“What do you want me to do?”
“Thank you, Pepa, I knew I could count on you! Look, if your son could take us to the border . . . We have friends in Biarritz who could get him across to Spain . . .”
“Jaime is about to come home. He has a few hours off before he is supposed to carry on with his work driving the taxi . . .”
“I know that this is getting you involved in a situation you might not want to be a part of, but I can’t think of any other way to get this man out of Paris.”
They heard the sound of a key in the lock, and the young man Jaime appeared. He looked like his mother, the same dark brown hair, the same steady eyes, the same air of calm.
“Here he is! You explain the situation, Juana.”
Jaime listened without saying a word, thinking about how to reply.
“I have to hand the taxi back at ten o’clock, but I could tell my boss to let me have it overnight so that I could start work earlier. If he says yes, then we can go now, but in any case I need to be back tomorrow.”
The young man went off to call his boss from the nearest bar and came back with a smile on his face.
“It’s all sorted out, we can leave right now.”
Juana did not lie to them and told them that the Gestapo was looking for them.
“If they find us, then you will pay the price as well.”
Mother and son looked each other in the eye and told themselves wordlessly what they needed to do. Ten minutes later Jaime was waiting for them, parked by the door. He hugged Pepa goodbye.
“Thank you, thank you . . .”
“Try to make sure nothing happens to you, you’re the only child I have left,” the woman replied.
“I . . . I hope I’ll be back safe and sound . . .”
“If you don’t . . . Well, I don’t even want to think about it, but if you die, it’s better to die for a cause. Go on, go now, if Jaime has to get to the border and back before tomorrow he doesn’t have much time.”
They had left Paris when two men pulled in front of Jaime’s taxi. Juana took hold of the weapon that she had in her overcoat pocket.
“Reverse,” she said to Jaime. But it was too late, two other black cars had stopped just behind them, blocking their exit.
Four men, pistols in hand, approached the car.
“We have to get out of here,” Juana insisted.
“We’re surrounded, there’s no escape,” Jaime said.
“Yes, yes, we can escape. Turn right, off the road and we might still be able to get away.”
“Juana, we can’t, they’ve got us trapped; if we try to escape they’ll shoot,” Jaime insisted.
“Do as I say!” she said and gave the steering wheel a twist.
“You’re crazy!” Jaime shouted as he tried to take control of the car.
The Gestapo agents opened fire, and one of their bullets caught a wheel of the taxi. Juana took the pistol out of her coat, opened the side window, and opened fire. Her eyes lit up when she saw that she had hit one of the men, but the car carried on running out of control down the embankment. The Gestapo agents carried on firing. Juana fired again, but it was the last thing she did: A bullet struck her in the head and killed her instantly.
The car hit a tree and Jaime was knocked unconscious.
The Gestapo approached and told them to get out of the car. Only Samuel would have been able to reply if he could have found the words to do so.
Juana was dead, and Jaime appeared to be dead. The Gestapo took the bodies out of the car. One of them kicked Juana’s lifeless body, his revenge for the comrade whose life Juana’s bullet had taken.
Samuel sat still and calm, as if he were in the middle of a nightmare. One of the men hit him with the butt of his pistol and knocked him to the ground. Then they made him get into one of the cars. And after that he disappeared.
Thanks to Pedro I was able to speak with Pepa, Jaime’s mother. I was impressed when I met her because she is a woman who has lost everything and yet she is still not crushed. She told me that she was from Granada and that she lost her husband, her two oldest children, and other members of her family in the Spanish Civil War. And in Paris she lost her last remaining son, Jaime. Jaime had risked his life to save Samuel, a man he didn’t know. I said to Pepa that I admired her bravery and that of her son. You know what she said to me? “If you have to die for freedom, then you will die. And you die with dignity.”
Pepa never recovered Jaime’s body, so she doesn’t know where to go to mourn him.
As for your father, Pepa told me that the only news she ever managed to find out about him was that he was taken for a few days to Gestapo headquarters. It’s possible that after that he was taken to Drancy, and from there on a cattle train to Auschwitz or Treblinka or Mauthausen. We don’t know, we haven’t been able to find out anything at all up through today. If you ask me did I go to Drancy, the answer is yes. I have been in Paris trying to find out what happened. I wasn’t able to find any papers that showed your father had been there, because the Nazi hierarchy burned all their papers before trying to escape. When the Allies entered Paris, the Red Cross took charge of Drancy. They were unable to tell me for certain whether your father, your sister, and my aunt had passed through the camp.”
I was shocked at Gustav’s story, I had not dared interrupt him as he told it. It was as if what he was telling me had nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my father or my sister. That it was just another one of those terrible stories that we were all hearing every day at that time. But such things, I thought, could never happen to us.
Vera had been crying silently for a while. Tears ran down her face and she knotted her hands together.
“I haven’t stopped searching for them since the end of the war,” Gustav assured me.
“Someone must know something,” I said, but without much conviction.
“A friend in the Foreign Office has advised me to go to the continent, to Poland, to Germany, maybe we can find them in one of the camps . . . The Germans kept records of everything. I was planning to go to Berlin tomorrow.”
“I would be more at ease if you went together,” Vera said, looking at me through the veil of tears that covered her eyes.
“Yes, but first . . . Well, I know someone . . . an intelligence officer, maybe he can help us.” I don’t know why, but at that moment I thought of Major Williams.
I explained to them who he was and that I had been under his command, although I didn’t say exactly what I had done.
Gustav went with me next day to the Admiralty. He knew enough people and had enough influence to get someone to tell us how we might find Major Williams. We were lucky. He was in Berlin. They had promoted him to colonel. They called him and he said that he would see us straight away, so we rushed off to Berlin.
Colonel Williams had grown older, or so it seemed to me. His chestnut hair was speckled with white and his eyes were duller.
“Thank you for seeing us, Colonel,” I said as I shook his hand.
“Curiosity, yes, I know that my job makes a lot of people curious. When they said you wanted to see me I asked myself what you could want from me now.”
Gustav explained briefly what he had been able to find out, and I asked him to help us.
Williams listened to us in silence. I won’t say that he was struck by what Gustav had to say, because he must have heard stories like this regularly throughout the war, but he did seem ready to give us a hand.
“These damn Germans had one thing going for them; they wrote down everything they did. There are registers of all those who were prisoners in the camps, all those who were sent to the gas chambers . . . We’ve found documentation about their horrible experiments on human beings. If your father or your sister or your aunt did not die in Paris and were sent to Poland or Austria or Germany, then we should be able to find them. It mig
ht take some time, so you’ll need to be patient. I have an acquaintance in the Russian zone, Boris Stepanov. He can have a look at the camp registers that the Soviets captured. I’ll call him and get him to agree to meet with you. As for me, I’ll look for their names as well.”
“Tell me, sir, are there still people in the camps?” I asked apprehensively.
“The Red Cross is in charge and is taking care of these poor unfortunates.”
“I want to go to Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Treblinka; I want to go to any of the places where they could have been sent.” My request was a supplication.
“I wouldn’t recommend it. You’re a soldier and you’ve fought at the front, you have risked your life and killed like a soldier, but these camps . . . If a hell exists, it’s there.”
“Can you get us permission to go?” I insisted.
“Yes, I can, but I don’t know if I should. You don’t need to, we can look for your family from Berlin.”
“Please . . .”
“Go and see Boris first, and I will try to find out what I can. We’ll see about everything else later.”
Walking through Berlin made me feel strange. I looked at the faces of the Germans, trying to see the marks of guilt. Starving men to one side, old men to another, lost-looking youngsters, housewives desperate to find food for their families . . . In other circumstances these faces would have moved me. But now . . . No, I couldn’t forgive them, I didn’t know if the faces I saw were guilty or innocent, but I thought they were all guilty for unleashing the madness of the Holocaust. How many of them had stood up to Hitler? How many of them had risked their own lives to stop thousands of people being sent to the gas chambers? They exculpated themselves, they said that people didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t believe that. They couldn’t be deaf and blind to what was taking place a few meters from their own homes, to the enormities that were being committed by their children, their husbands. These women, walking along with their faces turned to the ground, they had applauded the bastards who had murdered millions of Jews.
“I can’t bear being here,” I admitted to Gustav.
But he was a better man than I, and tried to convince me that all people have a survival instinct that makes us cowards, and that you can’t ask people simply to become heroes, that sometimes the masses have to close their eyes and cover their ears simply to go on living . . .
“No, I’m not asking for them to be heroes, I’m just asking how they can carry on living in the knowledge that their personal well-being is based on a crime. Whatever you say, you know as well as I do that they are not innocent.”
Gustav was a person entirely free from malice, and it was difficult for him to discern wickedness in others. These days would have been impossible for me without him, because to me everyone looked like a murderer.
With the safe-conduct pass that Colonel Williams had given us, we did not have too many problems in crossing into the Soviet sector of Berlin.
Boris Stepanov met us in an office in which he seemed to be swimming in papers.
“So you are looking for your family . . . Everybody’s looking for something. Fathers, brothers, uncles, sons . . .”
We told him what we knew, and gave him some old photos, and he promised to call us if he found anything out. He even offered us a drink.
He seemed a nice enough man, and I felt close to him, as he and I had fought in the same war.
“We were among the first to find the extermination camps. I went into one of them myself.”
Gustav asked him to tell us what he had seen, and he spoke to us about his time in Majdanek in Poland.
“When the Nazis knew they had lost, when we were about to arrive, they tried to destroy the camp, they blew up one of the crematoria, but we advanced too quickly and they left, leaving the gas chambers standing.”
Boris told us not only about what he had seen in Majdanek, but also about how they had suffered during the liberation of Auschwitz.
“If hell exists, it was there,” he said, as he poured out two glasses of vodka to try to help him banish the shadows of the horror. He continued: “The men we met seemed to have risen from their graves. The women . . . I will always have nightmares when I see those desperate faces. And the children . . . I have two children, and when I saw those children with their condemned faces my heart broke. What kind of men could have committed such atrocities? You face enemies in a war, enemies who are the same as you, you kill them, they kill you, and that’s it . . . But this, this . . . I am a peasant and I swear that no animal is capable of doing what the Nazis did.”
Boris, as large as a bear, broke down when he told us about the hell he had seen. And he, a professed atheist, crossed himself as his mother had taught him to do as a child, to protect himself from the evil he had seen.
Back then, large parts of Berlin were nothing more than heaps of rubble. The war had left its mark on the whole city. The worst was not the damaged urban landscape, but the misery in which the Berliners lived.
One evening Gustav and I were walking through the Nikolaiviertel on the banks of the Spree when a girl came up to us who could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. She offered herself to us with the resignation of someone who had no other option available to her to continue living.
“What’s your name?” Gustav asked.
“What do you care? Call me what you want,” she said, her voice dry and tired.
“Why do you do this? Don’t you have a family?” I asked.
She turned away when she saw that we had no intention of taking advantage of her, and also that she was not going to get the money she needed from us. Her silence was the last piece of dignity remaining to her. She sold her body but nothing else, which was why she had no need to give us any explanations.
Gustav caught up with her and put some coins into her hand.
“Go home, I think this should be enough for a few days.”
The girl seemed to hesitate, then closed her hand tight, nodded briefly, and disappeared into the fog on the banks of the river.
The whole scene had depressed us, and once again I cursed Hitler for having taken life away from millions of human beings, including many who were still breathing.
Colonel Williams called us after a few days to ask us to go with him to see Boris Stepanov.
“You’re giving me the perfect excuse to see the Soviet sector,” he said.
He took us to Boris’s office, where the Russian was waiting for us with a bottle of vodka.
“I’ve brought you some authentic Scotch whisky,” the colonel said to Boris as he handed him a bottle.
“Well, we’ll drink your whisky, and when we’ve finished that, then we’ll drink my vodka.”
Neither Gustav nor I wanted to refuse Boris’s offer, but we both still remembered the headaches we had had the day after we had first met him and had been unable to refuse his offer of vodka. Boris was a generous and expansive person, who didn’t understand the idea of someone rejecting the chance to share a glass with him.
“I have some information for you,” he said, and was quiet for a few minutes as he looked over some papers he held in his hand. “Samuel Zucker was sent to Auschwitz in December 1943, and was sent to the gas chamber the day he arrived. He was old and sick, so there was no way of getting any work out of him. He was in two camps in France—he went to Drancy first and then after a few days was sent to Royallieu, and from there straight to Auschwitz. He traveled with two hundred other Jews in a cattle car. I’m sorry, Ezekiel.”
I didn’t know what to say or what to do. I didn’t even move. I had to understand what Boris had just told me, to take in the fact that my father had been killed in a gas chamber after having seen the preliminaries to hell in a cattle car, where he had spent several days without food or water, defecating in full view of all the other prisoners, breathing in that unbearable st
ench, treated like a member of a subhuman species.
I couldn’t bear the images that filled my head while I tried to accept that this had been my father’s fate.
Gustav and Colonel Williams said nothing, what could they have said? I felt dizzy, I couldn’t accept that my father had been killed in a gas chamber. I thought about my mother, about what she would suffer when she found out.
“It can’t be true,” I managed to say.
Boris did not reply. He looked at me very seriously and put a glass of whisky in my hand.
“Drink it,” he ordered, as if it were a medicine that could ease the pain I was feeling at that moment.
I didn’t drink, I couldn’t, all I wanted to do was scream, to get up and hit everyone who I found in my way, to go out into the street and shout “murderer” to every German I met, tell them that they all had blood on their hands, and that never, whatever they did, would they be able to cleanse themselves of that blood.
Yes, I wanted to curse them and tell them that their sins would fall on the heads of their children and their children’s children, would resound into eternity. But I didn’t move, I was paralyzed with the horror of it.
I felt Gustav’s hand on my arm, his way of telling me that my pain was also his pain.
“Damn it! Why did it have to be me who gave the bad news?” Boris snapped and poured himself another glass of whisky.
“Come on Boris, don’t blame yourself,” Colonel Williams said.
“The worst of it is that lots of the animals who did this will get away scot-free,” Boris said.
“There is a trial underway, the guilty will be punished,” Colonel Williams said.
“My dear friend, do you really think that the guilty men will all be made to pay? No, it won’t happen, they will condemn a few of the Nazi top brass at Nuremburg and that will be it. If there were any justice then all of Germany would be put on trial. They were all complicit,” Boris said, angrily bringing his fist down on the table.
Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead Page 71
