Crossing the Borders of Time (48 page)

Roland scanned the crowd of strangers around him, leery now that he might have been followed. Near the door to the tracks, he picked out a pair of pale-faced men with dark suits and fedoras but no discernible facial expressions who were standing alert, smoking, with their backs to the wall. When the lonely wail of the train pierced the air like a mourner’s keen—no carefully plotted derailment that day to cheat expectations—the two men crushed their cigarettes under their heels. The regular churning beat of the wheels came closer, grew louder, closer and louder. The two men stepped forward, and Roland dashed past them, out to the tracks. Brakes squealed, wagons groaned to a halt. There was a last wind and a powerful shudder, and then the silence that followed the mighty mechanical sigh of the beast. It rolled over Roland like the sound of surrender. The doors opened, passengers spilled onto the platform, and Roland lunged toward them, parting the crowd with his elbows to find Roger. To save him.

“
Ah! c’est gentil!
” How nice! Roger stopped in surprise, set down his valises, and beamed at his roommate. Before Roland could whisper a warning, he froze at a snarled command behind his back: “
HALT!
” The two broad-shouldered Nazi agents shoved him aside and seized hold of Roger and his bags, undoubtedly filled with black-market produce.

Roland stood gaping in impotent horror at the retreating backs of the three silent figures as the agents dragged Roger through the crowds in the station. He wanted to scream, to flee, to wrest his friend from the arms of those thugs. Numbly, he awaited the grip that would claim him next. Then, a desperate gambit, he pretended to look for somebody else, as if greeting Roger had come to pass as coincidence only. He searched the waiting room, knitted his brow, and threw up his hands in a feint of annoyance, a public charade to say that the person he had actually come to collect had missed the train without sending a message. He made a show of rechecking his watch, studied the timetable, shrugged his shoulders, and very slowly strolled out of the station, at every step fighting the urge to turn around and face the future rushing to catch him.

That evening, his landlady managed to sneak him a warning not to return to his room: the Gestapo had been there already and slashed up the place, and she wasn’t looking for any more trouble. She told him to move. He went to stay with another Jewish friend in the city and with deep trepidation returned the next day to the French railway office at the Hôtel Terminus across from the station, planning to tell his boss he was leaving.

“
Finito, finito
,” he said, after recounting the terrible story of Roger’s arrest. But he yielded to his boss’s insistence that he would be reckless to give up a job that meant an exemption from forced German labor. Why compare his own situation, his boss asked, to that of a Jew? Still, Roland was sunk in despair over his best friend’s arrest and agonized about what would happen to him in the hands of the Nazis. Black marketeering was sure to raise extra charges. Would the Germans realize or care that Roger was only an amateur dabbler where that was concerned? How long would they hold him? And where? Roland was plagued by memories of how Roger had raced for a doctor while he lay unconscious two years before, a ruptured appendix spewing infection. Without Roger’s quick action, Roland would have died. To abandon Roger in an equally menacing hour made him feel like a traitor. A coward. There had to be someone who knew how to free him, yet Roland’s contacts in the Resistance offered no hope. They just shook their heads and advised him to keep his mouth shut, or else he’d wind up sharing a cell with Roger, wherever he was.

Near the end of the following week, Roland was summoned to interpret for a group of German and French railway officials, two
Wehrmacht
men, and a Gestapo agent, as they walked down the tracks to inspect a special train parked in the yard. Horrified to see that all its windows were covered with bars to secure the wagons for transporting captives, Roland studied the train with dread in his heart, now understanding that prisoners like Roger would ride these cars to hellish places. Even then, Roland could not foresee that most of the prisoners forced onto the trains at Lyon-Perrache would never be freed to come home again. When the group of inspectors turned back toward the hotel, content with the railcar modifications, the Gestapo agent summoned Roland—“
Sie, Dolmetscher! Kommen Sie hierher!
”—to walk alongside him. In the bright October sun their own opaque shadows glided before them.

“
Wo haben Sie so gut Deutsch gelernt?
” the agent inquired. Where did you learn to speak German so well? “Do I detect a hint of an Alsatian accent?
Nicht wahr?
” Not so? His smile was icy as he paused to offer Roland a cigarette and intimately cupped his hand around a match in order to light it for him. “Where are you from? Tell me again, what was your name?” For the next half mile, as they walked together back down the track, the Gestapo man peppered Roland with invasive questions—pointed, poisonous, and too polite. He probed his past, his credentials, and his thoughts on the war and the Jewish-Bolshevik menace in Europe, with his inquiry coiling around to the same repeated personal issues by way of back doors until Roland grew certain the agent was trying to trap him.

“Take my card,” the Nazi concluded when they returned to the station. “Do not make the mistake of failing to call me when you have something to report.”

That afternoon, Roland quit his job at the Hôtel Terminus. Through a connection in the Resistance, he soon found another job that exempted him from forced German labor, doing office work for a petrol firm. Roger was less lucky. After several weeks at Lyon’s Fort Montluc, the prison where the Nazis held thousands of Jews and resisters for deportation and torture, he was loaded onto a train to Drancy, the crowded and squalid transit camp on the outskirts of Paris. An enormous U-shaped complex of utilitarian five-story buildings, Drancy had been designed to house a low-income French population, but was taken over for use as a camp even before construction was finished. Inside, it was almost devoid of electricity, water, or toilet facilities, but it was soon well provided with guard posts, floodlights, and barbed-wire fences nine feet high. By late 1943, French police continued to serve as its guards, but SS
Hauptsturmführer
Alois Brunner was the Nazi official in charge of the disease-ridden compound, which eventually served as a last miserable French residence for sixty-seven thousand of the seventy-six thousand Jews deported to death camps from France.

There were three thousand inmates when Roger arrived, just two months short of his twenty-fourth birthday. As part of induction, and with the detailed bookkeeping designed to win approval from their German mentors, the French Interior Ministry police, on page four of Drancy notebook #16, recorded what they took from his person: “
Received on October 29, 1943, from Monsieur Roger Dreyfus, no. 7271, of 27 rue Puits Gaillot, Lyon—the sum of 100 francs
.” There was no accounting for the balance of days they robbed from his life.

Lyon’s Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation, the museum and research center where I found Roger’s records, occupies a building formerly used as a Gestapo headquarters, located on the avenue Berthelot, just over the Rhône from the gare de Perrache. It was here too that I found ledger entries that finally answered painful questions as to the precise fate of my mother’s cousin Mimi in Lyon. She was forty-one when she was interned at Drancy with her three children and Aunt Marie’s loyal attendant Bella Picard, on November 9, 1943—exactly five years after
Kristallnacht
and eleven days after Roger’s internment.

The three Goldschmidt children shortly before their deportation to Drancy and Auschwitz (L to R): Elie-Jean, eighteen years old; Jeanine, sixteen; and Jacques, fourteen

“
Reçu de Mme. Goldschmidt, Emilie née Cahen, 99 rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, Lyon, la somme de trois cent dix
[310]
francs
,” a police official duly inscribed in ledger #20, page 27. Bella is recorded as having been carrying only ten francs, a poignant reflection of her lower status. In a peculiar contortion of societal values, the Drancy chief of police observed the niceties of convention, not forgetting in these fateful ledgers to add the honorific
Madame
or
Monsieur
or the traditional identifier of a maiden name.

The research center also located a picture from Serge Klarsfeld’s memorial tome,
French Children of the Holocaust
, depicting the three Goldschmidt children, posed in the sun and clothed like dolls in party attire. Jacques, the youngest, appears about four—with knees as delicious as little round apples—dressed in dark velvet shorts, a matching jacket, a round-collared white blouse, spotless white kneesocks, and white ankle boots. His sister, Jeanine, not quite eighteen months older, is a miniature lady in a box-pleated dress topped by a jacket and a broad-brimmed hat that casts a shadow over her features. Elie-Jean, three years older than his little brother, stands off to the right and grins for the camera in long pants, a nautical shirt, and sailor’s beret. Like three living gifts, they all wear outfits adorned by bows at their necks. The caption reads as follows:

French police record of 310 francs “received” from Mme. Goldschmidt, Emilie née Cahen at Drancy on November 9, 1943
(photo credit 17.1)

Jeanine Goldschmidt was born on June 23, 1927, in Lyon, where her brother, Jacques, was also born on December 8, 1928. Their elder brother, Elie-Jean, also born in Lyon, had just celebrated his 18th birthday on November 8, 1943, twelve days before their deportation to Auschwitz on Convoy No. 62. They lived at 99 rue de l’Hôtel de Ville in Lyon.

On the day that I left the research museum with the Drancy records and this photo in hand, I wandered alone, shaken in spirit, across the pont Galliéni over the Rhône to the gare de Perrache where Roger was arrested, up the Presqu’île, and past the bloodred earth of the place Bellecour. Nearby, at number 99 on what had been the rue de l’Hôtel de Ville and is now rue du Président Edouard Herriot, I stopped before the beautiful entry of the building where my cousins had lived. The central panels of the wooden door still bore intricate carvings of fruits and flowers, and above the arched doorway, a bearded devil still lurked under the white marble bench where cherubs sat and played with a bird. A prayer of mourning filled my heart for family members I never had known because they were murdered before I was born: frozen in time, Jacques, Jeanine, and Elie-Jean forever remaining children to me. I lingered there, trying somehow to connect with their presence, and when a young and pretty North African woman walked to the door and unlocked it, I asked for permission to glance inside. My cousins had lived there during the war, I told her, and when I mentioned their name, she insisted I join her upstairs to speak with her husband.

His family, she said, had spent four generations in the same apartment next door to the Goldschmidts, so he was fully aware of the tragic events of the past. Like me, Marc-Henri Arfeux, thirty-nine at the time of my visit, a writer and teacher, had not known the Goldschmidts. But he, too, had grown up hearing about them, such that both our lives were touched by the ending of theirs. His mother had been a friend of Jeanine Goldschmidt, the two girls being apart in age by only a year. And his great-uncle, André Laverrière, had actually spied through his peephole into the hallway to watch in anguish as agents of the pro-Nazi French
Milice
banged at the Goldschmidts’ door when they came to seize the family in the first black hours of October 29, 1943.