on display in the museum’s Room o
f Murals.

  One painting depicts a procession of blue-skinned figures bearing plates that groan under the weight of immense sausages, cheeses, artichokes, and succulent fish, while others carry overflowing barrels of wine. Another wall features the words “Si vos assiettes ne sont pas très garnies, puissant nos dessins vous calmer l’appétit,” or “If your plates are not very full, may our drawings calm your appetite.” The most imposing painting, called The Banquet of Nations, offers a droll echo of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, with men representing many nationalities dining on dishes from their various homelands: an Italian with a forkful of spaghetti, a Chinese man eating rice with chopsticks, an Inuit consuming blubber, an Indian in a turban swallowing fire, an Englishman in the guise of Henry the Eighth about to enjoy a plate of roast beef. The Banquet’s painter was soon to be murdered in Auschwitz.

  At this point, Katell concludes our tour by leading Amy and me out of the gates of Camp des Milles and along a roughly quarter-mile path to a railroad siding containing a single boxcar from a 1940s-era train. I am intensely aware that at this moment, for all my figurative travels these past weeks in the footsteps of Alex and Helmut, I am quite literally walking the same Via Dolorosa they followed on August 10, 1942. Did they know their fate, I ask myself numbly. As if reading my mind, Katell points back to the factory and tells us that during those terrible days in August and September when about two thousand people were shipped to Drancy, dozens of inmates, who could clearly see the teeming siding from their vantage point, chose to jump to their deaths from the factory’s top floor rather than join the majority.