Because Julia could have slept through that night in January 1944 and woken on the Saturday morning. With the day would have come the realisation that maybe she misjudged Chantal. Yes, the girl was a bigoted cunt but lots of people are like that. It’s a long way from that to betraying somebody so that they will be killed. When it’s not the dark waking hours of the night, when the sun is shining outside, it’s easier to think like that.
With nothing for Julia to do and with the intense cold she would have stayed in bed, sleeping late. But eventually she would have had to go to the toilet. She would have jumped out to use the chamber pot and having done that, pulled the blackout curtain aside. Then swiftly back into bed to assess the twin rectangles of sky in the attic window.
It is a blue sky that Saturday – pure blue.
It is that blue which, along with the glancing light from a low winter sun and the heavy condensation on the inside of the windows that has turned to thin sheets of ice, dazzles her as though both panes of glass were encrusted with sapphires.
Eventually her curiosity about the day outside and what it holds draws her from bed. By then it is about noon.
Breakfast. And for once there is enough – bread, ham, cheese, the two eggs and some tea. In comparison to coffee, Julia doesn’t really rate tea but that Saturday morning, it is hot and warming.
Unbeknown to her, Julia has less reason than most other Dutch Jews to worry about Chantal or anybody else betraying her to the Germans. This is because – amazingly – Julia has slipped between the cracks. With all their filing systems and lists and transport numbers and thoroughness, their liking of order and discipline and everything else, the Nazis still make occasional mistakes. After all, they are human – though some would definitely argue with that statement. Julia is one of those mistakes and for it – though she will never know this – she has to thank Karl Maurer.
It came about like this.
The Nazis have a card index of all the Jews in the Netherlands. The index shows Julia as still living with her parents. Julia’s mother and father were deported to Theresienstadt in 1943. (From there, some time after that, they were deported again, this time to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, considered too old to work, not to mention physically and mentally destroyed after their short stay in Theresienstadt, they were gassed within an hour and their bodies burned.)
After a deportation from Westerbork takes place, there is a job to be done to update the card index to reflect the new situation. What is done is that the cards of the Jews who have been deported are removed from the main index and filed separately.
It is a Friday after the deportation of Julia’s parents when a German soldier – a clerk, the aforementioned Karl Maurer – is carrying out this task. His system is simple. Using a ruler to underline each name on the deportation list, he then finds the corresponding card in the card index and removes it to a separate pile – the pile of dead Jews, as he thinks of it. It is dull work, even though he enjoys seeing the dead Jews pile grow like winnings in a card game.
This task is the last thing Maurer has to do this week. His boss, a tidy-minded bureaucrat, insists on the card index being updated the same week as the deportation. Normally, there wouldn’t have been any problem doing this. Since only a little over three hundred Jews were deported and there are about fifty names per page on a deportation list, Maurer has about six pages to process. He had been intending to spend most of the day doing this at a leisurely pace with plenty of breaks for coffee and to chat with his colleagues. But that plan got ruined when his boss gave him another supposedly high-priority thing to do. The result is that Maurer started the deportation list late and is now under pressure.
Because there is another thing.
Karl Maurer has a seventy-two hour pass to Paris and his train leaves at seven this evening. It is just after six now and he is nearing the end of the list – he is into the S’s. He can still make it to the station. He has to make it to the station. If he doesn’t he will be forced to spend one of his three precious leave nights in Amsterdam rather than in the (blacked out) City of Light.
Maurer has never been to Paris before and has visions of spending a long weekend fucking some beautiful French girl – in fact, more than one. Three of them in a bed in a fine hotel with champagne and good food. He sees himself eating food off their bellies and their tits – strawberries from other places. He is hard now just thinking about it. Ordinarily, he would go to the bathroom to relieve his tension but he doesn’t have time for that now – anyway, better to save that for Paris.
When his ruler reaches Julia’s father, Maurer quickly finds the card for him and places it on the desk in front of him. The card lists his wife – Julia’s mother – and Julia as being dependents. Maurer moves the ruler. As he expected, just below her husband on the transportation list is Julia’s mother. He finds her card and removes it, tossing it onto the dead Jew pile.
Then a picture comes into Maurer’s head. It is of himself and the two French girls. Naturally one is a blonde and the other a brunette – just like a dirty movie he saw recently. The three of them are naked on a huge bed. The blonde is on all fours. Maurer is on his back with his head between her legs looking up at her pussy. The other girl pours champagne into the crack of the blonde’s ass and it flows from there down into his mouth.
He enjoys this picture for several minutes and then snaps out of it.
He refocuses on the index card for Julia’s father. He recalls that he already found the card for the mother. Now he finds Julia’s card and tosses it, along with the father’s card onto the dead Jew pile. He moves the ruler down one, finds the next name and his short, pudgy fingers begin to flick through the card index. The S’s. He is nearly there. It looks like he’s going to make his train after all.
It is a mistake, of course. After his daydream, he should have moved the ruler down one on the transportation list expecting to find Julia’s name. If she was there it would have been correct to place her on the dead Jew pile – but if she wasn’t, her card should have stayed in the card index.
It is on this insignificant, almost atomic event that everything changes.
With the records showing that Julia has been deported from the Netherlands, there is no likelihood that the Germans will try to deport her again. Their faith in the accuracy of their card index is as strong as their faith in their Führer.
This means that the only way Julia can be caught is if somebody brings her to the authorities’ attention. Chantal had been tempted to do this because she is convinced that Julia is a Jew and Chantal hates Jews. (Bert is right – in certain light, at certain angles with her dark hair and brown eyes, Julia does look Jewish.) But after Chantal leaves the shoot, she has other things on her mind.
A German who has seen her in a film has tracked her down through Bert. He wants to become a private client. (This is something that Julia has always refused to do. She sees having sex on film and getting paid for it as being quite different from prostitution. Also some of those things that men look for are pretty weird. And anyway, being that close to Germans, for they are the only people who have any money, is something too terrifying for her – a Jewess – to contemplate.)
So Chantal is off to meet this man, find out what he wants and put a price on it. Apparently, according to Bert, this German is very high-ranking so Chantal is thinking in terms of outrageously big numbers – ‘telephone numbers’ to use a term favoured by bankers. She is hoping that her film days are over, that the peanuts Bert pays her will be as nothing compared to what she could get from this. She is conscious – more so than Julia because Chantal is older – that she cannot stay at this for ever. Gravity will start to take its toll, her age will begin to tell against her. Chantal also wants to have a baby, though at the moment there is no man in her life to facilitate this. So for all these reasons, she is hoping that she will be able to get enough money from this, not just to survive but to save so that she can start to make her dream come true.
Thus, tho
ugh Julia does not know it, she is pretty much as safe as any Dutch person can be in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in January 1944.
She eats breakfast and goes out for a walk. She returns, cooks dinner – though without any wine this time and goes to bed early to keep warm and to read. She takes with her Anna Karenina which she loves and which she has just restarted for the umpteenth time.
Spring eventually comes and with it, warmer weather. Julia gets reasonably steady work from Bert which keeps her fed and a roof over her head. She never works with Chantal again so she never gets to have her revenge – at least not directly.
In June the Allied invasion takes place in France and the southern part of the Netherlands is liberated. But with the failure to capture the Rhine bridge at Arnhem it is to be nearly another year and the terrible Hunger Winter of 1944-45 before the Allies eventually liberate Amsterdam and the war ends.
Julia survives all this. Work from Bert dries up in the second half of 1944 and she is skin and bone by the time May 1945 comes and the Germans surrender. But at least she is alive. Thousands are not.
It is the day after the Liberation when Julia is walking down a street in Amsterdam that she encounters Chantal again.
Chantal did indeed make a lot of money from her German benefactor. He set her up in a nice little apartment – taken from Jews, of course – and she survived the winter quite happily. As it became clear that the Germans were going to lose the war, she contrived to get everything she could from her German – this by offering him ever more inventive delights. Simultaneously, she decided that as soon as the Allies came, she needed to find a British or Canadian or – best of all – an American officer who would bring her to America. There she could leave the past behind her.
Except that the past has a way of not wanting to be left behind. Like trying to get rid of an unwanted dog, you drive it out into a secluded country lane and open the car door. You use some treats and endearments to entice it out. It does – bounding out happily to find out what this new game is. You jump back in quickly and drive off, trying not to look in the mirror. But when you eventually do, as you inevitably will, you don’t see a tiny, devastated face receding into the distance or a frantic and hopeless effort of short legs to catch up with you. Rather, sitting up in the back seat, face filling the mirror and eager to find out what we’re doing next, is the self-same dog.
So with Chantal.
Unfortunately for her, her presence in the apartment hadn’t gone unnoticed. Nor could her relative affluence which contrasted so obviously with that of her neighbours. How could it have? At a time when people were starving to death, Chantal made little effort to hide her prosperity. (From a poor childhood, Chantal had money for the first time in her life – and lots of it. Which of us mightn’t have done the same?)
The result is that what Julia sees are two men dragging an expensively dressed, nicely coiffeured woman from a doorway into the centre of the street. Julia recognises Chantal instantly. The dyed blonde hair is perfectly styled. How did the stupid bitch ever think that would go unnoticed?
There is a large crowd on the street and the men push Chantal through it. Julia hurries to the edge of the crowd and by standing on her tiptoes she can just about see what is happening.
Chantal is pushed down onto the cobbles and her dress is ripped off her shoulders, revealing her bra and slip. They are expensive – not the endlessly washed, weary garments that Julia wears. A woman stands over Chantal and grasps a fistful of her thick hair. Then the woman hacks it off with scissors. She takes a second clump and repeats the process, then a third and a fourth, working her way methodically across Chantal’s head. The woman is not being gentle. At one stage Julia winces as the point of one of the arms of the scissors jabs into Chantal’s skull. A rivulet of blood trickles down the side of her face. The woman nicks Chantal’s ear and there is another flow of blood, this time more copious. Chantal cries. At one stage Chantal looks up at the crowd. It may have been intended as a gesture of defiance but all she manages to do is to look pitiful. Her eyes meet Julia’s for an instant but there is no recognition.
When Chantal’s head is no more than a field of bloody stubble, a man with a paint pot and paintbrush carefully paints a black swastika on her forehead. By then another woman has already been brought into the centre of the crowd and Chantal is shoved aside. Kneeling on the cobbles, she gathers the remains of her dress around herself, covering her underwear as best she can. She stands up and due to the angle Chantal happens to be standing at, Julia notices the swelling in the other woman’s belly.
Chantal is pregnant.
Julia is not sure what she feels about all of this. Certainly it’s not the kind of revenge she would have wanted. Chantal hugs the torn fabric to her and pushes her way through the crowd. She is jostled. Several people spit at her. The last sight Julia has of her is of spit and tears beginning to dilute the blood on Chantal’s face.
Julia notices another girl in the crowd. She is looking on just as Julia is. The girl is painfully thin, as are most other people, but what is striking about her is how pale she is. The combination of blonde hair and an unbelievably white face makes her look like a ghost. Or a corpse. She seems to be made of a different colour palate from the rest of the people in the crowd. It is as though they are in oils while she is drawn in pastels. Where they are red she is a faint, dusty pink; their strong blues contrast with hers, the faintest wash of dawn; their sturdy greens and browns and blacks all seem faded or seen through gauze on this girl. The girl wears glasses but Julia thinks she is pretty – or at least she would be if she looked less ghostly.
The girl is Suzanne, of course.
It is the only time that her and Julia’s paths will cross. This is the first full day Suzanne has spent outside her attic in three and a half years. She has yet to get used to the light, the people, the smells, the noise. Her muscles are weak, almost withered. She has wandered around in something of a daze, touching the stone of buildings, the wood of canal locks, grass. She has not been out in daylight in three and a half years and her eyes squint against the brightness. She feels the warm May air and the sunshine. She marvels that she is alive and hasn’t yet begun to think about her parents or the rest of her extended family. She looks on quizzically at the scene in front of her as though at a movie that she doesn’t quite understand. Eventually she shakes her head to snap out of it and slips out of the press of people.
It is the first and only time Julia will ever see Suzanne.
Come the autumn Suzanne will resume her studies. In due course she will graduate, then study for a masters and finally get a doctorate. She will go on to teach English literature in a variety of European universities. She will spend some time in similar institutions in America. She will get married – to another academic – but it won’t be a happy marriage and in time, they will divorce. Suzanne will have a child, a daughter, called Theresa – though she will be known as Tess, a small homage to Mr Hardy’s heroine.
As for Julia, she will become a proper actress just as she had dreamed. She will move first to Paris, then to England and finally to New York where she will make a career – taking whatever work comes her way, voice work in radio advertisements, small, off-Broadway productions, bit-parts in movies, in time some television. Nothing major but it will be a living.
She will have numerous relationships – with the occasional man but mainly with women.
She will always find herself disappointed.
56
We forget that there was a time when nobody smiled in photographs. But that was in the early days of photography. By the time the thirties had come everybody smiled and laughed and looked happy just as they do today. Look at any of the pre-war pictures to be found in Holocaust museums – there’s plenty of smiling and laughing and happiness.
Nobody smiles in the Theresienstadt propaganda film.
This is a film of the entire population of a town on Death Row.
Although as I write these words, I realise
it’s not strictly true.
The children smile.
The children smile and they laugh.
Especially when they are eating.
And it’s good to be able to think that at least Julia and Suzanne aren’t two of the lost, unsmiling faces looking out at us from that movie.
That would be almost like saving them.
Like bringing them back.
Imagine if that were possible – to bring back one, just one of the six million.
What about one of the children?
Just one.
So that they could live out their life and die a gentle death. It seems so little to ask and how wonderful a thing it would be.
But of course it’s impossible.
And so it eases things for us a little to be able to think that at least Julia and Suzanne escaped all of that.
57
British newspaper report
November 28th 2015
They are two tattered notebooks that have lain undisturbed for over seventy years. One has a black cover, the other faded pictures of what were once brightly coloured images of fruit. The curling, yellowed pages, some spattered with brown spots of damp, tell a remarkable story.
The notebooks were found during some renovation work in the Czech town of Terezin. These days a small, picturesque town inside what was once a military installation, Terezin holds a dark secret.
The Paradise Ghetto Page 35
