Armando’s group received an order from the British. They had to blow up some train lines, the ones that connected Paris to the German border.
Armando asked Dalida to help them. They needed someone to take the explosives out of Paris. Your sister had learned how to drive, and Armando knew that David Peretz had a car in his garage.
Samuel and Armando met to talk about the operation. Your father was scared that Dalida would be running a more serious risk than the danger normally associated with the operations she was involved in. He offered to drive the explosives himself.
“No one will mistrust an old man like me,” Samuel argued.
“It’s not just taking the explosives one hundred kilometers out of Paris, it’s also setting them. Dalida is young and will be very useful to us; also, we’ve taught her how to deal with explosives, and I doubt that you know how to set a timer.”
Both of them had to give in. Dalida would go, but Samuel would go with her.
On the day in question, they went out as the afternoon was drawing to a close. The plan was to arrive at night, and Armando would show them where to go. They had chosen to set the bomb some distance from any village or city. It was better to go into the open countryside so as not to arouse anyone’s curiosity. They had the help of an old retired railway man. The man had shown them the best place to plant explosives. They needed to blow up a section of the track to sabotage the supplies that the Wehrmacht received from Germany.
Samuel drove slowly so as not to attract attention. Dalida had asked him to let her drive, but your father was right, a young woman driving would have attracted too much attention. And very little escaped the eyes of Section IVB4 of the Gestapo. Alois Brunner, Theodor Dannecker, and Heinz Röthke had already gained a reputation as murderers.
Luck was not with them that day, and they got a flat tire on the outskirts of Paris, just by Drancy, where the Germans had gathered together thousands of Jews.
The internment camp was near three train stations, where convoys of Jews were sent directly to Poland, to the camps at Auschwitz and Sobibór.
From where they were on the road they could see the five towers of the blocks that made up Drancy.
“I don’t know if I’ll know how to change the wheel, we’ll need to ask for help,” Dalida said, worried to be so close to the camp.
“Don’t worry, I may be old, but I still know how to change a tire. If you help me I can do it quickly.”
Samuel was taking off the punctured tire when a group of soldiers wearing SS insignia came up to them.
“Where are you going?”
“North, to the house of some relatives of mine.”
“Where, exactly.”
“Normandy. I am old and it is hard for me to stay in Paris,” Samuel explained.
“And what do you do?” the soldier asked Dalida.
“I look after my father and I work as a paid companion to an elderly woman.”
They didn’t seem to be all that happy with their answers and the soldier ill-manneredly walked away and began to look over their car.
Samuel took out a cigarette and started to smoke with an indifferent air. Dalida prayed that they would not find the hidden compartment where Armando’s men had hidden the dynamite.
She didn’t know where it was. Armando had said that if they arrested her and interrogated her then she would have no reason to lie, it was better if she didn’t know where it was, so she would not give herself away by looking toward the hiding place.
Two soldiers looked over the car carefully and found nothing. When they had finished their inspection, they walked on, telling them to keep moving as soon as they had changed the tire.
Samuel and Dalida were silent as they finished fixing the car. It was not until much later that they dared to speak again.
They got to the agreed-upon place two hours late. No one seemed to be waiting for them. Samuel parked the car.
“Let’s wait a while, if they don’t turn up, we can go back to Paris.”
“They’ll think that we were arrested. Armando never waits a single minute. When someone doesn’t get to the rendezvous point on time, then he cancels the operation, whatever the cause,” Dalida said regretfully.
“We’ve done what we can, here we are. Let’s wait and see what happens.”
They waited expectantly for half an hour. But nothing moved. Then it started to drizzle.
Samuel was turning the motor over when they saw a shadow coming toward them. It was an old man who hobbled toward them, leaning on a stick. They waited for him to come over to the car.
The man leaned down to the car window on Dalida’s side and said the agreed-upon words: “You mustn’t trust the weather, it could still rain tonight.”
Dalida leaped up and opened the car door so quickly that she nearly knocked the old man down.
“You’re very late, why?” he asked.
“We got a flat tire and were stopped by an SS patrol,” Dalida explained.
“Where are our friends?” Samuel asked.
“Not very far away. I’ll go and find them.”
“We’ll come with you,” Dalida suggested, but the man refused their offer.
“No, it’s not a good idea for you to be seen. Wait here with your lights off. They’ll come, and if they don’t then I’ll come tell you.”
They saw him disappear into the darkness of the night. Almost an hour later, without them seeing where he was coming from, Armando appeared, accompanied by another man. He opened the back door and got into the car.
He made them repeat what they had told the railway man. He seemed to be unsure about what to do.
“It’s too late, and the fuses will get wet, even though it isn’t raining that heavily . . . ,” Armando said, unsure about the decision he should make.
Raymond, his lieutenant, didn’t agree.
“We can’t go, a train full of supplies from Berlin for the troops in Paris is due tomorrow. We have to stop it from getting through.”
“It’s raining,” Armando insisted.
“Even though it’s raining, we can still blow up the tracks, it will be difficult but we can still do it.”
They argued, and eventually Armando gave in to the Frenchman’s arguments.
Raymond got out of the car and walked over to where the railway man was standing. It was impossible to hear what they said, but the old man walked away. He didn’t take long to come back, and brought with him five other men and a woman who he said was his daughter-in-law.
Two of the men dismantled the back seats of the car and revealed a space where the explosives were concealed. They started to set them up along the track, while Armando ordered Samuel to drive a few kilometers further on without turning on his lights.
Dalida helped Armando to set the charges. She did it fearlessly, certain of what she was doing.
It took them almost half an hour to plant the explosives. They didn’t speak or rest, tense with worry in case dawn should surprise them. When all the charges were in place, Armando gave the sign for the fuses to be lit.
They went away and waited impatiently for the detonation.
Not all the charges went off. The rain had extinguished some of them, but a goodly section of the track had been rendered unusable. It would take the Germans a while to repair it.
“Now we separate. I’ll see you in two days in Paris,” Armando said to his men.
Samuel was too tired to drive and refused to allow Dalida to do so. Armando didn’t know how to drive, but they couldn’t stay there either because of the risk that someone would see them and arrest them.
“Let’s hide at a farm I know of a few kilometers away from here. The farmer can be trusted. They’re waiting for us,” Armando said.
“What about the others?” Dalida asked worriedly.
“They all have an esc
ape plan. They’ll be safe.”
The farm belonged to the son of the old railway man, who had been sent to Morocco with the French Army. His wife, the woman who had helped them plant the explosives, told them to hide the car in the hay-barn. Then she offered them some hot soup and a room where they could rest.
They stayed at the farm for a couple of days while they waited for the controls on the roads to slacken off.
Katia was waiting impatiently for them in Paris. When they arrived she already knew about the devastating effect of the explosions.
She had gone for tea with a friend who had good relationships with the German officers. One of the women present had commented about how angry the military governor of Paris was. She had said to her friends that “he was going to look for the culprits everywhere, even in the sewers. He had arrested a few suspects. They will be shot, of course. I don’t understand people whose actions make things more difficult for the rest of us.” Katia had not replied, she had only smiled. Dalida had told London of the success of the mission, and had been given another job for Armando to do.
Dalida woke up feeling cold and sighed, thinking that she would be even colder when she put her feet on the ground. Samuel’s cough had woken her. She would ask Katia to convince him to spend some francs on wood for the little stove that didn’t even heat their house.
She knew that if her father refused to buy firewood it was because he had less and less money available.
They had sold a few paintings and precious objects at a loss, but they had very little left to sell. Also, Samuel spent most of the money he had on financing the operations he organized to save the Jews who managed to escape from the Nazis’ bloody claws.
She was tired. She had slept little more than four hours, as she had taken part in another of Armando’s operations the night before.
There was a café where various members of the SS used to go, including the hated Captain Alois Brunner. The Resistance had decided to plant a bomb there.
Armando’s plan was simple. Someone would go into the café, order something at the bar, then go into the restroom. He would plant the explosives there, knowing that he had less than a minute to escape.
“What will happen to the civilians?” Dalida asked.
Raymond laughed at her scruples.
“Come on, there is no such thing as a civilian in this war, only soldiers and collaborators. Don’t you believe that the owner of the café is better than these Nazis. He is worse than they are, because he is a traitor to France.”
The answer convinced her, but it was not enough to make her agree to participate actively in the plan. All she offered was to take the bomb from the house of one of the members of the Resistance to that of the man who would plant the bomb in the café. That is what she did, and then she went home, plagued by a bad feeling about what was going to happen.
She looked out of the window as she made herself a cup of tea. Dawn was about to break and she saw no one in the street. She wanted to go back to bed, but she knew that if she did so, being awake, she would find it impossible to get back to sleep. Also, she had chores to do, darning her father’s socks and trying to make a warming soup out of their scarce provisions. But she didn’t settle down to either of these tasks, she felt uncomfortable.
Samuel was still sleeping when she heard some dull knocks on the door. She was already dressed, but she wondered who could have come round so early. She opened the door to find Katia.
“But what are you doing here? Come in, come in . . . Has anything happened?”
“They’ve arrested David Peretz. I found out last night but it was impossible for me to come round. I was at a dinner and heard someone say that they had arrested a leader of the ‘Jewish Resistance.’ I didn’t dare ask who it was, so I was alert until I heard them mention the name Peretz. The man who spoke of this was an SS officer who was speaking to one of the heads of the French police here, scolding him for not having rounded up all the Jews in Paris. The policeman apologized; he said they had done what they could, but that ‘lots of Jews had escaped, but there was no doubt that they would be arrested.’ Then he spoke about David Peretz. They had arrested him for trying to hide some Jewish children, daughters of a family that had been sent to the camp at Royallieu. The parents had asked a friend to look after them, the friend had done so but his wife was nervous and didn’t know what to say when telling her neighbors who those little girls were. She said they were the children of one of her cousins who was sick, then she confessed the truth to one of her neighbors, who denounced her to the police. The husband barely had time to get the children out of the house, and he took them straight to David’s place. But the police were already following him and they arrested them all.”
“No one knew about David’s house, only a few of us knew where he lived,” Dalida replied.
“Yes, David, like your father, left his house and found another one, a safe house, but he has been found out. They’ve taken him and his wife. We took his children across to Spain quite a while ago.”
“I’m going to wake my father. He’s had a bad night, he hasn’t stopped coughing.”
“It’s very cold here.”
“He doesn’t want us to spend a franc on firewood and he laughs at me if I say I’m cold. Then he talks to me about the winters in Saint Petersburg, and says that they were really cold.”
“He’s right, but there . . . We were never cold.”
Samuel did not take long to come down to the little sitting room where Katia and Dalida were waiting for him with a cup of tea.
“What are we going to do?” Dalida asked when Katia had explained the situation again.
“We should go now. It won’t take us long to get all our stuff together: there’s not much of it. David will talk about us and they will come to find us.”
“How can you say that, Papa! David would never betray us!” Dalida protested.
“I know that our friend will resist as much as is humanly possible, but the Gestapo knows how to make their prisoners talk. They torture them until they can bear it no longer, and then they always talk.”
“Your father is right. I will help you to get out to somewhere else. Maybe you could come to my house, even if only for a few days. No one will look for you there.”
“No, Katia, no. You are more useful to the Resistance and the British staying here, doing what you’re doing, listening and passing information. Dalida could stay with you, we’ve kept up the pretense that she is your companion, so your servants would not be surprised if she were to stay in your house; the only thing my presence would do is put you both in danger.”
“You have to hide,” Katia insisted.
They agreed that your sister would stay in Katia’s house and that your father would go there for a couple of hours until he could think of a place where he could go to hide.
Dalida went to see Juana and Vasily. She was sure that they would be able to help.
Juana listened to what had happened and bit her lower lip.
“When your friend David speaks they’ll look for you all over Paris,” Vasily said.
“There has to be somewhere my father can hide.”
“He could stay here for a day or so,” Juana said.
Vasily was going to say something, but the look Juana gave him stopped him dead. It was Pedro, Juana’s uncle, who dared question his niece’s decision.
“We are now all in danger. It’s like a domino, when one falls, then the rest fall with it. David knows about us, we’ve made lots of documents for your group, and if they make him talk . . .”
“What are you saying?” Juana shouted. “Are we going to crumple? We know that the Gestapo want to hunt us down, and what the risks associated with that are, if they ever find us. They will torture us and if we are lucky they will kill us, or maybe send us to one of their camps in Germany. But we have a saying in Spain—you can�
�t make a tortilla without breaking eggs.”
“What do you suggest, Juana?” Vasily asked.
“For the time being, to bring Samuel here until we can find him somewhere safer. Dalida needs to put the Resistance on alert as well. Armando is not in Paris, but she can speak to Raymond. He’ll know what to do.”
“The most sensible thing would be to get you out of France,” Pedro suggested.
“Yes, that would be best. We can get you to Spain and it will not be difficult to send you to Portugal after that,” Juana said.
Dalida was amazed at Juana’s strength. She was a woman who didn’t give in in the face of any danger. No wonder Vasily was captivated by her. Dalida was surprised that this great big man, almost a giant, behaved like an obedient child in front of Juana.
“I have another idea,” Juana said. “Maybe you should hide your friend in the nun’s convent. No one will look for you there and Katia won’t be in any danger.”
“I don’t know if that would be possible . . . ,” Dalida said.
“Try it. I think it would be the best option. As for your father, he can stay here, but whether you like it or not the time has come for you to go.”
“You are in danger as well,” Dalida reminded her.
“We cannot leave. We could move at the very most, but it’s not easy to do that. Our only guarantee of security is that no more than a dozen people know how to find us,” Pedro answered.
“But David is one of them,” Dalida replied.
Juana cut the conversation short.
“We’ll do what we have to do and we’ll try to be more careful,” she said.
Katia didn’t think it was a good idea for Samuel to hide in Juana’s house.
“If David talks, it will be the first place they’ll look,” she said, worriedly.
Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead Page 68
