Adolfo Kaminsky Page 5

  An announcement on Radio London during the summer of 1942 was the first news that gave us some hope. The Battle of Stalingrad. The German army was finally coming up against resistance. I also heard rumors that the sabotage of the German convoys was intensifying, groups were being organized. In response to these attacks, the German Administration decided to requisition all the men in the town to take turns in keeping a watch on the railway lines at night. In a way they were hostages because if there was an attack on the railway, those on watch were executed by firing squad. I wasn’t old enough yet but I went all the same in place of my father and Paul, so that I could see Brancourt. I can’t say how, but in the course of our discussions I eventually realized that he was an agent for de Gaulle’s intelligence service and for which the pharmacy was just a cover. He was in contact with the groups organizing acts of sabotage in the Normandy sector. I didn’t want to mourn my dead without doing anything, and he knew that. One night, as we were drinking ersatz coffee and watching the lines while struggling against sleep, he said, “If I showed you how, would you be willing to make some things for me that are a little more dangerous than bars of soap?”

  How long had I been waiting for that proposition without daring to mention it out loud!

  “Now listen carefully, it’s complicated work. You have to take the greatest care about the quantities.”

  From that day on as well as bars of soap, candles and salt, I made more harmful products that corroded the transmission lines, made railway parts rust, and little detonators as well. Being involved in the sabotage meant that for the first time I didn’t feel entirely impotent following the death of my mother and my friend Jean. At least I had the feeling I was avenging them. And I was proud; I was in the Resistance.

  1. The general union of Jewish workers in Russia, Lithuania and Poland.

  2. An uprising in Paris following the French defeat in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War. [MM]

  3

  WHEN THE GERMANS came to arrest me, in the summer of 1943, I was at the dye-works with my younger brother, Angel, whom I had gotten hired. They ordered us to follow them and get into a covered army truck. The rest of my family was already inside, with old Augier and his daughter Dora, the girl I used to walk to school with. A pretty thin roundup: we were all that was left of the Jews of Vire. Seeing my father, I hoped he would say something, anything to reassure me, but there was nothing to say. I did the same as everyone else: didn’t protest, didn’t say a word. No one asked where we were going. The journey lasted two hours.

  The truck finally stopped, and we were all crammed into one cell of La Maladrerie, the much-vaunted model prison in Caen. Seven of us in ten square meters. No room to stretch out to sleep, except for Augier, who was too old and ill. For two days not a single guard came to see us, we had nothing to eat, nothing to drink. We’d been forgotten.

  Then Augier, lying on his straw mattress, mouth half open, eyes glued to the ceiling and tears running down his wrinkled cheeks, started to groan. Dora bent over him, but the old man was dying, and his groans grew louder and louder, punctuating each breath. I tried to breathe in the same rhythm, to share his suffering. My father hammered on the door to let the guards know a man was about to die. He made such a racket that an officer eventually came to see what was going on.

  “This man fought in the ’14-’18 war, beside you, for Germany. He lost a leg in it. You can’t let him die in prison.”

  The officer left without a word. And Augier asked my father to sing the kaddish, in advance. I saw my father get up and recite the prayer for the dead for him. It was the first time I’d ever heard a prayer; in fact I had no idea my father knew any, and in that prison, breaking a silence of several days, the religious texts delivered by my father’s voice took on a very special significance. I knew that this prison was but one stage and that at the end there would be camps, perhaps death. Before getting up to sing the prayer, my father looked each of us in the eye. That day it was truly for all of us that Solomon sang.

  Augier was freed, but not his daughter. My father promised to look after her as if she were his own, and we took Dora into our family so that she wouldn’t be an orphan. The next day we were shoved onto a train with other Jewish prisoners from the region. Full buses ‘discharged’ their passengers, whom the soldiers pushed into the cars. Hundreds of people, of all ages and all classes, were piled up in them, while from the general hubbub the name of Drancy was already emerging. Paul went round the car, asking everyone, “Has anyone got any paper? Got some paper? A fountain pen?”

  Some had been rounded up at home and had brought luggage. From them Paul got what he was looking for and came back to us.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m writing to the Argentine consul.”

  “What for?”

  “Look, they’re all wearing the star. Not us. If anyone can do something for us, it’s the consul. We’re protected.”

  He wrote several letters. All the same, with our names, the date and where we were being sent, so that Argentina could demand our release. The train departed. Paul handed out the letters to anyone he could, to railway workers, he even threw some out of the window.

  All we could hope for was that some kind soul would pay for a stamp and mail them.

  Let me describe Drancy. A housing project surrounded by barbed wire. Long, horizontal six-story blocks, unfinished, forming a “U” around a vast square courtyard. No doors. No windows. No partitions. A building site in reinforced concrete left as a skeleton. A prison without walls to protect us from inquisitive eyes and from the cold. Nothing on the horizon besides guards and, above our heads, the menacing shadow of the five gigantic towers, where the German occupation troops were housed.

  The Palace of Drafts—in both senses of the word: the wind, of course, but also the drafts of detainees arriving and leaving by the trainload.

  There were thousands of us deportees arriving and leaving by the trainload. Forty to a room. Men and women separated at night. An anthill. No one stayed at Drancy. That was where they made their selection before sending the convoys off to the various camps in Europe. Some had barely arrived when they were on their way again. ‘The work camps,’ the Germans called them. Have you ever seen old men and children scarcely two years old capable of working? It wasn’t the beginning of the war any longer. Everyone had heard about the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup.1 And the convoys, as we well knew, all had the same destination: Pitchipoï.2

  On the evenings before the convoys left, you could hear, echoing throughout the building, the tears of those whose heads had been shaven and who stayed on the stairs because of the lack of beds in the rooms. It sounded like a madhouse. When I heard them I would think of Pauline, my little sister, and Dora in the women’s block. All night I just hoped they’d managed to get to sleep, that they had no idea what was happening. Dora. As my father had promised Augier, we had made her one of us. Unfortunately this adoption was only valid for us. No sooner had we arrived than she was put on the lower floor, the one for those who were considered ‘deportable’. My father did everything he could to have her recognized as his daughter, he was even granted a meeting with the commander of the camp, Alois Brunner. But Dora was French and Brunner adamant. His response made my father accept the inevitable: “If, as you say, you can’t abandon her, I can make room for your whole family in the next convoy.”

  A few days after that grim interview Dora’s name was on the departure list. When she left, there was nothing we could do, and time has not erased the immense feeling of guilt it has left me with.

  The others left, we stayed. A thousand per convoy, that was the rule, and Brunner was the kind of man who was punctilious about figures. If a person was missing at the roll call, someone else had to take their place. The camp could be jam-packed one day and almost empty the next, until the inevitable processions of prisoners came to fill it up again. Jews, short, tall, with blond hair, brown hair… It was not until I was at Drancy that I realized I knew nothin
g about them. There were very few Jews in Vire. The Lévys, who employed my father, the Augiers, ourselves and a few others. Nazi propaganda said awful things about them, gave descriptions that were caricatures in which I didn’t recognize myself, and the general population seemed to approve. I’d heard anti-Semitic remarks throughout the war and let them pass without realizing. People would say to me:

  “It’s the fault of the Jews, those dirty Jews.”

  “But we’re Jews as well.”

  “Oh, yes, but with you it’s not the same, you’re like us, While the others…”

  Did they even know what the others were like? I had no idea myself. At Drancy I discovered the Jews in all their diversity. I loved them, and through them I came to love myself—I felt I was a Jew, and I’ve never lost that.

  It was at Drancy that I learned algebra and arithmetic from an old gentleman who had taught at the École polytechnique3 in the days when the Jews still had the right to teach. Every day, he devoted whole hours to me. I was fascinated by the relationship between math and chemistry. I wanted to know everything—I took notes and memorized them during the night in order to be able to go on to the next lesson the following day.

  Thanks to that old man, my training in theory could even continue inside the fortress. He was moved by my thirst for knowledge, and I think each of us had a fundamental and irrational need for these lessons because they were the only moments when we could forget our condition as internees. I was his last pupil. One day, when it was time for our classes, he wasn’t there. He hadn’t wanted to tell me beforehand that his name was on the list, perhaps to spare us a difficult farewell.

  My political awareness was also filling out. The interminable conversations I’d had with Jean Bayer in the factory and with Brancourt while guarding the railway lines at Vire continued with Ernest Appenzeller, a young blond man with blue eyes who could have posed for the poster demonstrating the superiority of the Aryan race. I was seventeen, he was eighteen. He said he’d been arrested by mistake. Because he’d been circumcised. “Circumcised but not Jewish,” he added.

  He was demanding an examination by the German scientific commission that specialized in racial questions, for he was sure they could only conclude he was Aryan. With his determined tone and his quick-wittedness, he reminded me of my friend Jean. He’d often say to me, “If I were a Jew, I’d be a Zionist.”

  Like my father, I thought that a land for the Jews was a utopia. I felt that, whatever their religious affiliation, everyone ought to feel at home where they lived, and that above all there was no reason why religion and nation had to coincide. There was no subject under the sun Ernest and I didn’t talk about. We exchanged our points of view, theorized about everything, politics, philosophy, our ideals. We even talked about theology, that is, he did mainly because I knew nothing about it. I was impressed by his knowledge of Judaism, him not being Jewish. Together we invented a new world. A better world.

  In three months I met countless numbers of people, encounters that were marvelous, infinitely enriching. I started so many friendships, only to see my friends leave me, deported, one after the other. And I was powerless to do anything. As an Argentine I had the right to work inside the camp. I was a house painter. On the walls I whitewashed, many things had been written—names, dates, messages that I didn’t want to cover up, because they were perhaps the last signs of life of those who’d written them. I was caught in the act of using a bit of iron to re-engrave the inscriptions I’d just painted over. I was sent to work in the laundry to stop me doing ‘something stupid’ like that again. For some unknown reason Aloïs Brunner, who did an inspection tour of the camp every day, would always stop in front of me, draw himself up to his full height and give me a hard stare. In front of him, we were supposed to lower our eyes. But I didn’t. I held his gaze. In the name of Dora and all the rest. Since everyone was going away to die and I was staying there, I couldn’t give a damn about the consequences. I’d stopped being afraid. I can still remember Brunner’s look, his little, piercing black eyes staring into mine. Every day he would look me up and down, ignore my arrogance and continue on his way without a word. I have no idea why he didn’t say anything. I’ve never understood. Perhaps his curiosity had been aroused by the insistent demands of the Argentine consulate for our release; perhaps it was just because I was called Adolphe.

  “How did you all manage to get out of Drancy?”

  It was Paul’s letters to the Argentine consul that saved us. We spent three months in the camp. That was the maximum. So we owed our survival to the diplomatic cowardice of a government that, in order not to have the powerful North American states against them, without on the other hand breaking off the economic agreements tying them to Nazi Germany, had declared itself neutral. Neutrality doesn’t exist. To do nothing, say nothing, is enough to make one an accessory.

  When my father told us we were going to be released, I came very close to refusing. To leave while the others were condemned to death. Why us and not them? Solomon managed to convince me that I was no use there, but outside perhaps… I immediately thought of Brancourt and the detonators I made in Vire. My place was up there, at his side. I had to go back, whatever the cost.

  So there we were, outside, in Paris, without a dime, with dozens of letters from prisoners in Drancy hidden in the lining of our jackets. The anti-Jewish laws were worse in Paris than anywhere else. We still weren’t wearing the yellow star, but our papers had the very conspicuous stamp in red ink. We couldn’t go to a hotel, nor return to Normandy, nor even buy ourselves some food. Tough freedom. I hadn’t been in Paris since we left to go and live in Vire in 1938. The city had changed a lot. The signposts were all in two languages: German and French. The shop-windows had ‘Jews prohibited’ notices. Walls were covered in posters with drawings of hook-nosed Jews with big ears and fingernails like claws. German officers drove along the streets in shiny, brand-new cars, forming an outrageous contrast with the shabbiness of impoverished Paris. We had been advised to go to the UGIF. And that, after having wandered around like lost souls until the curfew was approaching without finding anything else, is what we did. We got into the last car of the metro, third class, reserved for Jews. Paul didn’t want to do that and went off on his own. He suspected the UGIF hostels were a trap, and he was right. The UGIF was the Jews collaborating with the Nazis.

  We were allocated to a former retirement home in Choisy-le-Roi in the Val-de-Marne, where we were fed and looked after. My time at Drancy had left me so thin that I had difficulty standing up, my knees kept giving way. When I’d recovered my strength a bit, I headed straight for the secondhand booksellers on the embankments of the Seine to buy chemistry books. I wanted to find out how to make powerful explosives before going back to put myself at Brancourt’s disposal. I’d written to him as soon as we were set free—very matter-of-fact, nothing compromising, obviously—just to let him know I was alive. He replied—it was more than I’d hoped—with a long, warm letter full of encouragement and kindness, in which he reminded me that he’d always be ready to help me whatever the cost. I kept that letter under my pillow so that I wouldn’t be without it, even during the night, as a lucky charm.

  I’d been there for ten days or so when, in the middle of the night, around four in the morning, I heard the sound of vehicles. The engines were turned off right under my windows. Policemen’s steps. In the time it took them to come up the stairs, I swallowed Brancourt’s letter. I ate it. It was so long I couldn’t finish it, but since I’d managed to get the most important parts down, I threw the rest into the toilet and pulled the chain. The police came into the room and told me I had ten minutes to get ready to leave. I took all my chemistry books, heavy tomes and, since I was still weak, one of them very politely helped me. I told myself the man was carrying the things with which I was trying to fight against him.

  Back to Drancy. We’re overcome with a horrible feeling that we’d done this all before. This time my father protests as soon as we get there.
It seems there’s been a mix-up. Some say, “Yes, there’s been an order to arrest them,” others say there hasn’t. Then, finally, we’re released after twenty-four hours. And there, outside the exit, we meet a group of people heading for Drancy surrounded by police. My father hears them talking in the mixture of Spanish and Yiddish characteristic of Argentine Jews.

  “Where d’you come from,” he asks them.

  “We’re Argentine.”

  “But… the diplomatic agreement?”

  “It’s over. They’re arresting all the Argentines.”

  We cleared out. The German-Argentine agreement suspended, goodbye to our shield. We owed our freedom to poor communications between the French police, the SS and the Drancy administration. A few more hours and we’d have had it.

  The following day my father disappeared and when he came back, he called a family meeting.

  “I’ve gotten in touch with some very old friends that I hadn’t seen for years. From Russia, former members of the Bund. We’re going to have to disperse. Each one of us will go their own way.”

  “Even me?” Pauline, just thirteen, asked with a tremor in her voice, terrified at the idea of separating from us.

  “Each of you will be placed on a farm. I don’t yet know where or how, but first of all we’ve got to get some forged papers. We have to give them some passport-size photos, and they want it to be a young person who brings them. I’m counting on you, Adolphe. You have a rendezvous quite soon. Your contact’s called Penguin.”

  Forged papers… I’d been brought up with such respect for the law that I have to admit that hadn’t occurred to me before…