Adolfo Kaminsky Read online

  “Let’s go to my office, it’ll be quiet in there,” the thin, stern-looking little man whispered; I put his age at about fifty.

  We crossed the room where a good dozen men were busy on colossal machines. A veritable factory: a work table with arc-lamps, etching trays, engraving tanks, agitating tubs, inking rollers. If that was what a photoengraving studio was like, I was going to have difficulty fulfilling Cachoud’s request.

  Goumard ushered me into a windowless office, double-locking the door behind him. “I don’t trust my workers,” he moans in a whisper. “Huh! That lot would sell their souls to the Krauts for an extra ration of bread. Right, then, it seems you want to be a photoengraver. You don’t get to be one just like that, let me tell you. I teach at École Estienne. My pupils study for three years, after which there are three more years as an apprentice, and I can tell you that you don’t know everything about photoengraving until you’ve been doing it for ten years. So if you’ve got sixteen years to spare, which would surprise me, you could perhaps become a photoengraver. And I did say perhaps.”

  “I don’t want to be a professional photoengraver, I just want to… well, you know… learn a few little things, to make copies of rubber stamps for example.”

  “I’ve said I don’t want to help anymore, it’s too dangerous. Here the workers are watching, I’m sure of that. When I work at night there are sometimes traces left on the machines. And there are traitors everywhere. Which network are you with, Keller?”

  “MLN.”

  “I was with the OCM,1 but since they’ve gone over to the socialists, I’ve joined the MLN. The socialists, huh… Why not work with the Jews, while we’re at it!”

  Did Goumard pretend to spit on the floor when he said ‘Jews’? I think so. I’d just realized why Cachoud had taken the precaution of telling me to introduce myself as an agent of the MLN and not of the 6th section.

  “Now it’s over with, I don’t help anyone any longer, as I’ve already said,” he went on, without giving me time to respond.

  “In that case, I’m sorry I’ve been wasting your time, M. Goumard. I’ll leave now…”

  He cut me off.

  “If I agree to help you, it’s because René told me you were the one who found out how to deal with Waterman ink. Just fancy! There are quite a few of us who’ve been racking our brains to find the formula for removing it. Lactic acid! I’ve done a bit of chemistry myself, and still I didn’t find it. You’re a good one, you are, Keller. And we’re not going to let those bastards turn our country into a German province!”

  I felt like spitting in his face to let him know what I thought of him, turning on my heel and slamming the door, but I needed this training so badly I had no choice.

  Fortunately my training with Goumard went more quickly than expected, and I must say I didn’t regret that. I’d never imagined I could accumulate so much knowledge in so short a time, but I think it was Goumard’s xenophobia and the nauseating way he went on and on that made me surpass even myself, so that I could manage without him as soon as possible. He had it in for everyone—the Jews, the English, the darkies but still the Krauts above all.

  I remember one of our last conversations: “Racist, me? Huh! Certainly not. I like the Poles when they’re in Poland, the Turks when they’re in Turkey. And the Jews, if they could only manage to find a country, eh. As far away as possible.”

  I was amused to hear Goumard, without realizing it, speaking up for the idea of Zionism. Once I even brought up the question of homosexuals, wondering if Goumard could imagine a country far enough away for them.

  “Huh! With the madmen!” he grunted.

  No, really, I wasn’t going to miss Goumard.

  Once we’d met, Cachoud never left me a moment’s peace. The more I did, the more he demanded. He even went so far as to ask for some police ID cards. And, of course, I always said yes, ignoring my exhaustion and my health. Delivering was my sole obsession.

  June 1944. It was three months since I’d last been out in broad daylight. Now that I’d set up my photoengraving studio in the room on the top floor of my boarding house, my only outings were to the Rue des Saints-Pères and back. If I saw summer arrive, it was through the skylight of the 6th section’s laboratory. It was promising to be a hot summer. We were suffocating, all five of us crammed together under the attic roof in the toxic stench of the chemicals. So I wasn’t unhappy that day to go out to meet Ernest, with whom I had a rendezvous. Filling my lungs with the air outside under a sun at its zenith and listening to the rustle of the wind in the trees in full leaf gave me a sense of freedom I hadn’t had for a long time. Paris seemed to have come alive as if there was nothing wrong with the world. Girls rode past on bicycles, holding on to their hats to stop them flying away. I heard children’s laughter from the corner of the street where a boys’ class was coming along, two abreast, under the watchful eye of a master with an authoritarian finger.

  If the passengers in the convertible speeding toward the horizon hadn’t been wearing Nazi uniforms, you would have thought it was just an ordinary June day.

  I hurried along toward Notre Dame, where Ernest would probably be waiting for me already. I was sure Cachoud would have another of his impossible requests, to be fulfilled immediately if not sooner, of course. I’d seen Ernest many times since our reunion in the Hôtel Montpensier. Furtive meetings, just time enough to exchange documents. No question of having a discussion; action was of the essence. But this time he didn’t talk about forged papers.

  “Follow me, I’ve something urgent to tell you,” he said as soon as I arrived.

  We went down to walk along the embankment of the Seine.

  “That’s it,” he said, “the Jewish Legion is about to come into being. Just imagine, Adolphe, all the Jewish resistance movements fighting under the same flag. You, the EIF and the 6th section, us, the MJS and the AJ (Armée juive: Jewish Army). If we bring all our forces together, we’ll pull more weight.”

  “But we’re together already. We all work together.”

  “Yes, but this time we’re amalgamating, showing that the Jewish Resistance is united. In the maquis there are men who are only waiting for the signal to regroup under the orders of the Jewish Legion.”

  The much-vaunted Jewish Legion. Ernest had been dreaming of it for ages. Since the beginning of the war he and many others had been thinking of an army that would bring together all the Jewish volunteers available and that, by its very existence alone, would cry out to the whole world that the Jews knew how to defend themselves, to fight and, above all, that they could win.

  “I’m in contact with a London agent. Thanks to him we’ve already received some weapons,” he went on, “and more are due to arrive. He wants me to draw up a list of the extent of our network, the number of combatants—we have to show that there are lots of us and that we have a solid structure. Give me the address of the lab and the names of those working there.”

  “Names and addresses—are you completely mad? I’m not giving the address of the lab nor the names of anyone at all.”

  “You’ve no confidence in us, is that it?”

  “Confidence in you, yes. As long as you’re not making lists. Who is this man who’s provided weapons for you? What tells you it isn’t a trap?”

  “There’s no trap, everything’s safe. It’s London that sent him. We’ve already gone through him and there’s been no problems.”

  “What’s he called?”

  “Charles Porel. Make your own investigations if you like but do you really think Cachoud would trust just anyone?”

  “Cachoud trusts him?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. So?”

  “Don’t count on me.”

  I saw Ernest’s muscular body tense. In exasperation, he turned round and took a few steps. The wind made the skirts of his raincoat flap furiously and even from behind I could tell how angry he was. When he turned round to face me, the blue of his eyes had darkened intensely. He gave me a challengin
g look that would have made a whole army go pale. But I, who had not lowered my eyes before Brunner, was not going to flinch facing Ernest.

  “You’re a coward.” He flung the words in my face. “You’re afraid. Afraid of fighting.” It was obvious that Ernest expected some reaction from me, but I gave nothing away, not one address, not one scrap of information, and I calmly held his icy glare until he turned on his heel and went off without saying goodbye. I watched him go. When his silhouette was nothing but a spot in the distance, I knew I’d lost one of my dearest friends.

  I set off home with a lump in my throat. Had I been right? The problem with our relations with London was that everything was so difficult to verify. Who was talking to whom?

  We never knew. If Cachoud was confident, however, it must mean the operation was secure. I was assailed by doubts, and when I got back, Otter didn’t fail to notice that. I explained what the problem was.

  “You said nothing, I hope?”

  “No, nothing at all.”

  “Very good. I’ll bring it up at the next meeting of the 6th, and we’ll see what the others think.”

  “But what do you think about it?”

  “The same as you. The laboratory above everything.”

  When Otter attended the meeting of the 6th section, he wasn’t the only one to raise the matter. Those in charge had heard as well. Everyone was talking about the new supply channel for weapons for the Jewish Legion. But in the end the meeting decided that the 6th section wouldn’t be part of it, even if it meant the others seeing us as something we weren’t. Cowards.

  The following month terrible news came from Drancy. The convoys were continuing, one after the other and more and more of them. The numbers were driving me crazy.

  Summer hit me with its share of nasty surprises and sorrow.

  Along with that, everything was happening in the lab the way I wouldn’t have wanted. Photoengraving was giving me a lot of problems with all my makeshift equipment. There were botched pieces of work, and I had to go back to square one without losing my composure, without letting myself get discouraged. Sometimes I couldn’t complete an order for lack of time, and the names at the bottom of the list had to be sacrificed. I couldn’t bear that. I was so exhausted I was more and more worried about making mistakes from lack of concentration, and I was getting nervous, paranoiac. Outside I constantly thought I was being followed. I had a premonition something bad was going to happen. Before going to the 6th’s laboratory, I would walk around the block several times to make sure that passer-by over there, or this one here wasn’t a policeman or a spy. The secondhand bookseller always had a shifty look, the butcher and the baker as well. And that couple on the bench, hadn’t he had a look at me before pretending to kiss his girlfriend? Assailed by doubt once again, I would change my route. Exhausting! As far as my health was concerned, my body was responding rather badly to the succession of sleepless nights and undernourishment. I was thin and weak and frequently fainted. But what worried me most of all was the condition of my right eye that had been running constantly for some time, during the night as well so that in the morning it took me more than half an hour to unstick my eyelids without tearing out the lashes. No time to go to the doctor, even though I was firmly convinced that my sight was getting worse and worse. Believe me, losing an eye is the worst thing that can happen to a forger.

  In the last week of July Otter came rushing in bearing news that was to be a terrible blow for me. All the main people in charge of the MJS and the AJ, but also some of the Dutch network and the FTP-MOI as well, had just been arrested by the Gestapo. Cachoud and Ernest were among them. The arrests had taken place during a gathering organized by the so-called London agent who had been the cause of my disagreement with Ernest a month ago. My hunch had turned out to be correct! By sacrificing my friendship with Ernest, I had at least saved the 6th’s laboratory. The man who had introduced himself to them as Charles Porel, claiming to belong to British Intelligence, was in reality a German, an Abwehr agent.2 Our comrades had fallen into the trap and got nabbed when they arrived at the rendezvous. I simply couldn’t believe it…

  It was a double disaster. On the one hand every branch of the OJC was affected, except the 6th. Could the organization still function shorn of its main leaders? Perhaps. We hoped so. In the maquis at least the fighters were continuing the struggle, and they were sufficiently well structured and autonomous to hold out. But for how long?

  On the psychological level, the arrest of Ernest and, especially, that of Cachoud were devastating. I’d thought Cachoud was untouchable.

  “Get out, the lot of you, go and hide!” Otter ordered with a catch in his voice that betrayed how distraught he was.

  Since I thought he looked pale, I asked him, “You didn’t give anyone the address of the lab?”

  “No. You didn’t either?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You never know. We’d better wait three days, that’s more sensible.”

  I quickly stuffed several rubber stamps, documents and chemicals in an attaché case, in the event I found the lab had been discovered when I came back. As for the photoengraving equipment at my boarding house, there was no point going to get it; indeed, it would be best not to set foot there again, since if I’d been followed, my cover there would obviously have been blown. As we left, Otter, who didn’t seem to have told us everything, said solemnly, “That’s not all. Cachoud died under torture.”

  Cachoud ‘died under torture’.

  We heard lots of details about their arrest. In Fresnes, as in all prisons, the walls had ears and our networks had sympathizers. I learned that they were all kicked and beaten but were also subjected to the ordeal of the bath. Cachoud was made the whipping boy and suffered the ‘worst humiliations’, to use the words in which it was reported to me. The details of the tortures he’d suffered stopped there, and it was up to my imagination to do the rest. ‘Humiliation’. What unspeakable sufferings that word concealed!

  We were told in precise detail how it happened. When the Gestapo handed over our comrades to the Abwehr, Cachoud was in such a bad state they wouldn’t take him. In reality he was almost dead, he was no use to them. So the Gestapo took it upon themselves to finish him off, with the others looking on, by chucking him over the banisters. Cachoud hit the ground five floors below. That was the end of the matter for him, but it was going to take me a long time to get over it.

  As for the others, they were now waiting their turn in Fresnes Prison, locked up in the block for those condemned to death. I continued to believe that, even under torture, none had talked nor would talk, and that the networks would not be broken up.

  “Here, same time, in three days,” we’d said before we parted. And it was better not to think of the consequences of the lab being inactive for three days if we didn’t want to go back ravaged by a sense of guilt.

  I had a few bucks left in my pocket, enough to find a hideout. I took refuge in a little hotel for students in Rue de l’Échaudé. I didn’t have a suitcase, so in order not to arouse the receptionist’s suspicions I took a room for one night only, intending to prolong my stay subsequently. On no account should I go back to the lab, but that didn’t mean the network was broken. We had established a pretty simple technique for getting in contact. Every day at eleven in the morning one of our agents was at a crossroads in the district. On Mondays it was outside the Sorbonne, Tuesdays at Notre Dame, etc. If I didn’t want the delivery of forged papers to be completely paralyzed for three days, it was imperative that I didn’t miss the next day’s rendezvous. No sooner had I settled into my new room than I drew the curtains and opened my precious attaché case. It contained the bare essentials: identity cards, demobilization certificates, ration cards, blank birth and baptismal certificates. Stamps and all colors of ink. That was enough to keep me going, even if at a slower pace.

  The next day Penguin was waiting for me at the Sorbonne. He seemed relieved to see me. He’d been afraid I wouldn’t turn up.
We took the time to have a longer conversation. He was also deeply affected by the arrest of our men and was worried about my morale.

  Since he was the one who’d recruited me and I was the youngest, he still had a fatherly, protective attitude toward me, as if he felt responsible, and even from a distance he tried to make sure that nothing happened to me. He gave a long sigh before starting to speak. “Listen, I know that the lab’s going to be closed for a while, but if I haven’t got the documents, I can’t do anything. You know that I have two groups of thirty kids to take out during the week. We’re in one hell of a fix.”

  “I’ve got the papers for you.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve come to hand them over to you. I did them during the night.”

  “Unbelievable!”

  We exchanged attaché cases and he left with the full one, I with the empty one.

  At the same time three days later I climbed the stairs in Rue des Saints-Pères. No one had followed me from Rue de l’Échaudé. When I opened the door, Suzie and Herta were already there, faithful to their post. The laboratory hadn’t been found but there was lots of work to catch up on.

  We’d just gotten back to work, when Otter burst into the room, his face whiter than ever: “They’ve got Penguin and the kids!”

  At the same time, we learned that a group described as ‘dangerous terrorists’, specially sent there from the prisons, had arrived in Drancy and that Brunner had lost no time at all in locking them up in the basements of the camp, under maximum security.

  The internees had been very moved to see them arrive, for the men were in rags and their emaciated faces bore the marks of torture. There were about thirty of them we were told. Who could these men Brunner called terrorists be? It didn’t take us long to figure it out. From the descriptions they were our comrades, Ernest and all those who were with Cachoud when he’d been arrested.

  “Why had they been sent to Drancy?”

  It’s easy to work that out. The allied armies were advancing on the capital, and the Nazis were in difficulty, so Brunner was being extra zealous. Rather than leaving their execution to the prison system, he wanted to see to it himself. If they were defeated, he wouldn’t be going back to Germany empty-handed—he could give his Führer thirty of the most active members of the Jewish Resistance. My friends’ tragic fate was sealed; they would be leaving for Pitchipoï with the next convoy.