Beyond the Call (28 page)

By February 1943, more than 160,000 French civilians had been swept up in the STO.
⁶
Isabelle was one of them. They were put on trains and sent to Germany, where they joined the great teeming hordes of other foreign workers – mostly Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians. The majority labored in German factories, but Isabelle was among the thousands put to work on the farms of Germany and Poland.

They were not technically slaves – they were paid, on a scale according to race. The French received (in theory, but usually not in practice) the same wages as German workers, while the Russians earned the least. But in every other respect it was enslavement. The workers were herded into camps which were run on the same model as all the Reich's prisons. By 1944 there were more than five million foreign workers in the Reich's factories, mines and farms, together with prisoners of war. As the war dragged on, they were joined by concentration camp inmates, who really were slaves and suffered worst of all. Altogether, forced laborers made up about a quarter of Germany's entire workforce.
⁷

As was the way of things, the women in each category suffered more than the men. There were rapes of female workers by their overseers and commandants.
⁸
Isabelle was one of the victims. It was only an issue for the Nazi authorities if the woman was an Eastern worker – a Pole or a Russian. The punishment for German personnel indulging in sexual relations with Eastern workers, regardless of whether it was consensual or involved bribery or rape, was to be sent to a labor education camp. The woman would be sent to a concentration camp. From the earliest days of the forced labor program, brothels for the use of male workers were set up in the camps. To prevent the crime of miscegenation, the prostitutes were drafted from among the female workers of the appropriate race.
⁹

It was a living nightmare, but worse was yet to come for the forced laborers.

As the war dragged on and the Reich shrank, food became scarce.
Starving laborers began to rebel, taking to robbery to feed themselves. In dozens and in scores, they were put to death. At this very moment, while Isabelle stood dejected outside the Hotel George, rebellious forced laborers all over Germany – in Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Münster, every big city – were being executed en masse.
¹⁰
Others died in the homicidal mania that was running loose in the towns and villages of Germany in the closing months of the war. It was an altogether wilder kind of madness than the industrialized murder of the Nazi regime; everywhere, the Gestapo and SS murdered their charges, sometimes in retribution, sometimes to instil terror, and often, it seemed, just acting on their own sociopathic hate and bloodlust.

Isabelle knew what these people were capable of. On the Eastern Front, as the Red Army closed in, SS units were killing foreign workers who tried to avoid being driven along with the retreat. Not far from where Isabelle herself had been incarcerated, a group of her own compatriots were killed for attempting to escape. At Oppeln in Silesia,
¹¹
between Kraków and Wrocław, French laborers trying to hide in a cellar were driven out by Germans with flamethrowers, herded together in a farmyard, and shot.
¹²
They were a few among many. Most were force-marched westward, along with the POWs and the concentration camp inmates, but hundreds, thousands, escaped the round-up and went into hiding.

Among them was Isabelle. With a small group of friends, she had managed to drop out of the march one night when the Germans moved on suddenly to get away from a Soviet advance. The women headed east and hid themselves in the Polish countryside, not far from where they had been enslaved. Like most other liberated prisoners, they feared and avoided the Soviet forces. Isabelle's little party of Frenchwomen made contact with other groups, and soon there was a network of them, all women, scattered across the countryside near Lwów, hiding out in barracks in the former camps or sheltered in abandoned farm buildings.

One question went back and forth between them, without an answer:
How can we get away from here and get back to France?
They were
trapped. But then they heard the rumor about the American officer who helped people get to Odessa. He was hard to find, they said, let alone to contact. Sometimes he'd be in one city, sometimes in another. And he was only interested in prisoners of war, particularly Americans. Would he be willing to help French civilian workers?

It was worth a try. Isabelle, who spoke some English, was elected to seek him out. He was known to spend time in Lwów. That was where she should go. Terrified of being rounded up by the Russians and sent to one of their holding camps, she had set out to walk into the city.

And now, that slender hope had come to nothing. Standing on the sidewalk outside the hotel, Isabelle wondered how she could go back and tell the other women that the American wouldn't help them.

As she walked away, she became aware that there was a scrap of paper balled up in her clenched fist. Isabelle recalled the American's hands enfolding hers and the hearty shake. She unscrewed the paper and turned it over. There was a number written on it. A hotel room number. Presumably his. But why? A familiar cold sensation gripped her. Was there going to be a price to pay for securing his help? With a flash of anger, she asked herself whether there were any men at all in the world who would do something for a woman without such payment. Was there no man who would do a person good without taking his price?

A
S EVENING DREW
in, Robert went up to his room and started getting ready for bed. For the rest of his life he would remember how blissful this bed at the Hotel George felt when he came in from a mission out in the countryside. He pitied the poor people who were living out there constantly, waiting for the opportunity to escape, or for somebody to help them.

He thought about the young Frenchwoman and hoped she would make use of the room number he had slipped to her. (Or
hoped
he'd slipped to her; he wasn't at all sure he'd done the move right.) It wasn't safe for anyone, let alone a young girl, to be alone on the streets after
dark. Thinking back to that first night in this hotel, and the woman being tortured and murdered, still gave him the creeping horrors. Even if you were a man and were armed, breaking the curfew could get you shot. The Russians seemed to believe that German spies came out in swarms after dark, like cockroaches.
¹³
It wasn't at all uncommon to hear gunshots in the night, and to find bodies on the streets in the morning.
¹⁴

Just as Robert was about to get undressed, there was a soft knock on the door. He opened it, and with a thrill of relief he recognized the raggedly dressed young Frenchwoman. So he hadn't fumbled the handshake trick!

‘Come in,' he said warmly, throwing the door wide.

Isabelle came in, bringing the unmistakable odor of the farmyard into the room with her. For a woman who was hoping to be helped, she didn't look very friendly. She stood and stared coldly at Robert as he closed the door.

He went to take a step toward her, and she held up a hand. ‘Wait,' she said haughtily. ‘I want a bath, please.'

‘Okay,' he said. ‘That's easy to arrange.' Bathing was usually the first thing ex-prisoners wanted when he brought them here; that and food. They didn't usually demand it in such frosty terms, though. ‘Whatever you want. I've got a towel and soap here. The bathroom is down the hall. I'll have to come with you to—'

‘No,' Isabelle said, snatching the towel and soap from his hands. ‘Please, let me to bathe first, before you are with me.'

He stared at her a moment, brain ticking over, then it clicked. ‘Whoa, whoa,' he said. ‘It's nothing like that! Is that what you thought?' He looked at her face, at the trace of fear behind the hostility, and was appalled. He'd heard the stories; he knew as well as anyone the kind of things that had gone on in those camps. ‘You're safe now,' he said. ‘Nothing to be afraid of. Listen, the bathroom is down the hall; I have to come with you to make sure nobody stops you in the hallway. Come on.'

He led her, still suspicious, down the hall to the communal bathroom. ‘In there,' he said. ‘Lock the door. I'll wait for you, Miss, er …?'

‘Isabelle,' she reminded him, her expression softening. ‘Call me Isabelle.'

After she had bathed, Robert went downstairs and brought back some food. She ate ravenously. Between mouthfuls she told him fragments of her story – the conscription in France, the journey to Poland, the forced labor. The atmosphere of fear and abuse in the camps had intensified as the years went by. Just this past year Isabelle had been raped more than once by the slave drivers who ran the camp. She described how at last she and her compatriots had managed to escape the march west, only to find themselves stranded in Soviet territory.

Robert told her again that she was safe now. ‘I'll take you to the station and put you on the Odessa train. You'll be home in no time.'

She looked at him, studying his face. ‘I have heard that the Americans have liberated France,' she said. ‘But you – why do you do this, for nothing?' After what she had been through, the idea of a man helping a person without expecting something in return was mystifying. She had apologized for her suspicions of him, but still she didn't understand.

Neither did Robert, entirely. It would be many years before he would be able to look back on all this and begin to figure it out. He had seen too much death, and it was as if he was trying to fight back; as if helping people, doing good, could somehow push back against the tide of violence, cruelty, and callousness that was threatening to engulf the world. He couldn't articulate it to Isabelle – or even to himself; all he knew at the time was that his missions helped to stave off the nightmare of what he had been through.

‘Anyhow,' he said. ‘We'll go to the station in the morning and get you on a train. You'll be in Odessa in a couple of days. There'll be a British ship to take you home, and—'
¹⁵

‘
Ah, non
,' she interrupted, almost panicking. ‘
Non! Toutes mes amies – il faut qu'elles m'accompagnent
.' She stopped and gathered herself. ‘Excuse me. My friends … I will not be without them. It … they must too, go with me.'

‘Sure,' said Robert, unfazed. Refugees were almost never alone.
They always came in pairs or groups. ‘How many of you are there?' In his head he started working out ticket costs and a plan for getting them to the train station without attracting attention.

‘Four hundred,' said Isabelle carefully.

Robert blinked. ‘Four … er, I think you mean
forty
.' Forty was a lot to manage at once, but he'd handled larger numbers. He went back to his mental arithmetic.

There was a pencil lying on the table; Isabelle picked it up and wrote on a piece of paper:
4 0 0
.

‘I can count,' she said. ‘Four hundred.'

The number swam in front of Robert's eyes. It wasn't possible to get that many out in one go. No way in the world. Nobody sane would even attempt it. Four hundred Frenchwomen, marching through Lwów? They'd be arrested before they got within a mile of the station. They'd have to be split into groups; but that could take days. He tried to puzzle it out. Say ten groups of forty … but there was only one train a day. In the meantime he had other calls on him, other people needing help. Maybe eight groups of fifty, or five groups of eighty … but no, it wasn't feasible, not without abandoning the stray POWs who needed him.

He saw her watching him anxiously. ‘Oh, don't worry,' he said. ‘We'll think of something. Do you have any papers? Identification?'

She shook her head.

‘Okay, well, I guess we'd better sleep on it.' He looked regretfully at the quilt and the soft pillows that had been calling to him for the past couple of days. ‘I guess you'd better have the bed,' he sighed.

That night he lay awake on the hard floor in his parka, trying to work out a solution. He couldn't bring four hundred women into Lwów, and he couldn't split them into groups. There had to be another way.

And then the solution dawned on him.
Couldn't bring them into Lwów
… That was the answer, right there: he didn't need to bring them in. The idea was absurd, it was dangerous. But it was a plan. He was going to need a whole train.

Chapter 16

BAIT AND SWITCH

I
SABELLE WALKED OUT
of Lwów in higher spirits than when she had entered it.

Earlier that morning, while the Hotel George was shaking itself awake, Robert had gone downstairs and scared up some breakfast. While they ate, he explained his plan. If he couldn't bring the women to the train, he reasoned, he would have to bring the train to the women. All they needed to do was be in the right place at the right time. It was simple enough in concept, but might be hell's own job to put into action. It was going to take some days to set up.

After she had eaten her fill and understood the plan, Isabelle crept down the back stairs, slipped out through a side entrance, and headed back the way she had come the previous day. In her pocket was some cash Robert had given her to buy some better clothes, so she'd look less like a refugee. She would have to return to Lwów before all this was over, and couldn't take the risk of being detained by the Russians.

Out beyond the city, Isabelle turned off the main road and began the long walk back to the shelter she shared with her friends. Would they be willing to trust this friendly American? Isabelle believed they could. But whether they could rely on him to get them to freedom was another matter. There were many hazards and pitfalls along the way.

T
HE TRAIN STATION
was almost deserted when Robert arrived. It was still early morning, and not many passenger trains came and went from Lwów. His footsteps echoed in the cavernous ticket hall; like the Hotel George and many other buildings in Lwów, the station was
a relic of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the city was called Lemberg and was capital of the kingdom of Galicia. It was built with palatial pretensions: all domes and stucco outside, all pillars and molded plasterwork inside.

Robert had become a familiar sight to the ticket sellers. The man behind the glass screen this morning was Józef. ‘
Dzień dobry, kapitanie
,' he called as Robert approached.

‘Good morning to you too.' Robert was glad it was Józef today; he spoke decent English. They chatted awhile, and Robert bought a ticket, in case there were any NKVD people watching; under cover of paying, he slipped some extra bills under the glass, and murmured: ‘We need to talk. Meet me at noon in the Pokój Węgierski. There'll be a good lunch and a bottle of the best.'

The Pokój Węgierski – Hungarian Room – was a restaurant near the Hotel George: decent, but not fancy. Józef hesitated in surprise, but then nodded and palmed the bills.

As Robert left the station, he glanced about; there were a few soldiers around who watched incuriously as he passed, but nobody who looked like they might be trailing him. It was hard to tell; the NKVD's official bird dogs were army officers, and as easy to spot as a whore in church. But you could never be sure about informers infiltrated among the local population. They could be anyone, from nice middle-class ladies like Esa Lowry to folks who looked like refugees. But although he'd only been in the game a short while, Robert had learned to sense when he was being watched. Either that or he'd simply caught the Russian disease of paranoia. Either way, he wasn't feeling under scrutiny this minute.

By noon, when he sat down to wait for Józef in the Hungarian Room, his confidence was ebbing. Every other patron seemed like a potential spy, and his worry that Józef would be followed, or just wouldn't show up, grew and grew. What if the Russians apprehended the ticket seller, interrogated him? Worse – what if they made an informer of him? It wasn't at all beyond the NKVD to threaten people's families, and Poles were found dead on the streets regularly.

When he saw the familiar face at the restaurant door, Robert's anxieties subsided a little. Józef came in, sat at the table, and gratefully accepted the meal and bottle of wine that Robert had ordered for him.

The next part was going to be tricky. Tentatively, without going into too much detail, Robert began to outline the situation he was in. He needed transportation to Odessa for four hundred people, and he had an idea in his head about how it might be achieved.

Józef listened to the proposition in silence, with a deepening frown. When Robert was done, the ticket seller shook his head. He couldn't do it by himself. He would need to involve his superiors, and some other railroad employees – engineers and brakemen. Robert understood; he explained that he'd worked as a railroad brakeman before the war, back in America. He knew how the system worked and understood how the stunt could be pulled. Józef promised to speak to his superiors and to his friends who worked on the trains. They were all Poles like him; local men who had been living here the last time the NKVD ran the city. They had no love for the Soviets.

It would take a few days to organize, Józef said. That was fine, Robert told him; it would take a few days for his Frenchwomen to get themselves together. And in the meantime he had other business to deal with, other strays needing his help.

N
EXT MORNING
, R
OBERT
stopped by the rail station. He needed tickets for some men he was channeling to Odessa, so he took the opportunity to check in with Józef. He felt uneasy – the sensation of being watched – but couldn't spot anyone tailing him. It must be simple paranoia.

The ticket seller had consulted his bosses, and they were willing to help. But they insisted that the American pay the money for the tickets up front, before they would allow the necessary arrangements to be made.

That was fine with Robert. But he couldn't just extract the cash and hand it over in public view. He would have to come back. After
a further brief consultation with Józef, he walked away. As he crossed the station concourse, heading for the men's room, he still had that eerie sensation of being watched, but although he had noticed several people scattered about the concourse and the rooms adjoining it, he didn't register the one pair of eyes that followed him carefully.

In the men's room, Robert locked himself in a stall and began unbuttoning his layers of clothing, burrowing down to his special undergarment – the much-loathed, incommodious money vest. It had become slightly less uncomfortable lately, as his stock of cash was depleted. He extracted a block of dollar bills and began counting them out. The bills were brand-new, and each one had to be peeled away from the block. When he'd counted out a good number, he stuffed them in his pants pocket. From another compartment in the vest he drew out his stock of Russian rubles. He'd already checked them back at the hotel and knew he had plenty for the tickets. He folded the bills up in bundles and put them in the pockets of his parka.

It was quite a sum. But how much it was actually worth to the United States government depended on how you translated it. The money situation in Soviet territory was totally crazy.
¹
According to the official exchange rate dictated by the Russians, which their banks and the US Military Mission were obliged to honor, this parcel of tickets was going to cost north of a thousand dollars. But it seemed less painful if you looked at it through the local black market exchange rate. In Poland, US dollars were like gold. At black market rates, the total bill for the four hundred tickets would be about forty bucks.

Robert peeled off the last few bills and put them in his parka pocket. Altogether he'd allowed enough for twenty extra tickets on top of the four hundred. He was concerned in case more women had joined Isabelle's crowd in the meantime. Best be prepared. It would be a crying shame if any of those girls got left behind.

A few minutes later, Robert walked back out of the men's room carrying his parka over his arm. Józef was sitting on a bench in the concourse. Robert sat beside him, and they chatted for a while about their homes and families, taking out their wallets and showing each
other their photos. Eventually Robert stood up, said goodbye, and walked out of the station building. He strode off toward Chernivetska Street, apparently unaware that he had left his parka behind on the bench; even outside, with just his flying jacket between him and the biting breeze, he still seemed not to notice.

He also failed to notice the figure that left the station building a few moments after him, following him up the long avenue toward the city center.

Back in the station concourse, Józef scooped up the parka and hurried across to the ticket office. Inside, checking that nobody was looking in through the glass, he rifled through the pockets, extracted the bundles of cash, and tossed them into the safe. He slammed the door shut, heaved a sigh of relief, and went back to work.

W
HEN
R
OBERT PUSHED
open the door of the little eatery, he found Isabelle already waiting for him. His heart lurched a little when he realized that she wasn't alone: three other young women were sitting with her. It was a foolish risk, coming into the city so many at a time. Isabelle introduced him to her companions, all young French girls like herself. All the women, she said, had wanted to see with their own eyes the American who was going to save them, but only these three had dared come into town. They gazed adoringly at him, and he experienced a moment of masculine frailty, grinning back like a teenager.

Isabelle, who had lost none of her earnest demeanor, brought the conversation back to business. Robert went over the details of the arrangements he had made. Isabelle and her friends knew the countryside for miles around Lwów far better than he did. At every mention of a place and time, they nodded; they knew where it was, and knew how best to get there. They suggested refinements to the plan. Four hundred was a lot of women to maneuver around the countryside, but they quickly worked it all out.

The only thing that beat them was how they were going to eat. It would be three days to Odessa, even if there were no hold-ups. Robert
took out the wad of dollar bills from his pants pocket and passed it surreptitiously to Isabelle. They could get a whole heap of rubles for that many dollars, and buy food for everyone en route. Along with the money, he handed over the wad of tickets he'd quietly pocketed while chatting to Józef.