The Lost Boy

by Kate Moira Ryan

  “What is it, Slim? What is going on with Daniel?” Françoise asked as two orderlies bounded down the hall and into Daniel’s room.

  “I showed Daniel a photo of Tiny and I think he thought it was his sister, Adrienne,” she said.

  Daniel’s shouting grew louder. Slim instinctively tried to go back into the room.

  “No, Slim. Let them calm him down,” Françoise said, moving Slim away from the door.

  The shouting continued for another thirty-seconds. Then it was silent.

  “See, they gave him something to calm him,” Françoise said soothingly in Slim’s ear.

  Moments later, Pasha came out. “Daniel has been sedated. Come, let us go to the cafe here and talk.”

  “I want to say goodbye to him,” Slim said, knowing full well she would not be allowed to do that.

  “Darling, you cannot say goodbye to Daniel right now. I know this is hard for you,” Pasha said.

  “What did they do to him? Why is he like that?” Slim heard herself shouting.

  “Listen to me. I will explain what I know, but we need to leave. There are other patients on this floor and we cannot disturb them. Come.” Pasha took her arm and guided her towards the elevator.

  Françoise took Slim’s other arm and said soothingly, “We will get this sorted out.”

  “How can we? Daniel does not know who I am,” Slim said, choking back tears. “He has no idea that he has a wife or a daughter. It is like we don’t exist.”

  Over café au lait, Pasha pulled out his ubiquitous cigarettes and lit one for himself and one for Françoise.

  “I thought you were cutting down,” Slim said to Françoise.

  “Our secret,” Françoise said, rolling her eyes.

  “Okay. I am calmer,” Slim said. “Now, will you please tell me what they did to Daniel? At one point, you said Klaus Barbie was using him as bait.”

  “I was wrong,” Pasha said.

  “What then?” Slim asked.

  “This is what I have been told. How much of it is true, I do not know, but I suspect it is somewhat true.” Pasha began. “When I left you in Munich, I went to Augsburg.”

  “Where is that and why did you go there?” Slim asked.

  “It is in Bavaria, about an hour away from Munich,” Pasha pushed a file towards Slim. “I had a tip that Daniel was there.”

  “You found Daniel for me,” Slim said, shocked. “You said that you had no idea where he was.”

  “I was not lying. I did not know. But Jones, the man who works for me in Munich, the one you went with to the jazz club…”

  “Yes, I know Jones.” Slim tried to keep the irritation out of her voice.

  “There’s a C.I.C officer, who does not want to be named—,” Pasha began.

  “What is C.I.C.?” asked Françoise.

  “The C.I.C. is the US Army Counterintelligence Corps. It started during the war and still is operating as an intelligence agency. Right after the war they launched ‘Paper Clip’, to recruit German rocket scientists before the Soviets got hold of them. Now they’re involved in grooming informants and getting defectors out of the Soviet-Occupied zones,” Pasha explained.

  “What does any of this have to do with Daniel?” Slim could not figure out what Pasha was trying to tell her.

  “They recruited Klaus Barbie as an agent and an informant because he had been so successful in interrogation,” Pasha answered. “Initially, they used him to report on intelligence activities in the French zone of occupied Germany. The Americans believe that the French have been infiltrated by Communists.”

  “So the rumor is true. Barbie is working for the Americans.” Slim shook her head with disgust. “Don’t the Americans know what he did in Lyon? He butchered members of the Resistance and countless Jews. There’s even a rumor he rounded up a bunch of children in an orphanage in Izieu and sent them to their deaths.”

  “The agent in charge of Barbie does not believe it. He thinks Barbie is far too professional to have been involved with torture. Essentially, he has been given carte blanche,” Pasha said.

  “To do what?” Slim asked.

  “They have been allowing him to perform psychological torture experiments and one of the subjects they used was Daniel,” Pasha said.

  “But why Daniel?”

  “Why not? The C.I.C. needed subjects and Barbie wanted revenge. Daniel tried to bring Barbie to justice,” Pasha said. “A junior agent passed this file to Jones. The junior agent does not like the fact that the C.I.C. is employing ex-SS men. He also does not think they should be using human subjects.” Pasha pushed the file towards Slim.

  “The French want Barbie back, we want him tried for war crimes. We have sentenced him to death in absentia.” Françoise said, “Why does the United States protect him?”

  “They think he knows too much about the inner workings of the C.I.C. They are afraid he will reveal this information, putting their agents and informants in jeopardy,” Pasha explained.

  “When you say Daniel was being used as a human subject, what does that even mean?” Slim asked.

  “Physical torture is seen as old-fashioned. Psychological torture and manipulation is regarded as the future,” Pasha explained. “In this file, you will find out what has been done to Daniel.”

  Slim shakily pulled the file towards herself. She was almost too frightened to open it. Pasha put his hands on hers.

  “Slim, there is a likelihood that Daniel will not come out of his state of psychosis. You may want to commit him to an asylum where he will be well-cared for,” Pasha said.

  “Pasha, let me tell you something about Daniel. He came from a family of barbers. They all lived and worked in the same building, where the bar and my agency is now. His father refused to teach his son to cut hair. Instead he sent him to the Sorbonne to become a teacher, a philosopher — anything but a barber. So he went to the Sorbonne, until the Jewish students were expelled. Then he was rounded up and sent to Drancy with his family. When the selection came for the trains to the east, the men bribed the police with jewelry so the women would be able to stay behind in Drancy. When the men arrived in Auschwitz, they became barbers. Even Daniel was given a quick lesson on the art of cutting hair. They did not cut the hair of the guards or the Kommandant. They cut the hair of the naked prisoners before they entered the gas chambers. As each week passed, they breathed a sigh of relief that the unshorn heads of their women and especially, his seven-year-old sister, Adrienne, was not among them. Six weeks later, his mother and baby sister sat before Daniel and his father. His father cut his wife’s hair and Daniel cut his sister’s hair. Then the doors opened and they went into the gas chambers. After an outbreak of Typhus, Daniel was the only one of his family to survive. He will come through this,” Slim said.

  “Mon Dieu,” Françoise whispered, “I knew Daniel had been a barber in Auschwitz, but I did not know about his mother and sister.”

  “Slim, this is not like the trauma of war. They injected Daniel with drugs. You have to be prepared for him to never come out of this,” Pasha said.

  “Let me tell you something about love,” Slim said. “When you love someone like I love Daniel — and God knows I have not been perfect — you do not give up. If he cannot be the father and husband I want him to be, I will accept that. But, I will not stop trying to help him. Daniel has been through so much. He has tried to overcome his demons. I will help him until I can’t anymore.”

  Later on that night, Slim reviewed the file. Daniel had been subjected to a program of mind control in a series of experiments to identify drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations with the Soviets.

  Page after page, much of it redacted, outlined what Daniel had been put through including hypnosis, sensory deprivation. He had been kept in isolation and when taken out, subjected to hours of shouting and abuse. He had been administered a hallucinogenic named Lysergsaure-Diethylamide. His dosage increased over a period of weeks, causing him to shake uncontrollably and giving him frightening
delusions. “Subject believes he is walking into the gas chamber with his mother,” was noted in one of the reports. When that experiment ended, Daniel was given a shot of a barbiturate in one arm and an amphetamine in the other. The effect of being both sleepy and awake made him confused and incoherent.

  Into the night Slim read. Finally, she fell asleep with pages of the report scattered across the bed. When she awoke, she stumbled into the kitchen where Josie was feeding Tiny. Exhausted, Slim looked at them both and asked with a yawn, “What are the plans for the day?”

  “I thought we’d walk over to the Tuileries and wheel Tiny about the garden. Pardon me for asking, but are you alright, Madame Cohen?”

  “I did not sleep much last night,” Sim said as she lifted Tiny up to give her a kiss and a quick cuddle. “Have fun today.”

  Slim crawled back into bed. She tried to go back to sleep, but with each twist and turn, she thought of Daniel. She thought about what Pasha had said about Daniel being too far gone to be fixed. Yet, people had been fixed after the war, even the smallest of children were able to resume a life of normalcy. Then she remembered Anna Freud. What was the study she had done with the five children from Terezin? She cleared the papers from her bed, got herself dressed and made coffee. The only way Daniel was going to get better was if she took the bull by the horns and wrestled it to the ground.

  After an hour of trying to get a call through to London, she finally reached Anna Freud’s assistant, Selina Treichler.

  “Miss Treichler, this is Slim Moran. I met you a couple of weeks ago. You helped me with the lost boy I was trying to find,” Slim began.

  “Yes, of course,” she replied. “Did you find your missing boy?”

  “Yes. He is a teen now. It is quite a story and I will tell you the next time I am in London. But, I am hoping you can help me with another problem I need to solve. This time, it is personal,” Slim said.

  “If I can, I will,” Treichler answered.

  Slim explained what happened to Daniel. There was a long pause on the line.

  “I gather you cannot help me, Selina,” Slim said with an air of defeatism. If she could not get the great Anna Freud’s assistant, then who could she get?

  “Hold on let me talk to Anna and ring you back.” Treichler said. “As you know, Anna works with children, not adults, but she might be able to come up with some ideas.”

  Slim hung up the phone. She looked at Daniel’s file. She had no desire to open it again. How many files of people had she opened? At the Red Cross, she faced the atrocity of hopelessness every day. When she first started working there right after the war, Slim had willed herself to seem cheerful and positive. As time went on she dropped the facade. A man looking for his wife and two teenage daughters kept saying, ‘We were in hiding throughout the war, the entire time. Six months before the war ended someone turned us in.’ His wife and daughters succumbed to Typhus. She remembered his shaking hands when she showed him the information from Bad Arolsen. He looked around the lobby of the Hotel Lutetia. “Everyone in this room must begin again, not just me. There is some cold comfort in that, I guess. I don’t know. Thank you for your help, Miss Moran,” he said in his halting English and left. Now, Slim felt like one of the lost people wandering about the lobby of the Hotel Lutetia looking for answers. The helper had become the one in need.

  Slim’s phone rang an hour later. Selina Treichler was back on the line. “So, I spoke with Anna. She says that you should contact Jean Delay. He is the chair of the department of psychiatry at the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne. He is at the forefront of biological psychiatry.”

  “Biological psychiatry? What is that?” Slim asked.

  “He is testing a drug called Chlorpromazine on male mental patients,” Treichler said.

  “No, but thank you,” Slim said. “They used so many drugs on Daniel, I do not want to subject him to—”

  “Hear me out,” Treichler said. “It is an antipsychotic drug. Delay is using it on schizoids at his hospital and preliminary findings show remarkable results,”

  “Do you really think that he can be helped?” Slim asked.

  “Everyone can be helped, Slim. Just how much is the question. Good luck. And please let me know what happens,” Treichler said, then hung up.

  Slim left a message with Jean Delay’s office. She went back to the American Hospital to check in on Daniel, only to find him sedated.

  “Madame Cohen, we are not equipped to deal with a patient like this. We will keep him until the end of the week, but you must make arrangements to move him into an asylum that deals with the disturbed,” the doctor on duty told Slim.

  Slim tried Delay’s office again and left another message. As she hung up the phone, she realized that Delay must be getting many messages from distraught family members. The only way she could get Daniel help was by going to the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne. She picked up the phone and put a call into Marlene. She was going to need to call in the big guns.

  Marlene showed up with her car and driver, bedecked in a pencil skirt, a form fitting jacket, a hat tipped rakishly to the right and a fox fur wrapped around her shoulders.

  “Get in, mein liebling. I know how to handle the French,” Marlene said, puffing on her cigarette holder. Marlene Dietrich was ready for battle.

  As they drove through the blue iron gates of Hôpital Psychiatrique Sainte Anne on Rue Cabanais, Marlene turned to Slim and said, “You keep your mouth shut.”

  They pulled up the drive past a large marble statue of a naked man gripping rocks, his head raised. When they arrived at the end of the circular driveway, the driver came around, opened the door to let Marlene and Slim out.

  “Follow me,” Marlene said as they walked into the Magnan Pavilion. At the reception, Marlene asked, “Where is Jacques—”

  “Jean Delay,” Slim corrected her quickly.

  “Jean Delay’s office, I must speak with him, tout de suite,” Marlene said.

  The woman at the front desk picked up the phone and dialed. Seconds, later, she hung the phone, “I am sorry, he is busy with patients this afternoon.”

  “I did not ask what he was doing,” Marlene said. “I told you I need to see him.”

  “Madam, it is not possible today. Perhaps, if you would like to leave your name…”

  “Marlene Dietrich does not leave her name or wait for a call,” Marlene said, glaring at the woman. She turned to a woman scrubbing the marble floor on her knees, “You, where is Jean Delay’s office?”

  “Madame Dietrich,” the woman said clearly in awe of who was before her. “He is on the male wing up the stairs to the right.”

  “Thank you, darling,” Marlene said, climbing the stairs with Slim trailing along behind her.

  “I’ve watched all your movies and love your work, especially the last— Stage Fright,” the woman called out after Marlene.

  “Darling, someone had to love that movie. I am glad it was you!” Marlene yelled back.

  Slim followed Marlene through the hallway until they reached the male wing.

  “I think probably we should find Dr. Delay’s office,” Slim said, uncertain whether she should follow Marlene.

  “‘I think probably’ is not going to find Daniel. ‘Where the hell is he’ will.”

  She pushed open the door, “Darlings, where can I find the great, wonderful, miracle worker, Jean Delay?”

  A tall man in a white coat turned around. “I am Jean Delay.”

  “No one told me how handsome you are,” Marlene said, holding out her hand to be kissed.

  “Marlene Dietrich?” Delay said as if he could not believe his eyes.

  “Yes, darling. I am here because I need your help.” She took a long pause. “Now!”

  ✽✽✽

  They sat in Delay’s office while he read Daniel’s file. Occasionally, he would note something on the pad next to him. Occasionally he would turn his head. Finally, he closed the file and sat thinking. He got up and looked out the window. Slim looke
d at Marlene. She felt the tears well up in her eyes and thought to herself that she had hit another roadblock. Marlene reached over to squeeze Slim’s hand.

  Delay turned around. “So Anna Freud suggested me to you?”

  “Yes, Doctor. She said you were doing something with biological psychiatry. I wrote the name of the drug down…” Slim opened her brown alligator purse and took out her small notebook.

  “I am at the beginning of my experiments with Chlorpromazine. I am administering it to the male patients who are suffering from schizophrenia. It is too early to tell what my findings are, but there are signs of improvement.” He walked over to Slim.

  “Madame Cohen, I do not want to get your hopes up. Your husband was fed a variety of drugs and I do not know if any have caused him permanent damage. However, someone must treat him: someone must help him. That someone will be me. Tomorrow morning I will arrange with the American Hospital to have Monsieur Cohen sent over by ambulance. We will withdraw him from all the drugs including the ones he received at the hospital. I cannot promise anything, but I will try.”

  Slim cleared her throat and said, “Thank you, Doctor Delay.”

  “And you must not visit him for a week. I must stabilize him. He cannot have any more trauma. Is that understood?”

  Slim nodded and said, “Yes, of course.”

  “Lastly, I do want something in exchange,” Dr. Delay said.

  “Anything,” Slim said.

  “Not from you Madame Cohen, but from you, Madame Dietrich,” he said with a smile.

  “What is it, Doctor? How can I be of assistance?” she said, crossing her legs and pulling up her skirt slightly.

  “Would you sing for my men?” he asked. “A song from you would do them wonders.”

  Marlene stood up. “One song. I sing one song only.”

  But, of course, Marlene did not just sing one song. She sang ten. She was about to sing eleven when it was time for dinner. The men stood up and applauded her. One walked over to her. Slim could see numbers engraved into his forearm. He shook as he walked, he said, “Erinnerst du dich an mich, Marlene? Wir haben zusammen gearbeitet. Erinnern sie sich an mich, Marlene? Wir haben zusammen gearbeitet.…”