Читать книгу A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical - W. E. Gutman - Страница 23

BETRAYAL, FLIGHT

It is how men exercise freewill under duress that earns them reverence or ignominy. The “Brigades Spéciales,” thugs and drifters hired by the French Police to do its dirty work, would earn, in four years, a reputation for perversion and cruelty second only to the Holy Inquisition. The methods they used to wrest confessions were so gruesome that, at his trial, a former Brigade member expressed shock at “the sadism of his compatriots.” His was a desperate if futile defense. It was also disingenuous in that it glossed over French history, past and contemporary. Frenchmen had long been at each-others’ throats -- quite literally during the 1789 Revolution. They would also bloody their hands during the Dreyfus “affair,” a scandal that inflamed political and religious passions, and very nearly brought France to the brink of civil war. Fifty years later, exploiting the chaos and jubilation of La Libération, Frenchmen killed again. Some settled old political scores; others slaughtered known collaborators. Compromised, their days numbered, those who had led double lives tracked down witnesses and eliminated potential turncoats. Over 9,000 collaborators were executed at war’s end; 1,500 were put to death following summary trials; 40,000 were sentenced to prison.

If hatred was an exploitable form of energy the world would drown in an ocean of fuel.

*

In the “confessionals” of the Brigades Spéciales, an old man is denied food and drink for nine days. He expires on the tenth. A patriot’s hands are tied for hours to the metal surface of a freezer, then ripped free. Another is burned over ninety percent of his body with cigarettes. A wire is connected to a Résistant's handcuffs; another is inserted into his rectum; the ends are plugged into a live socket. In another cell a suspected communist is stripped naked and hanged by his thumbs as heavy weights are tied to his toes. A young priest accused of hiding insurgents in his church loses his penis, and his life, to sulfuric acid. A student is repeatedly sodomized then forced to drink his tormentors’ urine. The exotic is often followed by the prosaic: captives have their hair torn from their scalp. They are kicked, punched, whipped, slashed with carving knives. Bones are broken. Eyes are gouged. Ears are severed. Tongues are ripped out and, to stimulate memory or loosen recalcitrant ones, boiled and served to fellow prisoners. Hundreds of Frenchmen succumb to untold agonies at the hands of their concitoyens.

Victims of ill treatment can, if they have the courage -- or the folly -- file a complaint and appear before hastily convened kangaroo courts presided by three anonymous judges (the judges “deliberate” behind closed doors!). Denied attorneys, the plaintiffs plead their own cases. They can never win and their tormentors are never brought to justice. Deaf ears and impure hearts further debase the pretense of free speech and equality under law. It’s unadulterated Kafka.

« The police are such that the Turks would rather suffer pestilence and the English deal with thieves.

-- Nicholas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort, 1741-94.

*

The Brigades Spéciales also had a distinct aversion for the youpins, the yids, the Jews. Aversion turned to dementia if their quarries worked for the Résistance. Many were apprehended and liquidated. I remember my father sharing the bad news with my mother as they sat side by side on the settee in semi-darkness. I knew the news was bad because my father whispered and his brow was furrowed and my mother’s eyes shut tight and she bit her lower lip and cried silently.

“They caught Jacques. He wouldn’t talk. They shot him. Pierre is in Drancy. He’s being shipped out tomorrow on the first train.”

My mother would shake her head and peer intently into my father’s eyes. She’d then look at me with a mixture of love and terror.

“What will become of us? We’re next. I feel it.”

“Nah.” My father would dismiss my mother’s fears with a wave of his hand. “We’re fine, don’t worry,” he’d say, trying to comfort her. But his words rang hollow and his reassurances lacked vigor or conviction. Exhausted, clearly overtaken by the situation, he would turn his head and stare out the window. My mother would sigh long, doleful sighs. And I would continue to push a toy truck across the floor, averting their gaze, careful not to communicate my own disquiet.

Many fell. Fellow physician and childhood friend, Samu Moldovan, was yanked out of bed in the middle of the night, hauled to the Préfecture, tortured and shot by French police. Another colleague and former schoolmate, Dr. Salzberger, was deported to Buchenwald where he later died. Others, inexplicably, continued to prosper during the occupation. Among them my father’s cousin, Ernö Wertheimer, the anesthesiologist, who bought and managed a hospital after the war in the fashionable 16th arrondissement; and an old friend, Jean Klein, an internist whose practice, in a posh duplex on Place de la Nation, thrived until his death in the early 1970s. Childless, Klein and his wife, Simone, had taken more than just casual interest in me and had often jokingly offered to take care of me “in these uncertain times.” They pressed the point once too often. Troubled by their “sinister jesting,” and vexed by their pretense to be Christians, my father distanced himself from his old friend and colleague. We didn’t see the Klein again until well after the war.

“Why do you think they made it when so many others didn’t,” I’d ask my father over the years.

“I won’t speculate. I can’t risk sullying anyone’s memory.”

“Surely, someone betrayed you, turned you in.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you suspect anyone?”

“Maybe.”

“Friend or acquaintance?”

“Acquaintances rarely double-cross each other. They have nothing to gain.”

“Then who?”

“Drop it.”

I did but I never stopped wondering.

Suspicion weighs more heavily on the distrustful than on the object of their mistrust.

*

Late one afternoon there’s a loud rap at our front door. I’m in my room. The door is ajar but I’m engrossed in play and I hear nothing at first. My father is having coffee in the kitchen.

My mother walks to the door, her heart pounding, she recalls.

“Who is it,” she asks, her prophecy unfolding.

“Police. Open up!” The command is followed by another urgent staccato.

My mother fumbles the key in the keyhole, pulls the latch and opens the door.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Let us in.”

My mother complies. Two large men in black leather trench coats and wide-brimmed black hats, their hands buried deep inside their pockets, step into the vestibule. Once inside, they pull out their pistols. Lugers, I’m certain. Lugers have a devilish countenance, an air of utter self-possession, arrogance and deadly efficiency that one never forgets.

“What is it? What do you want?”

“Dr. Gutman. Where is he?”

The sound of strange voices draws me out of my room. I pass by the kitchen. My father’s face is ashen. He looks dazed. His hands are shaking. Coffee splatters on the floor.

“There must be some mistake. My husband is away. Out of town. He should be back in a few days. Come back then, won’t you? I’ll tell him you came by.”

“That’s not true, maman. Papa’s in the kitchen. I think he needs you. He spilled coffee. Come look.”

The two men in the black trench coats exchange glances. A cruel smile twists their lips. They run to the kitchen. Lugers at the ready, they find my father as I’d left him, paralyzed with fear, his trembling hand still clasping the cup.

“Put the cup down,” one of the men orders.

My father obeys. As he does, the other thug punches him in the face, breaking his nose. Blood red mixes with coffee brown on the white tile kitchen floor.

My mother sobs uncontrollably. She tries to intervene but one of the men pushes away.

“Papa, papa.”

My father looks at me with tenderness and immense pity. He manages a smile through his tears as they drag him down the stairs and shove him in a black Citroen.

I was four, or so. I’d been taught to tell the truth.

We never learned why my mother and I had not shared my father’s fate that day. My father would never mention the incident but it is with inconsolable sorrow, shame and everlasting remorse that I will remember this guileless disloyalty for as long as I live.

*

“Henri Lafont. Let me speak to Henri Lafont. This is an emergency.” My mother had spent half the night and all morning trying to reach Lafont, one of my father’s former patients and now chief of the French Gestapo.

Telephone lines are overloaded. She’s put on hold, transferred, disconnected, directed to redial other numbers, urged to call later, tomorrow, next week.

“Mon Dieu, he’s our last hope,” my mother thinks out loud as she nervously wraps and uncoils the telephone cord around her wrist and fingers. “Please, it‘s a matter of grave urgency. I’m sure he’ll take my call if he knows what this is about. Hurry up, please.” A few minutes elapse. Suddenly, a look of relief brightens her face. She has exhausted all her tears.

“Allo, Monsieur Lafont?”

“Yes?”

“This is Madame Gutman. Do you remember me?”

“Oui Madame, of course. What can I do for you?”

“They took Ari.” My mother breaks down.

“Merde! Where are you? How can I reach you?”

“At home, 2, rue du Pont Neuf.”

“I had nothing to do with this, I swear. Hang tight. Let me find out what happened. I’ll call you right back.”

Fifteen minutes later, the phone rings. It’s Lafont.

“He was taken to Fresnes. They haven’t shipped him out yet. There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll handle this. We’ll get him out, I promise. Don’t move a muscle, I’ll be right there.”

*

Picture two Jews in occupied France riding in a German armored car in the company of a French turncoat -- now an officer of the Third Reich -- on our way to rescue a Résistant from the clutches of the collaborationist French police. Farfetched. Preposterous. Yet here we were, my mother and I, being waved through one heavily guarded checkpoint after another as we sped toward Fresnes, France’s second largest prison located about ten kilometers northeast of Paris. This would not be the last implausible episode in a string of chance events that brought us ever closer to catastrophe. An even more bizarre odyssey awaited us about two years later when we crossed warn-torn Europe by train under Red Cross escort.

*

We arrive at Fresnes. A guard lifts the heavy wood barrier. Lafont gets off and disappears into the sentry box. Impeccably attired in his finely tailored uniform and shiny black leather boots, he oozes confidence and authority. He can be heard placing a call to the office inside the compound.

“This is Capitaine Lafont. Dr. Gutman was picked up yesterday. Yes, 2, rue du Pont Neuf. Release him.”

There is a brief pause.

“Don’t argue I tell you. I have the papers. Let him go. We’re waiting. We’re at the gate. Hurry up.”

Escorted by two guards, a human figure emerges from a building at the far end of a gloomy courtyard and heads our way. We get out of the car.

“Where’s papa,” I ask.

“Look,” Lafont replies, smiling. “That’s him right there. He points at the human figure with a gloved finger.

I look but all I see is a shadow of a man, disheveled and haggard, his clothes in disarray, his lips cut open and bleeding, his eyes nearly shut, limping toward us. My mother runs toward him.

“Ari, Ari, what have they done.”

Incredulous, bewildered, uncomprehending, my father spreads his arms and weeps. We rush to embrace him. He kisses my mother then drops to his knees and hugs me. He has received a horrific beating, his face is swollen, two front teeth are missing, but it’s him, my beloved father, my papa.

“Docteur,” says Lafont, “you’re free. Let’s go. You must leave Paris right away. There’s no time to waste.”

“I appreciate what you’re doing, Henri, but two other men were picked up yesterday by the Brigades. They’re being shipped to the east tonight. Arrange their release and I’ll leave.”

Lafont is livid. “You can’t be serious.”

My mother tugs at my father’s sleeve. “Ari, don’t....”

“Henri, I rode with these men in the paddy wagon. I don’t know who they are but I know and feel their faces. They look just like me. See what bare fists and a mean heart can do. After the beatings we were all thrown into the same cell. We cried. We cursed. We threw up. We pissed in long fitful spasms from the blows to our kidneys and bladders. Tears and blood and vomit and urine coalesced on the bare floor in one ugly, agonized mass of mortal matter. Look at me, Henri. I am them and they are me. But by some providence, I’m here, alive and offered freedom -- as you were when I treated you, remember? They’re still locked up, wallowing in slime, desperate, overcome with fear and about to take their last journey, in a cattle car, to one of the Fuhrer’s slaughterhouses. I beg you. Two lives, two miserable souls. Surely, they can’t amount to very much in the scheme of things. Why not let them live? Free them Henri. You can do it.”

“Gutman, you’re crazy. I know I owe you my life but what you’re asking is insane. They’ll have my neck. And they’ll have yours too if you don’t get the fuck out of here.”

“Henri, you owe me nothing. It’s what you owe yourself. Do you think this horror will last forever? What will happen to you when this is over?”

Lafont pushes back the visor of his cap and wipes his brow.

“What do you mean? I’m now up to my neck. What more do you want?”

People never ask for advice without hoping for moral support.

My father had learned early in life that while fresh, hope is full of promise. He could let it wilt. He gently grabs Lafont by the shoulders and draws him close, close enough to smell fear on his breath.

“Do it, Henri. Life is short but memories linger. The war will end one day. Be practical if you can’t be noble. Buy yourself some ‘soul’ insurance. Perhaps history will take note of your magnanimity.”

He who walks backwards risks tripping on his future.

*

So Lafont pulled it off. He ordered the two men released in his custody on some pretext. My father asked that they be taken back to Paris but Lafont refused. Instead, he let them loose in the Enghien forest. He would claim they’d contrived to break free.

“Then?”

“Then he drove us back home, pressed us to pack and ‘decamp.’ He gave us a laissez-passer to Lyon. We never saw him again.”

*

Lafont had told my father:

“You drive a hard bargain, Gutman.”

“Yes, but you were man enough not to dicker in the end. I don’t know how this will all pan out but maybe posterity will concede that a sin does not a sinner make if he has shown some decency along the way.”

Lafont said nothing. He shook his head, shrugged, smiled pensively and drove away.

Posterity concedes nothing that contradicts the useful or the opportune.

Lafont found it useful and opportune, as many Frenchmen did, to embrace the enemy, to merrily goose-step to its Teutonic leitmotif. It was useful and opportune for the French -- some of whom had danced with him cheek-to-cheek -- to execute Lafont at war’s end as it was for Hitler’s Germany to massacre millions in its lunatic drive toward world domination.

It would be useful and opportune for the evil that men do to be interred with their bones. But evil, like matter, cannot be destroyed. It is reborn, its face transformed, its essence unchanged and immutable.

Some people find all sorts of excuses to avoid doing the right thing. It’s as if they’re ashamed to be clean.