by Andrew Gross
“I’m afraid these papers are forgeries,” the milice captain declared.
“I beg your pardon?”
“They are worthless. They are as bad as your Spanish, I’m afraid, mademoiselle. All of you…” He raised his voice so that the entire crowd could hear. “You are no longer under the protection of the Paraguayan and El Salvadoran governments. It is determined that these visas and passports are not valid. You are prisoners of the French government now, who have no recourse, given your situation, but to turn you over to the German authorities.”
There was an audible gasp from the crowd. Some wailed, “My God, no!” Others simply looked to the person next to them and muttered, “What did he say…? That these are not valid?”
To Alfred’s horror, the French officer began to tear his documents into shreds. All that had kept them alive these past ten months, their only route to freedom, scattering from his hands like ashes onto Alfred’s shoes.
“You three, over there,” the officer pushed them brusquely, “with the rest.” Then he moved down the line without another word. “Next.”
“What have you done?” Alfred bent to scoop the shredded documents off the ground. He pulled at the arm of the officer. “Those papers are perfectly valid. They have been inspected many times. Look, look…” He pointed to the torn signature page. “We are Paraguayan citizens, looking to return home. We demand transit!”
“You demand transit?” The SS officer following the milice captain finally spoke. “Be assured, transit is arranged.”
Two guards edged their way in and pushed them with their guns from the line. “Take your bags. Over there!” They pointed toward the throng of other Latin American passport holders who were now being penned in by guards, a deepening hopelessness beginning to envelop them.
People began to shout out cries of outrage and objection, holding up their documents, eight months of waiting, hoping, being kept in pens, their dreams of freedom suddenly dashed. The French officer announced in several languages that those holding these travel papers had five minutes to gather their belongings and board transportation that had been arranged outside the camp grounds.
“Where are you taking us?” a terrified woman yelled. For months, rumors of dark places where no one was ever heard from again had spread through the detention camp like an outbreak of typhus.
“To the beach,” one of French militia laughed. “To the South of France. Where else? Isn’t that where you are looking to go?”
“We have an express train for you. Do not worry,” another chortled with the same sarcasm. “You Latin American aristocrats will be traveling first class.”
Pandemonium spread like wildfire. Some just refused to accept their fate. The old rabbi in the white beard and his wife sat down on their luggage, refusing to budge. Others screamed back in anger at the black-clad guards, who, now that the true purpose of what they were doing had come out and the crowd had grown unruly, began to close in, herding them like sheep toward the front gate, brandishing their weapons.
“Stay together,” Alfred instructed Marte and Lucy, tightly clutching their bags. They were separated for a moment by people charging to the front, cursing and showing their discredited papers in fits of rage. The crowd began to surge. The guards closed in, using their rifle shafts like cattle prods. The white-bearded rabbi and his wife still refused to move; a German guard had now taken over and was screaming at them like they were deaf. “Aussen.” Out. “Get up! Now.” Fights began to break out. Some faces were bloodied, struck by rifle shafts. A few old-timers fell to the ground, and the crowd moved over them despite desperate pleas and shrieks from those who stopped to help.
But family by family, there was no choice but to go. Worried, everyone grabbed their things. The milice herded them with their sticks and rifles in the direction of the front gate. Some prayed, others whimpered, but all, except the rabbi and his wife, went. Guards infiltrated the crowd, kicking along luggage. “Is this yours? Take it, or it stays!” Moving them like cattle through Vittel’s makeshift wire gate, dogs barking, pulling on their leashes, amid outraged shouts everywhere, wails, cries, everyone giving themselves over to their worst fears.
“Papa, what’s happening?” Lucy said, afraid.
“Come on, stay close,” Alfred said, clutching his and Marte’s valise along with his briefcase. “Maybe it will just be another detention center like this. We’ve lived through worse.” He tried to appear as positive as he could, though he knew in his heart it would not be. Now they had no papers. And Marte’s health was growing worse. They moved through the front gate, the first time in eight months they were beyond the wire.
A cargo train waited for them on the tracks. At first, people assumed it was not for them. More for cattle or horses. Then everyone was startled by the sudden rattle of the doors being flung open. The French guards remained behind. The soldiers along the tracks were now German, which sent terror into everyone’s heart.
“Here are your fancy carriages, Jews,” one of them cackled. “Please, let me help you.” He cracked a man in the head with his rifle stock. “Everyone up and in.”
There was resistance at first, people objecting, fighting back. This was transport fit for swine, not people. Then there were two short bursts of machine gun fire from behind them and everyone turned. The white-bearded rabbi and his poor wife were now lying on the ground in a pool of blood next to their luggage.
“Oh my God, they’re going to massacre us!” a woman screamed.
Everyone headed for the trains. One by one they hurried in, pushing the old and young, dragging their belongings with them. If it couldn’t be carried, or if someone stopped to load another article first, their bags were torn from them and tossed aside, clothing and pictures and toiletries spilling over the platform.
“No, those are my possessions!” a woman yelled.
“Get in. Get in. You won’t need them.” A guard pushed her inside.
“There are no seats in here,” someone said. Alfred helped Marte and Lucy up and someone pushed him up from behind. When they all thought the car was filled, they pushed more in. In minutes, you could barely breathe.
“There’s no room! There’s no more room! Please…” a woman wailed. “We’ll suffocate in here.”
They filled it even more.
“Please, I don’t want to go!” a man shouted over the wailing.
“C’mon, do you want to end up like them?” another urged him onward, glancing back to the rabbi and his wife in the courtyard.
“My daughter, my daughter. Sophie…!” a woman cried. A young girl, forced by the crowd into another car, cried out from afar, “Mama!”
The guards kept loading and packing people in with whatever they could carry, until the train car grew tighter and more crowded than Alfred could ever have imagined.
Then the door was slammed shut.
There was only darkness at first. The only light from outside angled through narrow slits in the side door. There were a few whimpers in the pitch black, but then everyone just became silent. The kind of silence when no one has any idea what will happen next. There was barely room to move, to even adjust your arms, to breathe. The car smelled, the odor of eighty people jammed together in a space that should hold half that, many of whom hadn’t bathed in weeks.
They stayed that way, listening to the shouts and cries from outside, until they heard a whistle and with a jerk the train began to move. Now people were whimpering, sobbing, praying. They stayed upright by leaning against each other in the dark. In a corner were two jugs, one filled with water—but hardly enough, given the number of them in the car. The other empty. Alfred realized what it was for.
“Where are they taking us, Alfred?” Marte asked under her breath as the railcars picked up speed.
“I don’t know.” He sought out her and Lucy’s hands and clasped them tightly in his. “But at least we are together.”
FOUR
Gruppen führer Colonel Martin Franke stepped out on the
tracks outside the detention center as the train pulled away. It was over. The Jews were all packed up and gone. The deception had come out and now there was no more recourse for them. All he’d had to do was dangle the bait long enough and he knew someone would grab it. These Jews would fight for a half-eaten piece of tripe off the ground even though it meant giving up one of their own. He watched as the last railcar chugged off to who knew where. Where they were heading, no passport or visa in the world would do them good anymore.
“Captain.” He nodded to the French police officer, whose men were now cleaning up all the mess in the courtyard, including the two or three stubborn ones who lay behind in pools of their own blood who they’d had to make a show of. “A job well done, Captain.” Now not a trace of those who had just boarded the train would even exist.
“Permit me, Colonel…” The French officer bent down and picked up someone’s scattered ID papers from the ground. “But were they…?”
“Were they what?” Franke looked at him. “Speak up.”
“Were they, in fact, forged? The passports. Were they counterfeit?”
Franke took the boot-smeared document from him. The Jew’s own kinsmen had probably stomped all over it in their haste to board. “What does it matter anyway?” The officer shrugged. “They were never going anywhere from the start.”
“I’m sorry, Colonel…?”
“See that the rest of the documents are all accounted for. For our records,” Franke said without answering his question.
“Yes, Herr Gruppen führer.” The captain saluted and then went away.
Franke pulled his heavy, gray officer’s coat closed against the cold. He’d traveled two days from Warsaw, and where was he? Not in Paris; not in some warm, crowded café with a bottle of old médoc and nuzzling at the tits of some loose French barmaid on his lap. No. But packing up a bunch of immaterial, frightened Jews in a prison in the middle of a fucking forest. There wasn’t a day that went by when he didn’t miss his old post. A year ago, he was part of the German attaché in Lisbon, a plum assignment, spending the war attending parties at the roof bar of the Mundial and sharpening his diplomatic skills. With any luck, he would have been chief attaché within a year, and from there, however the war resolved, there would be influence to trade: Bribes. Exit visas for sale. Artwork stolen from the walls of palaces and stuffed away.
But his secretary, Lena, a piece of ass who couldn’t type for shit but who’d been screwing half the mission, proved to be part of a British spy network and fled to London with the names of half the Abwehr network in Lisbon and a notebook full of contact codes. Exposed half the contacts in Europe and Britain. Disgraced, Franke was transferred to Warsaw. G section. Sabotage, false documents, covert contacts with certain minority groups. There the only food was boiled, and the only fish came out of the fucking sewer. Not to mention the cold. It was the kind of cold that you never fully got out of your bones. It made Lisbon seem like the South of France. Then to top it off, his wife, whose family owned a thriving metal factory in Stuttgart which kept him in fancy linens and tins of caviar—his own family could barely afford to put meat on the table—wrote to say that she was leaving him.
Still, better the cold than a cyanide pill, Franke resolved. Now he was serving the war effort by twisting arms and running informants to root out resistance fighters on the Polish frontier or stubborn Jews still hiding out in the Aryan sector. Completely beneath his skills, of course, but it had been his network of informants that had unearthed the traitorous chargé d’affaires from the Paraguayan embassy in Warsaw who was the source of those illegal forgeries. Franke had always been a man who would do whatever it took, whatever means, to accomplish what was necessary. He had been a detective back in Essen, and not some flashy ass-kisser who went straight for the headlines but one who turned over every page, got on his knees to find every shred of evidence, and a man like that was always poised to sniff out the one opportunity that would land him back on his feet. Otherwise, he would spend the rest of the war in this useless, forgotten city, or, if things went badly, as he was beginning to sense, until they sent him out to the front lines in the East to be shot, likely by his own men, while exhorting them to stand fast against the advancing Russian horde. These days, Franke craved only one thing, and that was the chance to prove his worth to his superiors in Berlin again.
But today had been a good one. His network had unearthed the informer in Warsaw who had given his kinsfolk up. The trail went from the ghettos of Warsaw to the embassies of Paraguay and El Salvador. Two hundred forty Jews. Only a drop in the bucket, given the big picture, of course, but 240 Jews who had come to arouse the interest of the United States and British governments and whom Berlin desperately needed certain proof of if it was to challenge the sovereignty of two neutral Latin American friends and resolve this thorny situation. He’d surely get a commendation from Berlin, maybe a nod from Canaris, admitting they had been hasty in their treatment of him in Lisbon. Or even the Reichsmarschall himself. They’d all have to take notice.
Because a man like Franke, who had been brought up in the iron smelting factories of Essen, knew it wasn’t so complicated. All that it required was to follow the scent and not be afraid to dirty your hands. That was the problem with these Abwehr stuffed shirts. They were too busy going to cocktail parties and flirting with dignitaries’ wives to know an informer from a bartender. But Franke was a person who was willing to risk everything for what had to be done.
Still, for now, he lamented, it was back to Warsaw, and the winter that still had two more months. Another success like this and they would have to offer him his old position. Perhaps Geneva this time, he sometimes allowed himself to dream.
Maybe even Paris.
The last plume of smoke had faded as the train went around a curve. His work here was complete. Franke took out the left-behind identity paper that the captain had handed him. The photo page of a visa that had fallen to the platform. A pretty little thing, for a Jew. Maybe twelve, with pigtails and a happy smile. He read the name: Elena Zeitman. Zeitman. No matter, Franke thought. He folded it neatly and placed it in his pocket. He did not know the precise location she was being sent. Some labor camp in Poland, he’d heard. But he did know, looking after the train, that whatever fate awaited her, no visa or passport in the world would be of help to her now.
FIVE
JANUARY, THE FOLLOWING DAY
At his desk at OSS headquarters in Washington, D.C., Peter Strauss read the cable from the War Refugee Board attaché in Bern, Switzerland, with a sense of deflation.
It concerned various civilians being held at the Vittel detention camp in northeastern France who were seeking transport out of Europe under the protection of certain Latin American passports.
Passports he had a keen interest in. And had helped arrange.
The cable read:
It is my misfortune to report that diplomatic protection for these applicants has been permanently denied. Documents ruled falsely obtained. All bearers rounded up and placed on a sealed train. Destination: labor camp in southern Poland. We believe it to be in a town named Oswiecim.
Strauss reread the cable as his stomach fell. It had been a year. A year of carefully setting this up, of getting the documents into the hands of the one man they sought, then routing him and his family out of Poland and through occupied territory. Secretly arranging transport. A year of petitioning the government of Paraguay to resist German diplomatic pressure and to stand behind them.
A year that was now lost.
All bearers rounded up and placed on a sealed train. Destination: labor camp in southern Poland.
Strauss put the cable down. Operation Catfish was finished.
As the son of a cantor, who could still recite the prayers and Torah as well as he could his own name, the hollowness in Strauss’s gut felt even deeper. His father’s brother was still in Vienna; they had no idea what fate had befallen him, or his entire family. In a way, Strauss had put all his faith and bel
ief in a positive outcome for this war into the hope that this mission would succeed.
And now both had crumbled.
“Any reply, sir?” The young lieutenant who had delivered the communiqué was still standing there.
“No.” Strauss shrugged glumly. “No reply.” He took off his wire-rim glasses and started to wipe the lenses clean.
“So then it’s over? Two hundred and forty of them…” the aide inquired. That was as much as the lieutenant knew. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Two hundred and forty lives…” Strauss nodded. “All worth saving, no doubt. But only one that was vital.”
SIX
FOUR DAYS LATER
They heard the hiss of steam and the jolt of the brakes and after three agonizing days of pressed-together, foul-smelling confinement, the train finally came to a stop. “Where are we?” people asked in the dark. It was night. “Can anyone see?”
For a while they just stood there, hearing shouts in German outside. Dogs barking.
Someone said, “I’ve heard they let the dogs attack people right off the train. They just take their pick.”
“Shut up,” a woman replied harshly. “You’re scaring the children.”
Suddenly they heard the rattle of locks being opened and the doors of the train car were flung wide. Cold air rushed in, along with glaring lights.
“Rauss, rauss. Everyone out! Get out! Schnellen. Faster.” Gray-clad soldiers carrying sticks rushed up to the train and started pulling people down from the cars. “Quick! Now! Assemble on the platform with your things.”
Fear leaping up in their blood, Alfred, Marte, and Lucy stepped down from the packed car, pulling shut their jackets against the biting cold and shielding their eyes from the sharp glare. During the endless trip at least four in their car had died. An old woman who was sick; another, a pregnant one, just fell and gave up. Two were infants. There was a moment or two when Alfred wasn’t sure if Marte would make it; in the cramped quarters, the rattle in her chest seemed to grow even worse. There was little to eat except what people had brought along and were willing to share. And the thirst … Their throats were parched. There was only one water break per day. “You remember on our honeymoon in Italy?” Alfred had tried to cheer Marte up on the journey. “How mad you were at me?”
