Gone to Soldiers (40 page)

Maman and Rivka are in Drancy, reachable by train if I was permitted in through the Gare du Nord nearby. I can sometimes get a food package to them and we are able occasionally to pass messages in and out with M. Tiefelbrun of the General Union of French Jews, the GFIU, who tries to act as liaison between those inside and those outside.

Daniela and I both have good false identification. I was easy to outfit, because as they say, I can pass. I took on the identity of a young woman who died in a bus accident. Her name was Jacqueline, which makes it easy for me. I am now Jacqueline Porell. She is a year older than I am—or than I was, perhaps I should say.

Daniela's papers say Paula Guerlain. If we keep her hair very short, it does not curl as much. Daniela is very dear to me. Without her friendship and her guidance, I would never have survived this long. I think after Maman and Rivka were arrested, I would have given up and walked into a dragnet. For a Jew to survive, you have to want to all of the time; that is not sufficient, because you also need papers and money and friends and luck, above all, luck. But without that hard-glinting, ever-wary willpower, we have no hope of survival. Eyes in the back of the head, Daniela says. Eyes on stalks. Ears perked forward and back.

Daniela is shorter than I am and much darker. I took after Papa more than Maman, which right now is lucky. Daniela's hair is naturally kinky, dark brown. She has enormous wide-set very dark eyes with lashes she could paint with, a strong nose, a strong chin and a large sensual mouth. Her figure is much fuller than mine, although she is not at all plump. She is strong as a little horse. Even on our dreadful rations, she can run up the six flights to our room and barely be out of breath at the top, while I am dragging myself up and puffing. She was studying to be a doctor and is now working as a nurse.

We work in a hospital ten blocks away. There we have managed to disappear a number of Jews by pronouncing them dead. We have a little conspiracy of a doctor, several nurses and orderlies. We kill people on paper and then bring them to life under new names. We use the hospital facilities to counterfeit papers. Antoine Moussat—who used to be a professor at the Ecole des Etudes Orientales and was involved in our short-lived school—does the counterfeiting.

Besides our occasional work passing people through the hospital, the other task Daniela and I have taken on is to distribute some of the beautifully fabricated papers Moussat produces. We change the identities of up to three people a week. Some are rare individuals who escaped from a camp; others are simply Jews or Resistance people needing to be somebody else. We can hand out a complete sheaf of identity cards: birth certificates, work permits, certificates for repatriated prisoners, baptismal records.

The hard cases are when we need papers that will cover people obviously not French-born, and then we have to search the prewar issues of the Journal Official for names of naturalized non-Jews. My friend Céleste, who is not even Jewish, does this work. She is forever in the libraries doing research for us so that we have good identities. Then if the police call a mairie to check on a suspect's identity, the records confirm it. Since her beating, Céleste has been committed to defying the Nazis.

Handing over the cards is always touchy, because that is the likeliest time for us to get caught. One of us goes and the other watches from a safe distance. We take turns, Daniela and I. Are we scared? Of course. But we are illegal beings anyhow. We might as well do what we can, because our chances are not good even if we sit still. At least this way we feel we are striking back.

I do ask myself why I do this, and the answer is, to make amends to Maman and Rivka. I often wish I could see just one member of my family again, although best would be all of them. I wonder how Naomi is doing in the U.S. I hope they do not mock her because she speaks English so poorly. I'll bet now that she wishes she had studied and not played around so much when she should have been practicing grammar and conversation. Neither of the twins were scholars. I always enjoyed excelling at school, but they never cared, although I think they are probably bright, or perhaps I just expect them to be bright because they are my sisters. I don't care anymore if they are bright or stupid, I only wish I had them back.

My own English is kept up because Daniela has a little radio we listen to under the quilts every night. Of course it is illegal—illegal for us to have a radio at all, for they insisted all Jews turn in our radios months ago, and illegal to listen to the BBC at any time—but just about everybody who has a functioning radio does it. We huddle under all the quilts and listen to the broadcasts in French but also to those in English. Daniela and I live in a state of anxiety that a tube will burn out and we will be cut off from our oxygen supply, real news of what is happening outside France—and even inside, sometimes.

I love Daniela the way, I believe, the twins loved each other, as if she is my sister, my other self. Without her, I would have given up and perished. When she is the one to make the delivery of false IDs, I hate it. I cannot lose anybody else. I prefer when I am the one. I am not as terrified then, although my heart beats fast. I have imagined being arrested so many times that it feels almost boring. At first I could think of nothing else but the danger. A roaring filled my head till I could scarcely catch my breath. Now except for the accelerated heartbeat in my throat, my wrists, my chest, I remain cool and observant.

We keep varying the place where we carry out our drop, so that we minimize the danger of somebody noticing the pattern. Today I was the one. After work, Daniela stood across the street while I sauntered into a greasy-looking bistro. I ignored the men at the zinc counter, thinking how often our drops lead me into places I would never willingly enter with any lesser motive. Will I ever get over feeling self-conscious walking into such a place alone? Sometimes my face heats up with embarrassment.

I had a ghastly newspaper
Paris Soir
which I opened and pretended to scan. I looked over the men in the bar obliquely, in a series of sideways blinks so that I would not make eye contact with anybody. I try to guess if any of them are Gestapo or French police. None of them give me any prickles of fear or hostility. At times like these when I am making a drop, I feel as if time slows down and I have a great many moments in which to examine every detail of the tabletop and the clothing of the men.

When a man sat down at my table and tried to pick me up, I did not know at first if he was my contact or only a local wolf. He was maybe thirty-five, with pale sad brown eyes and a shy, droopy look, puppyish. Then he said the magic sentence, “With the weather so cold, how about something hot to drink?”

I said, “I'm waiting for a friend. But I see he is not coming, so I am leaving.” Under the table he put the tightly wound roll of bills in my lap. I jumped up as if pestered to death by him, leaving my paper on the table. As if idly, he picked it up saying to the room at large how stuck up I was and how some women didn't know what they wanted. In the newspaper were the identity cards, glued in an envelope to the page, so they would not fall out if he took up the paper awkwardly. We try to anticipate these problems. Then we went home to our supper of cabbage soup.

12 novembre 1942

I was writing about food yesterday, when my hands got too cold to continue. At noon we eat at the hospital, so we have one filling meal. Every three days we cook up a stew or a soup and then eat it until it is gone, that anonymous soup that Daniela calls potage de rien. Still, life is not terrible, because we laugh all the time. Daniela has taught me the Hebrew alphabet and a few words. She wants to go to Palestine after the war. I hope she will change her mind. I would not like to be without her company.

Daniela's parents left Paris shortly after the Vel d'Hiv raid in which Maman and Rivka were taken away. They were passed over the border into Vichy France and have been living in Nice, which has been a pretty safe spot for Jews. Now Daniela is extremely worried about them, with the Germans occupying the south too.

Her brother Nathan is living in the western suburb of Neuilly, where he has a factory job under a false name. He is also involved in the Jewish Resistance, but we do not know what he is doing. All the Jewish groups that remain pass on information from one group to the other with the speed at which mouths can work and feet run, but only the news we must hear. We do not ask each other unnecessary questions, for fear we may inadvertently betray each other if we are captured and tortured. Our cell deals mostly with young adults and sometimes with adolescents, but there are other groups that exclusively help children. Then there are groups that do acts of reprisal or attempt sabotage.

Personally I am pleased with what Daniela and I can accomplish, with the help of Marcel, Céleste, Dr. Lefèvre, Professor Moussat and the nurses and orderlies in our little cell. We are ten altogether, all Jews except for Céleste and Dr. Lefèvre, who has a Jewish wife he fears for. We hold firm. Every week we save as many lives in our clandestine work as we do in our hospital work.

As a result of my work as a nurse's aide, I am no longer physically squeamish. Maman, who used to make fun of me because I did not like to handle dirty laundry or anything rotten, would be pleased with my iron stomach and my iron will. If only I could see her. I have learned a fair amount of nursing, since the hospital is shorthanded and I am called upon to do tasks that would normally be carried out by trained nurses. I give injections and change dressings. It makes me laugh to think that after the war perhaps I will end up as a nurse, if I survive, because that is the only training I am being permitted—a long way from being an actress in the Comédie Française or a teacher in a good lycée.

Now it is time to sleep. We have to get up early for work and the apartment is bitter cold already. We have stuffed rags and papers in the cracks, but still the wind slips in. We call our little apartment Bald Mountain, as in Night on. Daniela used to study the violin.

15 novembre 1942

Daniela is pleased because we have learned it is the Italians who have occupied Nice, and that things are easy under them. Her parents have nothing to worry about, so Daniela has been singing all day.

This weekend there was a deportation to the east of a thousand from the camp at Drancy. They say there is to be a thousand a week transported from now on. We have been unable to find out where they are being sent. The BBC announced a tremendous British victory in Africa, at a place called Tobruk. We drank a little wine to celebrate, sharing a glass. It is so cold we are both huddled in bed, so I will make this entry brief, as I am keeping Daniela awake.

20 novembre 1942

We have heard something terrifying. There is a special courier in Paris right now named Jan Karski who has been in the ghetto in Warsaw and witnessed camps where Jews are sent. He says that most of the Jews sent east are not resettled but killed at once. The others are worked to death. It is planned to smuggle him out of the country via Spain and Portugal, so that news of what is happening to Jews will cause England and the U.S. to open their borders to Jews who do manage to escape, and to bomb the railroads to the camps as they are now said to be bombing inside Germany.

I have heard rumors before, but it is said that this man has testimony and papers with him. I do not want to believe this, but after the Vel d'Hiv raid, I can credit almost anything.

I must go and talk to whomever I can reach about whether it is possible to bribe anybody out of Drancy. I have heard of no one managing it, and my resources are slight. Escape is what haunts me. How can I get them out? I can save them once I have them, because I can provide false ID and I know whom to contact to whisk them out of Paris. I believe I could arrange for them to be secreted in a village with farmers. But how to get them out?

1
^ier
décembre 1942

M. Tiefelbrun said that Maman should have had an Ausweis to say that she was a Wirtschaftswertvoller Jude, an economically useful Jew, since she was working in the fur trade. He said it was stupid that she did not have that, and maybe it was not too late to try to get it for her. He is hopeful anyhow and is beginning the paperwork. When I see him, of course I use my old name but do not ever tell him where I live or work. In general more people tell me I might be able to get Rivka out than extend hope I may be able to free Maman, but I am determined and working very hard on every person I can get hold of who may be able to help at all.

We have heard of a mass deportation of very young children, many of whom had already lost their parents. In many cases, rumor has it, the French police rounding them up in the stockade at Drancy and marching them to the railroad tracks do not even know who they are. The Germans simply demand a fixed number.

10 décembre 1942

Yesterday I had a very encouraging meeting with an official who is working on getting Maman the economically useful status. Her old boss has written very strong letters saying that she is wanted back on the job and that the work is slowed down because of her lack. I really appreciate what he is doing for her. I'm going to get them out, I'm determined!

We had an emergency at the hospital today just as we were about to leave. People try to heat with all kinds of ancient apparatus now that the weather has turned bitter cold. We had to handle a whole family whose little wood stove, in which they were attempting to burn rubble and sawdust, exploded. Dr. Lefèvre handles the difficult burn cases, on which he has published several important papers, and Daniela is his right hand. The condition of the two little boys was pitiful. We were tied up for hours. Thus Daniela, who was to make the evening's drop in a seedy little café near Gare du Lyon, was a full hour late.

When we got there we heard that the Gestapo had picked up the man we were to meet. Apparently he made the mistake of approaching every woman who entered the café, in desperation, and somebody turned him in for the reward. We came home feeling guilty, but what could we have done? At least we hope that his desperation gave him away, as the other possibility, even more frightening, is that they were already watching. I talked over with Daniela the possibility of returning to that café perhaps in a few days and sitting around to pick up local gossip. That way we would probably hear if somebody local got a reward for tipping off the Gestapo that night, or if the Gestapo already had the drop under surveillance.