Jews arriving at Drancy, c. 1942
A new German police chief, SS General Karl Oberg, had been appointed to France, and under him a clever young Nazi called Helmut Knochen. The two men were as one on the subject of the ‘race maudite’, the cursed race of Jews. Knochen and Eichmann’s representative Dannecker both had their offices in the Avenue Foch, the magnificent boulevard that runs from the Bois de Boulogne to the Arc de Triomphe. The French police were under ever stricter vasselage to their German counterparts, but René Bousquet, the hard-working, manipulative Gascon head of police in Vichy, remained for the moment unwilling to turn over French Jews. Instead he proposed including for deportation the foreign Jews from the occupied zone as well as the unoccupied zone, offering up all those Germans, Austrians, Poles, Letts, Czechs, Russians and Estonians who had entered France after 1 January 1936. At this point, Vichy did not seem to be intending to murder its ‘undesirables’, but it did want to get rid of them, though how much it knew about the Wannsee conference of January 1942 and the plans for a Final Solution for Europe’s Jews is not clear. Oberg and Knochen observed with approval the way that Vichy was doing their work for them.
On 11 June 1942, a decision was taken in Berlin to deport 100,000 Jews from France, women as well as men, aged between 16 and 40, with exceptions for war veterans, unaccompanied minors under 18 and pregnant women. The costs of deportation – transport, blankets, clothes, food – were to be borne by the French. Bousquet and Oberg were juggling problems of their own: the Germans needed French help in carrying out the arrests, having only three battalions of police in France, while the French wanted an agreement to save French Jews. So a deal was made: some 3,000 French policemen would arrest 22,000 foreign Jews in Paris, and Bousquet would arrange for the delivery of similarly stateless and foreign Jews from the unoccupied zone. For the moment, overall numbers had been reduced, as there was not enough transport for them all.
On 30 June, six months after the Wannsee conference at which the fate of Europe’s Jews was decided, Eichmann arrived in Paris to oversee the deportations. On 4 July, fearing a shortfall in numbers, Laval offered further concessions. He would also hand over to the Germans some of the stateless Jewish children, those who had come to France with their parents in the 1920s and 1930s. Women and children up to this point had not been regarded as fair game. Initial calculations that France contained some 865,000 Jews, a number inflated by the wild outpourings of journalists like Maurras and Céline, were now suspected to be grossly exaggerated. New calculations put the figure at more like 340,000. In theory, as naturalised French, Simon and Berthe were safe for the moment; but not Sara.
On 12 July, at one o’clock in the morning, the Liwerants’ bell rang. Sara woke Simon and asked him to see who it was. Outside stood a police inspector in civilian clothing. ‘You mustn’t stay here any longer,’ he told the boy quietly. ‘Say to your mother that there is going to be chaos.’ Next morning, Sara asked the concierge for permission to move from their first-floor apartment into an attic room on the sixth floor. Jacques was now two, and one of Simon’s tasks was to collect the ration of milk for the baby every morning before going to school. As he reached the ground floor on the morning of 16 July, he was stopped by an inspector in plain clothes, accompanied by three uniformed policemen. ‘Tiens, c’est un Juif,’ said the inspector, asking Simon where he was going.
Ordered to lead the policemen to his family, Simon unlocked the door to their flat on the first floor and pretended not to understand their questions about why it was empty. But then one of the men spotted that he had other keys in his hand. Marching him up before them, they climbed the building, floor by floor, trying each door until they reached the attic. There they found Sara and Jacques, but not Berthe, who had gone to stay with a friend. They were cowering under blankets. In spite of her poor French, Sara had the presence of mind to point out that the name on the list the police were carrying was not theirs – it had a ‘w’ rather than a ‘v’ – and that it must refer to another family. After much deliberation, the police agreed to check again at headquarters. When the three men in uniform were out of earshot, the inspector turned back. ‘Let me give you some advice. Don’t stay here. You won’t get away with this twice.’
At four o’clock on the morning of 16 July 1942, just as it was getting light, the Vichy government launched Opération Vent Printanier – Spring Wind. Nine thousand French policemen, including cadets from the police academy and some 400 ultraright volunteers, fanned out across the 3rd, 4th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 18th and 20th arrondissements in search of the 28,000 Jews they believed to be hiding there. There were no Germans among them, for Oberg and Dannecker had efficiently negotiated with Bousquet the use of France’s large contingent of gendarmes, gardes mobiles and municipal police, men regarded as powerful, if incompetent, corrupt and partisan. The manhunt lasted until one o’clock on the afternoon of the 17th, but netted only a disappointing 12,884 people. They were taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the winter cycling stadium on the Boulevard de Quenelle in the 15th arrondissement. Those unable to walk were carried on stretchers. Twenty-four people, resisting arrest, were shot. Though the UGIF had hesitated to broadcast rumours of the impending raids, for fear of sowing panic, many ordinary French citizens and a few sympathetic and appalled French policemen, like the inspector who had warned Sara and the children, had combined to alert, then hide, the Jews.
As the days passed, conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where the blackout glass cast an eerie light, deteriorated to a nightmare of heat, smells and panic. It was extremely hot. On the fifth day, the men were transferred to Drancy, and, soon after, the women and children to the internment camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Trains carrying the first deportees to the east, to occupied Poland, started to roll before the end of the month.
There were terrible scenes when fathers who had miraculously obtained exemption as veterans went home to find that their children, who had been overlooked in the initial manhunt, had since been picked up and disappeared. On 20 July, Jewish mothers in Beaune-la-Rolande were loaded on to lorries to take them to Drancy. Fighting and screaming, they were bludgeoned into leaving their children behind; when these were sent on later to Drancy, their state was pitiful, and the smaller had long since lost the name tags that were to have identified them and restored them to their parents. The older children, those over 12, were initially kept back, but were then put into the cattle trucks in convoys that left between 31 July and 7 August; the younger followed on trains between the 17th and the 28th. Not one would return. No longer would it be possible for anyone to believe that those arrested were all workers destined for factories and industry in occupied Europe.
In their flat in Belleville, despite the odds, Sara and the children managed to avoid capture. Still believing that naturalisation would protect Berthe and Simon, Sara found a passeur to take herself and the baby across the demarcation line from occupied into unoccupied France, saying that she would send for the children when she reached Lyons. At Châlons, her passeur – one of a small but shameful breed of collaborating passeurs – handed her over to the Gestapo. Though she had time to destroy her papers, with the identifying word ‘Juive’ stamped on them, she fell and hurt herself. Her health had not been good since Jacques’ birth. When she came to, she found herself in a hospital guarded by German soldiers; her bad French and foreign accent had told them enough about her origins. A friendly Red Cross nurse offered to take Jacques to her relations in Lyons.
In Belleville, Berthe and Simon, fearing every strange sound, every knock on the door, every distant noise of footsteps, seldom dared leave the flat. One day, a letter arrived; it was in Yiddish, which they could speak but not read, and they took it to their aunt to translate. In it, Sara explained what had happened, and said that they should lock up the flat, leave everything and join her in Chalôns. Simon thought it prudent to do only part of the journey by train, as the Germans were particularly vigilant at railway stations, and so at Beaune
they changed to a bus. Somewhere along the route, SS officers got on board. Suspicious about the children’s papers, they took them to the local Kommandantur, and put them into separate rooms, each guarded by a large Alsatian dog. They were told that if they moved, the dogs would bite them. Fifteen-year-old Berthe wet herself. At six that evening, a brusque Gestapo officer ordered them, on pain of arrest, to return immediately to Paris.
It was getting dark as the two children wandered the deserted streets of Châlons. A concierge in one of the town’s smarter hotels finally took pity on them, but said that they would have to leave by dawn, when the German officer whose room he gave them returned from night duty. Soon after four, they were hustled out of the hotel. Crouching in the gateway of a private house, they spent the hours waiting for it to grow light and for the hospital to open. In their mother’s ward were a dozen Jewish women who had been handed over to the Germans by the venal passeurs. Sara, whose fall seemed to have reduced her to a frail invalid, told the children that she had arranged with one of the nurses, a member of the Resistance, to get them across the demarcation line, here running parallel and through the river Saône, and into the unoccupied zone. They lived like hunted animals. Every evening, around six, they went to wait in a café for the sign that a boat had been found to take them across the water. Not many days later, a man wearing a helmet gave the signal for them to follow him. On the riverbank were a number of the Jewish women from their mother’s ward. Sara was not among them.
Berthe and Simon crossed in a small boat, in a group of six; they slept the rest of that night in a farmhouse. Next day, Simon persuaded a reluctant Jewish refugee to let them share his taxi to Lyons, where they found Jacques and their cousins. There was no news of Sara.
Lyons, in the summer of 1942, was fast becoming unsafe for Jews, even those like the Liwerant children who had French citizenship. Berthe, who had already been learning her father’s trade in Paris, was apprenticed to a sympathetic leatherworker. Simon was put in touch with the Organisation de Secours aux Enfants, the OSE. Their general secretary, Madeleine Dreyfus, a young woman from Alsace whose Jewish parents had come to France in the 1920s, with three children of her own, came to collect him. He was going, she told him, to a village in the mountains, where he would be safe; and he would take two-year-old Jacques with him.
There was another young boy, Jacques Stulmacher, whose story was leading in much the same direction. He was not quite nine when war was declared, living with his Russian father, Polish mother and younger brother Marcel in two small rooms in the 11th arrondissement in Paris. Their flat backed on to the Passage Alexandrine, and since most of the local inhabitants were Jews from Eastern Europe, they spoke in Yiddish to each other from their open windows across the narrow alleyway. Until he was three, and went to nursery school, Jacques did not know that any other language existed.
Jacques’ father was an engineer by training. He had helped his own father run a factory making leather gloves until the Red Army had ordered them to produce boots instead and he was sacked for protesting that the leather was unsuitable. Jacques’ grandfather claimed that he was too old to flee, but his father made his way through Turkey to Paris with his wife and young children and went to work for Citroën. He was active in the new trade union movement, and when hard economic times arrived he was one of the first to be laid off as a troublemaker. Jacques and Marcel were often hungry.
When the Germans broke round the Maginot line in the spring of 1940, the Stulmachers joined the frenzied exodus south, travelling in Jacques’ uncle’s ancient open touring car, seven of them crammed inside, his father riding on the running board. One night, as they sheltered in a hospice, German bombers strafed the building, apparently believing that government ministers who had passed this way not long before were still inside. Next morning, the bodies of those killed were laid out in neat rows in the courtyard. Jacques had never seen dead people before. The Stulmachers were unharmed.
They travelled on south, hoping to reach Bordeaux; whenever they heard the sound of bombers, they abandoned the car and hid in ditches or the forest. It was not fear of the bombs that worried her, said Jacques’ mother, because bombs hit everyone impartially; it was anti-Semitism, which seemed to be aimed just at them. At Arès, they ran out of petrol. It was here that Jacques tasted his first oyster, though he was embarrassed when the waiter referred to them ‘les huîtres’ and his father thought they were called ‘dix-huit’, eighteen. Even though his father’s French was distinctly better than his mother’s, both his parents had strong accents.
The family soon returned to Paris, part of the vast wave of people going back to their homes in the north after the armistice was signed and fighting ceased. It was only now that Jacques discovered what it meant to be a Jew. For every misdemeanour, however small, the teacher who supervised the breaks at school punished the culprits by sending them to stand facing the wall, with their hands on their heads. But he seemed blind to the fact that the small group of Jewish children was continually attacked by older, stronger boys. Day after day, as break approached, Jacques thought of himself as a gladiator, facing the lions in ancient Rome. He also learnt his first lesson in decency. The day after the yellow star became mandatory, M Leflond, the headmaster, assembled the entire school in the playground. ‘I want you all to be particularly kind to the children wearing yellow stars. Neither for me, nor for any of the other teachers, is there any difference between any of you.’ The supervisor from the playground mysteriously recovered his sight and there were no more attacks by bullies.
On his way home from school with his brother Marcel, Jacques would look at the shop windows that bore the sign ‘No Jews and no dogs’. Sometimes passers-by shouted out ‘Yoppin’ – Yid – at the two boys. There were not many places they could go now. When, one day, a group of defiant young Jewish boys and girls, wearing their stars and singing, paraded down the Champs-Elysées, that too became closed to Jews. Every morning, the school sang ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’, the new hymn to Pétain’s glory. In the Passage Alexandrine, Jacques and his friends never played games: they talked. He no longer felt like a child, and childish games had lost their allure. He was 10.
It never occurred to his parents not to register themselves when ordered to do so; they came back from the police station with the words ‘Juif’ and ‘Juive’ printed in bold red letters on their identity cards. Even so, when Jacques’ aunt came one day to warn them of rumours of a round-up of Jews, on 15 July 1942, and their neighbours exchanged frightened words from their windows in the Passage Alexandrine, the Stulmachers decided to go into hiding. A generous Portuguese couple in Saint-Ouen with a 13-year-old daughter were prepared to conceal all nine of them, both Jacques’ family and his aunt’s, in a wooden hut in the garden. Whenever neighbours came by, they had to remain absolutely silent, which was hard for Marcel, who had just turned six, and for their much younger cousin.
The news from Paris was grim. Jacques’ best friend’s father, picked up and taken to Drancy in an earlier round-up, was said to have been killed after he stole a carrot from the kitchens. His widow, ferocious in her attempts to save her three children, had struggled and fought when the French police arrived on the morning of 16 July. She had been unable to save any of them from being captured. Opération Vent Printanier had taken all the boys from the Passage Alexandrine.
For the time being, the Stulmachers were safe. But when life in the one room became intolerable, Jacques, Marcel and the small cousin were sent first to a family in Saint-Etienne de Rouvray for six months, then to an elderly couple in l’Aisne, who had a pig they called Adolphe. At the village school, Jacques would have skipped the weekly church service, except that on the first day, observing him leaving the line, an older and wiser child hauled him back. From then on, he never missed church; it didn’t pay to stand out, even if only the elderly couple knew for certain that he was a Jew. He and Marcel had kept the name Stulmacher, saying that their family came from Alsace.
Seven mon
ths later, their father managed to make his way to Lyons, where he found work as a cobbler. Jacques’ mother, still in hiding with the Portuguese family in Saint-Ouen, came to collect the children. They crossed the demarcation line by train at Vierzon, their passeur pretending to be the children’s mother, while she sat somewhere else. There was an agonising moment in the middle of the night when two SS officers boarded the train and announced that there would be a check of documents, but something happened to move the train on and the danger passed.
No one thought it safe for the children to stay in Lyons. It was the OSE that, as with the Liwerant boys, stepped in to propose a hiding place in the mountains. The man who came to collect them, André Chouraqui, was adamant about one thing: there was to be no contact of any kind between parents and children, no letters and no visits. It all felt very bleak.
CHAPTER TWO
The camps of shame
On a plateau in south-west France covered in ferns and spiny acacia lies the hamlet of Gurs. In summer it is a pleasant spot, with a view across to the Pyrenees, their peaks covered in snow for much of the year. But in autumn, the rains turn the ground to mud, while winter brings bitter winds and biting cold to the exposed pastures. In early April and May 1939, 25,000 Spanish republicans arrived here, fleeing from Franco’s army. They were housed in rectangular wooden barracks, 24 metres by 6, hastily erected in neat military rows on either side of a straight track. Not anticipating that the refugees would stay beyond the summer, the French authorities took no pains to make the huts warm or windproof. They used planks of raw uncured timber, which quickly shrank, leaving gaps, and put in no proper windows, only wooden shutters that could be raised a little way. The roofs were covered in bitumen.
Village of Secrets Page 3
