The Fighter (18 page)

Buses take us from the station to Hôtel Lutétia, which serves as a welcoming center for concentration camp survivors. Nurses wash us and disinfect us. Doctors examine us. We have to answer questions: “When were you arrested? In what camps did you stay?”

They serve a light meal. Brod doesn't want to eat.

“I want to see my wife and kids. They've grown, of course. I hope I'll recognize them.”

After we fill out some papers, they let us go. A crowd of women and children is waiting in front of the hotel. Although I look carefully, I don't see Rachel and Élie. Brod is livid.

“You see, Wisniak, you lost your wife and your son…. Me, I lost my wife and my four little ones.”

“They can't come to this hotel every day. Hitler didn't kill everybody. I'm sure they're alive. Let's go to my place, then I'll go with you to yours.”

My concierge (doorkeeper) smiles broadly when she sees me. This is a good sign. I thought I had forgotten all my French, but some words come back.

“My wife? She alive?”

“Of course, Monsieur Wisniak. Yesterday she went to that hotel looking for you, but this morning she went to the countryside to fetch your boy.”

We go to Brod's apartment. A stranger in slippers opens the door. He stares at us as if we were beggars asking him for money.

“I signed a lease for the apartment,” he says. “There's nothing I can do for you.”

He understands perfectly who Brod is, but he doesn't seem very happy to see him. Brod becomes even more upset. He is not “as white as a bedsheet,” but rather as gray as his pajamas.

“They may have moved, Brod. Do you know anybody else?”

“My sister….”

“Where does she live?”

“Not far.”

Brod's sister is a little round lady with red cheeks. Before we ask her whether Brod's wife and children are alive, her solemn look answers the question.

I leave Brod with his sister and walk back home. The concierge has a key to my apartment.

“If you want, I'll bring you dinner, Monsieur Wisniak.”

“Thank you, madame. You very nice.”

Who is this monster who grabs his steak with two hands and devours it, who throws potatoes like candies into his wide open mouth? Is it me? Monsieur Wisniak? I must not eat too much. Nibbling biscuits is all right. Eggs and onions…. The French cook in Prague: “A juicy horse steak, nothing better to perk you up, man!” If I wasn't so tired, I would go down and ask the concierge for a cup of coffee. Real coffee…. The lice followed me all the way from Krähwinkel, even though the nurses in Hôtel Lutétia washed me and disinfected me. Shitty bugs.
Krähwinkel
means “the crows' corner.” They should call it
Lauswinkel
, the lice's corner. If I lie down in the bed, the lice will settle there. But I am too weak to go on standing up….

I lie down on the living-room floor and I fall asleep instantly. In the middle of the night, I feel somebody shaking me. Brod? Dawn call? My shoes! Where are my shoes? I need my shoes for the sport session!

“Maurice, Maurice… It's me!”

A woman. Neither the concierge nor Brod's sister.

“Rachel?”

“My name is not Rachel anymore, but Renée. And our son has become Charlie.”

A small boy hides behind the woman. He is scared, like the children in the Czech villages. With my shaved skull, my eyes popping out of their sockets, my gray skin, I look like a vampire.

Rachel (or Renée—I'll have to get used to it) pushes the boy toward me.

“Don't be shy, Charlie. This man is Maurice. Your papa!”

“Let him be. Better he doesn't come close. I'm full of lice…. Tell me, hmm, Renée, I would like to ask you something. Can you make a cup of coffee?”

“Coffee? Of course.”

I am home with my wife and my son. I drink real coffee. I hope I am not dreaming. A large indistinct crowd is shuffling around in my head—all the comrades who won't drink coffee anymore. Stranger yet, the cup seems to be talking. “Things are as before,” it says. “Don't I taste the same? You died and now you're reborn. You're getting a respite, a few more years. Sipping a cup of coffee in Paris in May. Isn't life worth living after all? The woman and the child are not going to the gas. She won't strangle him. You should be happy, believe me.”

After putting Charlie to bed, Renée tells me what happened:

“Did you hear about the great Vél d'Hiv roundup?”

“Yes. We went to Auschwitz the next day.”

“They came here. A French cop and a German civilian.

Do you know what? They were looking for you! I told them they had taken you to Pithiviers eight months before. The German said, ‘In that case, well…' He was ready to go, but the Frenchman wanted to arrest us. The German was surprised. ‘Why do you want to take them? We have a warrant for the husband, not for the wife and baby.' This German guy saved our lives.”

“I thought they only arrested foreign Jews.”

“That's what they said. But this swine of a French cop was going to take us away. They wanted to show their German masters they were good pupils. I left Paris to hide with the child. In this neighborhood, everybody knew I was Jewish. I wore the yellow star, after all.”

“Where did you hide?”

“You remember the Parisels? We met them when we went camping. I changed my name. I became Renée Vinard. I took a job with a lawyer as a typist. The Parisels found a woman in the countryside who agreed to keep Élie, whom I renamed Charlie. Other friends gave me shelter. Many helped me. I wore a bunch of keys that opened several safe apartments. I worked for the underground as a courier.”

“What about my mother?”

“The day of the great roundup, they also went to her place. When they knocked, she didn't open the door. She was lucky that they didn't break in. Your brother Albert paid a woman who came to get her a few days later and
brought her to Montauban, where he lived with your sister, Paule.”

“Are they okay?”

“Yes. They came back to Paris. They live in their old apartment.”

“And Carole, Jacques' wife?”

“They came on the morning of July 16 and they said, ‘Prepare your things, we'll be back in thirty minutes.' Do you understand? The cops were not all bastards like the guy who came to my place. They were warning her and leaving her some time to flee. But she didn't know where to go, especially with her little Rosette, so she waited for them. One of her neighbors told me all this. They took her away. She never came back.”

“She won't come back. Women with small children were gassed as soon as they stepped off the train.”

On the following days, I wash and rewash. Not only do the lice torture me, but diarrhea returns and I smell bad. I should have refused the concierge's dinner. I stay home. My mother, my brother, and my sister come to visit me. They seem nearly as shy as my son. They do not dare hold me in their arms. They're afraid they'll break me, as if I had become a fragile doll. They wonder whether it is really me. They speak in low voices, slowly. They try not to mention my ordeal.

Every night, I see the camp in my nightmares. The SS, the whips, the dogs, the Muselmen. I wake up drenched
with sweat and I do not understand where I am. Renée doesn't understand, either. She thinks I'm ill. This illness I'll keep all my life.

When Charlie drops a toy, I jump as if I've heard a shot. I get angry. He cries. I think he cries too easily. I must toughen him up, otherwise he won't be able to confront life's hardships.

After a week, I am strong enough to go outside and walk the few blocks to the apartment of Brod's sister. Her eyes are reddish and puffed.

“He's dead. When you left, he went to my bedroom and lay down on the floor. He didn't move. He didn't want to eat anything. He thought so much of his wife and children that I could feel their presence in the room. I was scared. I called a doctor who gave him some shots. This didn't help. The day before yesterday, when I woke up, I found his lifeless body. Lying on the floor, all curled up. He looked like an Egyptian mummy.”

I feel as if my legs are turning to marshmallow. I sit on a chair. Tears run down my face.

“Your brother was a great man. He saved my life. Over there, he never lost hope. He even survived a firedamp explosion in the mine. A large rock protected him. It was a miracle. When we found him, he was sleeping…. He told us he hadn't worried too much: ‘Either my last hour has come and I'll die, or it hasn't come and I'll live.' In the camp, he wanted to live, to show the SS and the kapos he
could resist them. Last week, when he found a stranger in slippers in his apartment… I guess he had no more reason to live.”

“What about you?”

“I have a six-year-old son. Charlie. I'll live for him.”

My father, Lonek Greif, had a blue number tattooed on his arm. Instead of telling me the story of Snow White or Cinderella, he talked about SS, kapos, kommandos, and gas chambers.

In 1950, when my brother Noël was four years old and I, five, he took us camping for our summer vacation. He belonged to an organization, Nature's Friends, that rented a meadow near a beach in Brittany. My mother stayed in Paris to take care of our newborn brother. She didn't like camping, actually.

Our tent neighbors were Maurice and Renée Garbarz. They made leather bags and wallets. They had two boys. One of them, Charlie, was older than me. The other one was younger. His name was the same as mine: Jean-Jacques.

Maurice also wore a blue number on his arm.

My father believed in rough living. He bought eggs at a
farm and showed us how to gulp them down raw. We ate uncooked carrots as if we were rabbits. We didn't complain. We could eat anything. We followed the family food laws: never leave a single crumb on your plate; don't even think of throwing food away. I knew that I was lucky to eat raw eggs on a campground (in French,
camp
) in Brittany while my grandparents, aunts, and cousins had died of hunger in a camp (in French,
camp,
too) in Poland.

Renée took pity on us.

“Look, Lonek, I cooked too many potatoes. If you want some for your kids…”

In Paris, Noël and I liked to go and play with Jean-Jacques Garbarz, because he had a Ping-Pong table in his bedroom. The best thing about it was that Renée offered us lemonade. At home, we drank only water.

Much later, Maurice Garbarz, helped by Charlie, wrote a book about his years in Auschwitz:
Un survivant
(Éditions Plon, Paris, 1984). Charlie and Jean-Jacques had graduated from the very best French universities. Charlie worked for the French government as a regulator of insurance companies. Jean-Jacques had moved to America and had become a psychiatrist in San Francisco. He translated the book into English (
A Survivor
. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1992).

My elder son visited California in 1992—he was twenty years old. I gave him Jean-Jacques Garbarz's address. It so happened that when my son went to San Francisco, Maurice
and Renée were staying with Jean-Jacques. This was their first visit to America. My son already knew an old Auschwitz survivor—Lonek, his grandfather. He said that Maurice, who was then seventy-five, was made from the same mold. “These survivors,” my son said, “seem to have more energy and to joke more than ordinary human beings. They're old, but they don't think and speak like old people. I had a lively conversation with him, as if he had been my age.”

I saw Maurice and Renée in 1997. They were more than eighty years old and still lived in Paris.

With Maurice's permission, I took his book as a starting point to write this story. I didn't invent any event or situation. I just imagined dialogs and tried to guess what the narrator, whom I called Maurice Wisniak, might think and feel. I went to see Maurice several times with lists of questions. I also saw him once at my father's home. When Maurice met with my father, they always talked about the camp.

“Do you still dream about it?” my father would ask.

“Not anymore. Now at last I can begin a new life!”

“I had frequent nightmares for twenty years or so. Then they went away by and by.”

“I used to dream I was back in the camp again. Hey, this is wrong, I thought. I'm sure I got out! Why am I back inside again?”

Maurice's memoirs end in May 1945. The last chapter's title is “Homecoming.” When I asked my mother and my father to write their own memoirs, both ended them in
1945, too. I asked my father for an explanation: “That's when my story ends,” he said. “Then your story begins.” After the war, Maurice Garbarz made handbags during the week, went camping on weekends and in summer. He followed world events and politics and could talk about all kinds of subjects with my son, but when he read books, they were mostly about the camps. He has more of them in his library than anybody else I know. He already has the French version of this book, of course. As soon as the English version is published, I'll send it to him.

While I was working on this story, I discovered that there were many boxers in Auschwitz. Maurice told me about Arie Pach, champion of Holland. Charlie also helped me: he gave me the Auschwitz memoirs of Gabriel Burah, featherweight champion of France.

Primo Levi, an Italian chemist, stayed from March 1944 to January 1945 in Buna-Monowitz, also called Auschwitz III, a camp where slaves were supposed to make synthetic rubber. In his book
If This Is a Man
(one of the very best books about the camps), he quotes one of the strange things that the old numbers told the newcomers on arrival: “Whoever boxes well can become a cook.”

A typical boxing event took place in Buna-Monowitz in the fall of 1943. Two professional French boxers, Victor “Young” Perez, flyweight world champion in the early thirties, and Robert Lévy, bantamweight French champion, fought in a real ring against two German giants, a
Wehrmacht soldier and an SS. The commanders of Auschwitz I, Birkenau, and Monowitz were sitting in the first row, the Monowitz barons just behind. In spite of their small size, the professionals would have won easily if they hadn't chosen to be careful and control their punches. As a result, the matches ended in a defeat and a draw. Young Perez and Robert Lévy died in the camp. To survive in Auschwitz, being strong and knowing how to fight did not suffice. You needed lots of luck.