Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  “And then?”

  “To London; Konstantin, Katia’s brother, will take us into his house.”

  They walked on tiptoe so as not to make any noise until they reached the cell that would be Dalida’s bedroom.

  “I am going to pray for God to help us,” Sister Marie-Madeleine said as she left, making the sign of the cross.

  Dawn had not yet broken when Dalida was woken up with a start at the sound of blows and screams. The door of the cell opened suddenly and Sister Marie-Madeleine ordered her to get dressed at once.

  “Put this on!” she said, handing her a habit. “The Gestapo are searching the convent. The mother superior told them that we were not hiding anyone. I’ll help you escape. We’ll go out the back door.”

  Dalida put on the habit and the nun helped her to adjust the wimple. Then, holding hands, they ran along the little passages of the convent, hearing the footsteps of the Gestapo get ever closer. They went into the kitchen and found the sister cellarer with an odd expression on her face. They didn’t have time to ask her anything because a hand closed around Dalida’s arm.

  “Did you really think you could escape?” The man had on a black leather overcoat and it was difficult to see his face because it was hidden under the brim of his hat.

  “Who are you?” Sister Marie-Madeleine asked, confronting the unknown man. “Can’t you even respect a group of poor nuns?”

  “Ah, the Good Samaritan! Would you like to come with us as well? I don’t mind at all. Traitors are traitors even if they wear a habit.”

  The man twisted Dalida’s arm and made her stumble.

  “I thought that you Christians hated the Jews, wasn’t it they who killed Christ? Well, I suppose there’s an exception to every rule.”

  The mother superior arrived at that moment, accompanied by two other Gestapo agents. She tried to keep her dignity, even though her eyes showed a fear that was as large as it was intense.

  “Ladies, the game is up. You have to answer for having hidden a Jewess in your convent,” the man who seemed to be in charge said.

  “You are mistaken, sir, there are no Jews here, we are all nuns,” Sister Marie-Madeleine said.

  The Gestapo agent walked up to the nun until he was less than half an inch away from her, but the woman didn’t flinch.

  “If you insist, you can come with us as well.”

  The mother superior tried to protest, but they pushed her away and she nearly fell onto the stoves. The men left, taking with them Dalida and Sister Marie-Madeleine.

  They drove off in a car, crammed in next to one another. The nun started to pray in a low voice.

  When they got to the Gestapo headquarters they were pushed out rudely. They walked upright, trying not to show the fear they felt.

  They were locked in separate cells. Dalida shuddered at the cold that came from these dirty walls. There was nowhere to sit, and she stood up as she tried to grow accustomed to the darkness and its disgusting smell, a mixture of sweat, fear, and blood.

  They didn’t take long to come and get the two women. Two of the agents who had arrested them pushed them out of their cells, insulting them while making them climb some narrow steps.

  They took Sister Marie-Madeleine to a room where a man was waiting for her.

  “Sit down and watch,” he ordered, “and you’ll see what happens to Jews and traitors.”

  There was a glass panel set into one of the walls, which showed a room that at the moment simply contained an empty chair. She could see the men pushing Dalida into the room and how she fell to the floor. The men shouted at her to get up and your sister got to her feet as best she could. They told her to sit down and tied her hands behind her back. Then another policeman came in, and looked around with distaste. He walked around her a couple of times, then suddenly punched her and broke her nose. Dalida lost consciousness for a few seconds, then felt the blood running down until it reached her lips. Her hands were tied and she couldn’t stop herself from swallowing her own blood.

  “You are the daughter of Samuel Zucker, where is your father hiding?”

  Dalida didn’t reply. The man came closer and looked at her intently and then hit her again, this time in her right eye. This time she really did faint. She remained unconscious for a while. When she came to, she was still bleeding and the pain in her eye was unbearable.

  “Your Jewish friends told us where to find you. Ah, David, such a good friend to your father! All you Jews are a bunch of cowards, ready to hand over your own children to protect yourselves. You hide like rats in the most obscure little holes, but it is useless, because you always fall into our traps. Yes, soon we will be able to tell the Führer that Paris has been completely disinfected.”

  As he spoke he stood in front of Dalida, who could scarcely see him out of her one good eye, the other one being so bloodied.

  They picked her up out of the chair and, without untying her hands, hung her head downwards from a hook in the ceiling. The man who spoke kicked her in the head, then another policeman punched her, and so it continued for a while. She didn’t know if she was screaming or if her screams were being muffled in her throat. The pain was so intense that all she wanted to do was die. When they had stopped hitting her they took her down from the hook and she fell to the floor like a sack. One of the policemen came up to her and ripped off the habit, leaving her naked. She heard them talking about her body, disgusting words meant to humiliate her.

  “Your friend the countess is with us now, so why not tell us where your father is? You should be a good daughter and do all you can to be with him.” The policeman burst out laughing at this, as if he had told a good joke. Dalida did not hear any more as she had lost consciousness again.

  When she came to she heard one of the policemen speaking: “She’s more dead than alive. The best thing to do would be to kill her and save ourselves the cost of sending her to Germany. There are too many Jews in the camps, we can get rid of them here as well.”

  The beasts had gone so wild that Dalida would not have been able to talk even if she’d wanted to, such was the state they had left her in. The question was which camp would they send her to, if they sent her anywhere. Or would they kill her here, in Paris?

  Katia had been arrested that same night. She didn’t speak either. Like Dalida, the torture made her lose consciousness. The men were so cruel that her body became a mass of bloody flesh that not even they had any use for.

  As soon as they had gotten her to the General Headquarters they made her strip. And they kept her in a cell, naked, for four days. They didn’t give her any food or drink, and they kept the lights off.

  Katia heard the scuttling noise of the rats running around her cell, and didn’t dare sit down for fear that they would bite her. She remained standing, leaning against the wall, terrified, confused in the darkness. When they brought her to be interrogated she had almost lost her mind. But she had not, not completely, and so she didn’t tell them where to find Samuel. She was hovering on the border of insanity but she understood that if she kept quiet then she had a slim chance of coming out alive. The sane mistrust the words of the mad, but maybe these men were sane and Katia was mad?

  They made her kneel and clean the boots of the man who was interrogating her with her tongue. Katia didn’t refuse, she just acted mad, as if she didn’t know what they wanted of her. They hit her, and she fell to the floor and received more blows until she lost consciousness.

  Sister Marie-Madeleine stayed still, tied to a chair and watching the suffering being inflicted on Katia in the other room. She didn’t pray. She knew that no one would come to rescue them.

  For several days they made her watch the same macabre spectacle that she had seen inflicted on Dalida as well.

  The nun also suffered at the hands of those criminals, but in a different way. After she had seen Dalida tortured, one of the policemen raped her.
Another day they took her down to her cell, raped her again, and didn’t take her back up to the glass-walled room. They finally let her go, scorning her as they did so.

  The mother superior met her with sobs and wanted to make her swear that she would never be so imprudent again, but Sister Marie-Madeleine swore nothing. She couldn’t. If she closed her eyes she could feel that man’s hands on her body. She could smell his sweat and his disgusting saliva on her lips.

  She had not been hung from a hook as if she were a piece of meat, she had not been beaten unconscious. But the torture they had chosen had been equally cruel, as she would never be the same after being raped.

  She went to confession, did her penance, and asked for God to explain what had happened. But all she heard was silence, the same silence that millions of Jews had heard, millions of Gypsies, millions of men and women in the extermination camps. She herself decided to fall silent forever.

  But where was she? Where was Katia? She had been in Paris recently. Sister Marie-Madeleine could not tell me anything. It was hard for me to get the mother superior to allow me to see her. She said she wouldn’t speak to me because she didn’t speak to anyone, but as soon as the nun left us alone together, Sister Marie-Madeleine told me all that I have told you. Her voice seemed to come from another world. I had the impression that in spite of being here with us, this woman was no longer among the living. Before I left she surprised me by asking: “Why did they let me live?”

  After speaking with Sister Marie-Madeleine, I tried to find Pedro and Vasily. It was not easy, but I found the print shop. Pedro was still alive. He greeted me mistrustfully. He also felt guilty for having survived.

  Pedro gave me the last clue about your father. He told me that Raymond had been to Juana’s house and had told her to get Samuel out of there.

  “They’re rounding up Jews again and they are looking for him.”

  “And Dalida?” Juana asked.

  “She must be with the nuns. They have arrested the countess. Two of our men went to her house to get the radio and saw the Gestapo taking her away. I hope that Dalida is safe, Armando has gone to the convent . . . He won’t be too long.”

  Juana started to walk up and down the room as she always did to help her to think. Her Uncle Pedro and Vasily looked at her expectantly.

  “We have to get Samuel out of here,” Vasily dared say.

  “Oh, do we? And where would we take him? He’s got a fever, he doesn’t stop coughing. And you, Raymond, is your escape route to Spain ready yet?”

  “No one can leave Paris at the moment. The Gestapo are everywhere, and so are the men of the Feldgendarmerie. I’ve told you, they’re looking for Jews, as if there were not enough in Royallieu or Drancy.”

  “We have to show them that for all the Jews they arrest, and for all the members of the Resistance they kill, they will never stop us,” Juana replied.

  “Now is not the time to do anything,” Pedro warned.

  “Yes, yes, it is the moment, it’s exactly the right moment. They have to know that they cannot crush us like this. If we could get rid of that SS assassin . . . ,” Juana said angrily.

  “Forget about Alois Brunner.” Vasily’s words sounded like an order to Juana.

  She stood in front of him, hands on hips, and glared at him.

  “Forget about him! No, I’m not going to forget about him, if we get rid of him, then we will put fear into the rest of his crew.”

  “Stop dreaming, Juana, we have other problems now, and the biggest two are getting Samuel Zucker out of here and getting the radio back. The countess may have hidden it or given it to someone she trusts. Samuel knows her well, so he might have an idea.”

  Juana accepted reluctantly the idea that Raymond should talk to Samuel.

  Your father was lying down, half asleep because of the fever.

  “Samuel, this is Raymond, you’ll have heard Dalida talk about him. I have bad news. They’ve arrested Countess Katia Goldanski, and possibly your daughter Dalida as well,” Juana said, as she wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.

  Samuel sat up in fear. It was as if he had been given a punch in the gut when he heard about Katia and Dalida.

  “Where are they? Who took them?” he shouted faintly.

  Raymond explained everything that had happened in the last few hours and Samuel sank back onto the bed again. Knowing that Katia was in the hands of the Gestapo, and that his daughter might also be, brought him close to some kind of attack. Juana could hear Samuel’s heart racing like a clock. She made a sign to her Uncle Pedro to bring a glass of water and insisted that Samuel drink it.

  “We have to think, we cannot give up now. You have to help us. We need to get the radio back that Dalida gave to the countess to look after. Where do you think she might have hidden it?”

  He did not answer straight away. His eyes were closed and he tried to control his trembling hands. When he felt capable of looking Juana in the eyes, he said:

  “Katia trusted Grigory, he’s her chauffeur and he’s married to her housekeeper. They are Russian like us. But are you sure that the Gestapo hasn’t found the radio already?”

  “No, we’re not sure, but if there’s a chance that they haven’t, then we need to make sure,” Raymond replied.

  “I have to go,” Samuel said.

  “No, you’re not going anywhere,” Juana commanded.

  “If they are looking for me they will find me, and they will find all of us. You have to dismantle the press; take it and save yourselves,” Samuel said.

  “We will do nothing of the kind. We have a press, and so what? We earn our living printing what we can: visiting cards, posters for shops . . . We have nothing to hide.” Juana spoke so firmly that it was difficult to contradict her, but even so her Uncle Pedro dared to speak.

  “What will they do if they find all the documents we’re forging? We have more than a dozen passports here, halfway prepared.”

  “And that is what you will take out of here. Take anything that might compromise you and we’ll let them see what our real job is. We don’t have to dismantle the press, it would be reckless.” Juana had answers for everything.

  They agreed to take the compromising documents, but nothing else.

  “They will arrest us,” Vasily said, almost in a whisper, when Raymond had left.

  “Not all of us, you can go with my uncle, but I’ll stay here with Samuel.”

  “You’re mad!” Vasily feared Juana’s decisions because he knew that it was impossible to make her change her mind.

  “It would be stupid for you to get yourselves arrested. You and my uncle are too valuable to the Resistance, and it’s better if you stay hidden. I will stay with the old Jew until Raymond comes back this evening and tells us how to leave Paris. But you should go now, there’s not much time.”

  For once in his life Vasily didn’t agree and stood up to Juana.

  “Do you think that I can save myself and leave you here? Your uncle can go with the incriminating documents, but I’ll stay here, and if they come, then we’ll see what to do. Haven’t you said that we can pretend to be printers, normal printers? Well, let’s do it, let’s work together.”

  Juana was about to reply when she changed her mind. She realized that an argument with Vasily at this moment would be a waste of time, so she decided to use another tactic.

  “Alright, stay with me, but I want you to help my uncle get all the sensitive material out of here and take it to Raymond’s house. My uncle will stay there and then you can come back here.”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone for so long,” Vasily protested.

  “Don’t be silly, don’t you see that my uncle can’t go alone with all that material?”

  They didn’t take too long to gather all the files with the false documents. Then they put them in a couple of old bags and covered them
with other stuff.

  When Juana said goodbye to her uncle she whispered in his ear, “Don’t let him come back.” She was talking about Vasily. Pedro looked at her in surprise, worried about what his niece might be planning, but he said nothing.

  Once Juana and Samuel were alone, she checked that the pistol she always carried with her was loaded and cocked. Then she went over to Samuel’s bed and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Can you get up?”

  “Yes, I think I can . . .”

  “I’m going to try to get you to the border, although I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”

  “But . . . What about your friend? Raymond . . . Doesn’t he have to come to find us?”

  “We can’t afford to lose any time in waiting. I am afraid that the Gestapo could be here any minute. Look, I have a friend who lives not too far from here, a Spaniard like me, an exile, she lost her husband in the Civil War but managed to escape with her youngest child. He’s a good lad, he works as a taxi driver, maybe he could help us.”

  “Are they with the Resistance?”

  “No, they’re not, they’ve never wanted to commit themselves, they have suffered enough, but they are anti-Fascists and will help us if they can.”

  She helped him to sit up and then took him to the bathroom so he could wash his face. Then they went out to meet their fate. They went down the stairs to the main door and looked out at the street for a few seconds without seeing anything out of the ordinary. A mother with a shopping bag in one hand and a four- or five-year-old child holding onto the other, a young student with his textbooks, an elderly couple slowly strolling . . . No, there was nothing out there that made them suspicious, so they went out into the street. Juana took Samuel’s arm to support him. They went to the Métro and a few minutes later got out at Montparnasse. She tried to look at people’s faces by seeing them reflected in the shop windows, but she still saw nothing suspicious.

  Juana’s friend’s house was a single-room attic, as dark as it was narrow. The woman opened the door, surprised at this unexpected visit.

  “I’m sorry to put you in a tricky situation, but I need you to help me save this man,” Juana explained to the disconcerted woman.