by Richard Wake
The guy wasn’t running a prison camp. He was running a factory — the shipping department of a factory. He was moving inventory. That’s all it was to him. And the only thing that seemed to be missing from his master schedule was the destination of the trains. I wasn’t sure of much, but I was pretty sure the destination wasn’t Pitchipoi.
Finally, the captain looked up.
“Well,” he said.
“My orders, sir.”
“What orders?”
I pointed to the paper on the desk.
“I don’t have time for this shit,” he said.
I stood there, mute. He scanned the paper.
“Where are these from?”
“Avenue Foch, sir.”
“I can see that, sergeant. But where specifically?”
“84 Avenue Foch, sir.”
“I can see that, too. But from whom?”
“I’m just the delivery man, sir.”
The captain grunted. He put the paper on the desk and tapped at it a few times with the pencil eraser.
“84 Avenue Foch,” he said. “The big shits.”
“I just carry the orders, sir. I don’t know about the size of their shits, but I do know that they eat well, sir.”
The captain laughed. He tapped the paper once more, then a second time. He was obviously thinking, but then he almost just as quickly decided. He reached for a rubber stamp on his desk, banged it on an ink pad, and then again on the orders. He scribbled something indecipherable on the spot where he stamped and then handed the paper back to me. As I folded the paper, I saw the word “APPROVED” in big red letters.
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
He did not answer. His head was back down in his paperwork, and then he was picking up what I thought was the train schedule. I left the room without being formally dismissed.
47
I left the command building, turned right, and walked along Drancy’s perimeter wire again. Back to the first place I had been, the administrative hut, with my solid gold fake orders with the big fucking APPROVED stamp on them. This was going to work. I actually felt some of the weight lifting off my chest. I caught myself smiling but managed to wipe it from my face in less than a second. It wasn’t done yet.
Back inside — this time without slamming the door, for some reason — I approached the counter and slapped the orders on them, hard. The same head clerk picked them up, saw the captain’s rubber-stamping handiwork, shrugged, and called over another of the clerks.
“Bring it back clean,” is all I heard him say. The lackey trotted out the door, the fake orders in his hand.
“It’ll be a few minutes,” he said, and then pointed at a single wooden chair. “Might as well. I mean, it could be more than a few minutes.”
So I sat. I wanted to take off the helmet and scratch my head, but I didn’t dare. It was the best camouflage I had, and I couldn’t be sure that someone in the hut hadn’t seen me during my brief Drancy vacation.
I thought about conversation but then thought better of it. I had shown off enough of my French language skills already to the clerks. In the command hut, I had spoken German, but with the Jewish prisoners, I went with what I approximated as good high school French. I replayed the earlier conversation and realized I had made a crack about backpedaling on the steppes, and saw that it was a mistake, that it was a little too advanced for a German sergeant. I don’t think they had noticed, though. If they did, I would just say I was from Alsace — but there was no need to chance it.
So, in the silence, I was left to ponder my next move. That was the thing I had not plotted out — what I would do after I had scooped up Leon, Karl, and Max’s dad and driven away from the prison. As I thought about it, there really wasn’t much there. We would leave Karl with his people, and return Max’s father to his family, and then Leon and I would disappear as we always did, Resistance cockroaches taking a breather. Where, I had no idea. Maybe Hannah could help us with that — although that would require another meeting, and another stirring of them emotions that I wasn’t sure I was up for. Whatever. First things first.
It was probably 15 minutes when the clerk was back. He had the three of them. Leon was in the same clothes, Max’s father still with his Croix de Guerre — although I couldn’t believe how old he appeared, a 50-something man who looked like he was 75. For his part, Karl was filthy, truly disgusting even by Drancy standards, and he was the only one of the three who was handcuffed.
I stood up and wasn’t 10 feet from Leon, but there was no recognition. There was nothing from Max’s father, either. It was Karl who recognized me first, as the clerk was unshackling him. I saw him kick Leon’s leg, and then my oldest friend looked up and saw who was really beneath the German helmet in front of him.
“Need any help?” the clerk said.
“With these three? Nah.”
He handed me the orders, and I put them back in my breast pocket. I unholstered my weapon for show and pointed the three of them toward the door. Leon made a point of not looking at me as he passed, but I knew he had seen.
Karl reached for the doorknob when the head clerk shouted, “Sergeant, wait.”
I thought about turning and shooting him. There would be a reaction to the shot, yes, but nobody else in the hut was armed, and we weren’t 20 steps from the vehicle.
But, no. Maybe it was a simple as him needing to sign the orders one more time. “Wait,” I said to my three “prisoners,” and turned. I walked back, reaching into my jacket for the orders.
When I reached the counter, the head clerk leaned over and whispered. He said, “I don’t know who you are, sergeant. All I know for sure is that you are in possession of one very impressive set of balls.”
I leaned back, just a foot or so, and put my best what-are-you-talking-about look on my face. Below the counter, I also fingered the trigger on the pistol. The clerk just looked back at me and shook his head, and then he smiled.
“Good luck to you,” he said. “Good luck to all of you.”
With that, I turned back to my “prisoners” and hoped I hadn’t visibly pissed myself. We were out the door and to the vehicle in just a few seconds. There were a couple of French guards along the wire, maybe 50 feet away, but they were sharing a cigarette and paying us no attention. Still, I wanted it to look good.
“In,” I said, pointing at the back door with the pistol. The three of them got in and I barked, “Shackle yourselves to the bar.” I never stopped pointing the pistol at them.
Karl was mystified. Max’s father was in a fog. Leon was laughing. “But how—”
“Later,” I said, under my breath. And then I barked a little louder, “Faster… tighter.” Then I pointed with the gun again.
After they were secure, I got behind the wheel and laid the pistol on the seat next to me. It started right up, but then I thought that I should holster the weapon. This all needed to be by the book — orders in my pocket, prisoners shackled to the metal bar in the back seat, weapon in my holster. I mean, you never knew who might stop you for some kind of check of identification or orders or whatnot.
I had to look down to re-buckle the holster. As I was looking up, I saw them, a half-dozen Germans with rifles likely coming from the command building, turning the corner at the end of the wire and closing quickly on the vehicle. There weren’t 50 feet away when I saw them, and they were on us in no time.
In the hours after, three sensations stuck with me. First was the shouting of “Halt! Halt! Halt!” Second was Leon, sitting right behind me, softly and dejectedly offering a simple, “Shit.”
Third was the sight, maybe 10 seconds behind the half-dozen rifles, of two men, hurrying without running. One was the captain who had rubber stamped my fake orders. The other was one of the Jewish prisoners. I didn’t think it was one of the clerks from inside the hut, but I knew I recognized him from somewhere. And then, when he got close enough, I realized: it was Izzy, demonstrating a rather unique form of gratitude.
4
8
They stripped the German uniform off me and threw a pile of clothes in my direction — trousers, shirt, jacket, all filthy. I must have made a face as a pulled on the pants — they smelled of urine and were damp — because the soldier with the rifle who was watching me guffawed.
“Pulled them off a dead body about an hour ago,” he said. “Waste not, want not.”
Leon, Karl, and Max’s father had been taken someplace else in the camp. I had been put through a half-assed interrogation in a room fitted with a table and two chairs and nothing else. The captain who had approved the orders, amid all of his study and rosters and timetables, was the questioner — but he didn’t really bother asking much. He just stood there, holding the fake orders from 84 Avenue Foch, and told me how much he admired the audacity of the whole caper.
“The uniform? The vehicle?”
“Let’s just say there’s a naked sergeant somewhere in Paris, cupping his balls as he tries to explain to his captain what happened.”
My captain laughed. Whatever.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever understand you people,” he said. “Friend of the Jews. I mean, really. The stupidity is just shocking to me. But, well, here we are. I have to admire the effort. If you hadn’t been recognized by one of our trusted prisoners as you walked along the wire, you would have been home free.”
Izzy. I never saw him. I was so happy with myself and the goddamn stamp of approval on my orders that I wasn’t paying attention. Not that it would have mattered, of course. If I had seen Izzy, I would have assumed he would have, first of all, not recognized me beneath the helmet and, second, been supportive if he had.
The captain read my thoughts as I sat there. Maybe he just read the silence.
“The one who turned you in, you had helped him in the past somehow?”
I thought about refusing to answer, but opted instead for a nod. I mean, who cared at that point? It was then that the captain’s tone changed to one of a man about to share a confidence. You know, Christian to Christian.
“You know they can’t be trusted,” he said.
I shook my head.
“Fine, believe what you will,” he said. “But you have to admire our little setup here. We give the Jews we select a measure of authority, almost autonomy, inside the wire. The gendarmes keep them in line, and we keep the gendarmes in line. But inside, we give a few Jews some actual power. It drives the rest of them crazy. And it leads to actions like the one your friend took. You would be surprised what a man will do to keep a scrap of power and privilege, to eat at a table where the tureen has a few chunks of meat inside.”
I was equal parts disgusted and horrified. I would have liked to think that, placed in the same position, I would never have done what Izzy did. At the same time, the diabolical nature of the Drancy scheme made me want to throw up. For every trusted Jewish clerk who helped camouflage the fact that his fellow inmates were digging a tunnel, how many more were like Izzy, ready to sell out a friend in order to retain a shred of advantage?
The captain read my thoughts again. He said, “Human nature. It’s something, isn’t it?”
He left the room without another word. A minute later, a new guard with a rifle came for me. He talked me across the yard to the other side of the complex. I did a quick count. We were going into the fourth stairwell. It was one of the deportation stairwells. When we climbed up to the open space on the third floor, up the urine-soaked steps, there were about 20 men inside. Leon saw me before I saw him.
The guard said, “Back with your friends. The captain told me to tell you that this was meant as a sign of respect for you.”
Leon, Karl, and Max’s father were all there — and Max’s father seemed even more out of it than he had been before, almost catatonic. He didn’t acknowledge me and didn’t listen as I told the others the story of what had happened. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to admit to Leon that Izzy had turned us in, mostly because I couldn’t stomach one more of his fucking UGIF/I told you so lectures. But I did admit it, and there was no lecture. Instead, Leon quietly explained the relationship to Karl, and Karl just put his head in his hands and muttered, “Fuck… fuck… fuck.”
Then he said, “Well, I’m no worse off. Leon and the old man are, though. And you.”
“Of course you’re worse off,” I said. “I mean, this is one of the deportation rooms, right?”
“I was in this same room when you showed up in your uniform.”
“But—”
“The tunnel,” Karl said. “They found it.”
“How?”
“They just did. They caught us all.” He looked around the room. “All of us, and now you, too.”
On the other side of the room, a half-dozen men were talking quietly but intensely. It was somewhere between a debate and an argument — or at least, that’s how it appeared from 20 feet away.
“Any idea?” I said, gesturing in the direction of the debate/argument with a flick of my head.
“I think so,” Karl said.
“And?”
He turned his back toward the stairwell and reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out what looked like a screwdriver, although I wasn’t 100 percent sure what it was, given that he pulled it out only about three-quarters of the way, and only for about a second.
“What the—”
“Our digging tools,” Karl said. “We all still have them. I mean, we had some bigger things — shovels, bigger picks, like that — that were left behind when they caught us, but not these.”
“But how?”
“I’m sure they’re very proud of the beauty of their system,” he said. “But this is the flaw. We were caught by a Jew, one of the trusted ones. He brought the gendarmes, who are idiots. They got the bigger tools, and that’s all they figured we had. Then they called the Germans, who are not idiots. But they’re pretty much just the transportation department, and when they decided that deportation was our fate, well, they never searched us. I guess they assumed that the gendarmes did — and besides, they weren’t going to dirty their hands. They just moved us to one of the first six stairwells — well, after the kommandant told us that they would have shot us, except that he so much admired our handiwork on the tunnel. He said, ‘You see, the Fuhrer can always use good workers.’”
“Okay, but—”
“So what they’re arguing about,” Karl said. “They’re arguing about whether we should all try to take our sharp little picks and fight our way out of here tonight.”
“Won’t be much of a fight,” Leon said. “I mean, rifles against screwdrivers? They have to realize that.”
“They’ll see it soon enough,” Karl said. “I’ll make sure of it. There’s a better way. They’ll see that, too.”
“Better how?”
“Later,” Karl said. Then he walked across the room and joined the half-dozen in their discussion.
49
The sun rose, and the process began. Two guards with rifles entered our room and announced, “Five minutes.” Then they waited near the stairwell. Men dropped their pants and pissed or squatted anywhere. What did it matter?
Five minutes. I’m not sure I slept that long. The discussion group had stayed together for another few minutes after Karl joined them, and then they broke up. Nobody really slept. Leon and I didn’t say much, other than him saying, “I mean, I can’t believe how close you came to pulling it off, you fucking idiot.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You know, except for the idiot part.”
“You were free, idiot.”
“Like you wouldn’t have done the same thing.”
That was pretty much it, other than when I asked him about Max’s father.
“He’s just gone,” Leon said. “Like, empty eyes. I was just leading him around like an old dog. He reacts to nothing. He knows to eat, he knows to shit, he knows to sleep. He knows to put on his coat. He knows how to put one foot in front of the other. But that’s about it. He doesn’t react when you say his name, or Max’
s name. There’s nothing there.”
The whole room was quiet — no crying, no nothing. You could tell that nobody was sleeping, though, not really. They had all seen a deportation as spectators, so there would be no surprises. I don’t know if that made it easier or not.
After our five minutes, one of the guards shouted, “Alain Kerr.” Again, it took me a second to remember that was the name on my fake identification, but when I did, I stood up and walked to the guard. He handed over my papers along with a Friend of the Jews armband and a pin.
“Put it on now,” he said, and I did. When I was done, he yelled, “Line up!”
We were marched down the stairs and then stopped at the bottom. We were on the fourth staircase. We had to wait our turn.
Most of the food scraps had already been thrown from the windows by the other prisoners by the time we came out of the building and made the walk to our bus. I felt a small bit of something hit me in the back as I walked. I turned. It was a small crust of bread. I wasn’t going to pick it up, except maybe for Max’s father, but my second of indecision was enough for the man behind me to scoop it up.
As it turned out, we didn’t sing, didn’t do shit, just walked. On the bus, there was more breathing room than I would have expected. When the sixth staircase was marched out and loaded, the buses rode in a caravan out the Drancy front gate. It was only a few minutes before we were at the train station. I didn’t really pay much attention, but I knew it wasn’t the Drancy station — we had traveled too far for that. Leon was sitting two seats in front of me, with Max’s father next to him. I couldn’t help but feel guilty about getting them caught — although, the truth was, if they hadn’t been on this transport, they would have been on one the next day, or the next week, or the next month. After all, people in Drancy died of malnutrition, and dysentery, and suicide — but nobody died of old age.
