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.”
*