Perfectly Ordinary People(87)

A few days later, and I’m pretty sure it was the morning of day three, I sat up and declared I wanted to go.

Christophe rolled over to face me – it was really early in the morning – and said, ‘Oh, you’re back with us, are you? Good.’

He asked if I wanted to leave the hotel or Mulhouse, and I replied that I wanted to leave both, and preferably the country as well.

‘You want to go to London,’ he said.

He reached into the drawer of the bedside table then, and pulled out a pile of letters and postcards and told me that I probably needed to read them first.

Sorry, these are letters sent by who? I’m confused.

He’d gone back to my parents’ apartment for me and had spoken to the Polish woman’s son. So this was all the post they’d found in the letterbox when they’d taken over the apartment.

Most of it was from me: the letters and postcards I’d sent to my parents. But there were letters addressed to me too – letters Ethel had posted from London. There were lots from 1940 and a few from 1941, and then hardly any from that point on, and they just got shorter and shorter as time went by. I tortured myself by reading through them all in order, from her early declarations of undying love until the final one, posted in 1943, which was painfully short and to the point. It said she didn’t know if the war would ever end, and she didn’t know if she’d ever see me again, but if I was receiving her letters I needed to know that she was well, that she was having to move around a lot, and if I wanted to contact her I should write to her care of her cousin Hannah. That letter was so cold, so businesslike . . . I knew she couldn’t be too expressive because of the censors, but all the same, it really upset me. It was a letter from someone who’d got bored writing letters to someone who had never replied. It was a letter from someone on the point of giving up.

Hadn’t you written to her at all?

No, I had. And that was the problem. I had written to her from time to time, both at her parents’ address and care of her cousin in London. So my letters clearly hadn’t got through.

I read through all of Ethel’s letters repeatedly, and I finally let myself weep for her, for my parents, for all of it. Christophe tried to comfort me for a while but then gave up and went out for the day with Guillaume – he simply let me get on with my grieving.

When he got back that evening, I told him I needed to visit Ethel’s parents, and it was only when he told me they were gone – and the whole Jewish quarter was like a ghost town – that I realised I’d been lying on my bed for three days, and during that time I hadn’t even thought to ask what Christophe might be going through.

So I asked him if his parents were OK, and he said that they were alive but not OK at all. He said they’d wanted nothing to do with him.

How could they not want anything to do with him?

I’m not sure if I told you, but they were devout Catholics. And of course, his arrest meant they’d found out he was gay. I believe they’d asked him if it was true that he was a sodomite, and that had so upset him – because it was the same word the Germans had used – that he’d told them that yes, he was. He never wanted to talk about it much, but from what I could gather, it was very much their opinion that he’d brought his bad luck upon himself.

Poor Pierre! After all that he’d been through as well!

That’s funny. I kept calling him Pierre in Mulhouse, too. It was as if, as long as we were there, he’d gone back to his previous identity for me.

I asked about Johann next, but he hadn’t been able to find anything out. No one had seen Johann since 1940. And then he started to cry as he reeled off a list of all these people we’d known, saying, ‘Lala’s missing, probably dead. Michel and Matias are dead.’

Matias, his policeman friend? The one who helped you?

Yes, he was one of the few where we were able to find out for sure what had happened. He’d been shot for conspiring with the resistance. I just prayed that it wasn’t because of us, but I suppose we’ll never know.

Johann’s ex-boyfriend, Jean-Paul – the boy he was with before he dated Pierre – he was in prison. And that’s one of the most shameful stories of all.

Prison? Why?

At the end of the war quite a few homosexuals were transferred from the concentration camps straight to prison. Most survivors were obviously freed, but often the ones with the pink triangles, the homosexuals, were transferred to prisons so they could finish serving their sentences.

I don’t understand why?

For the simple reason that homosexuality was still illegal almost everywhere. Many courts even refused to consider the time these men had spent in the camps as counting against their sentences. So there were gay men, particularly in Germany, who’d been arrested in, say 1938, and sentenced to five years in prison. And if they were lucky enough to have survived until 1945 – and very few did manage to survive that long – but if they had made it until the liberation of the camps, they got transferred straight to prison so they could finish serving their time.

But that’s outrageous! That’s totally inhuman!

Yes. It is. And that’s what happened to Johann’s friend, Jean-Paul. He survived Schirmeck and Dachau, only to be arrested when they liberated the camps.

In fact, Jean-Paul was the person who was finally able to tell Christophe what had happened to Johann. Christophe went back for his father’s funeral – in ’53, I think it was – and he ran into Jean-Paul somewhere. Jean-Paul had been in Schirmeck with Johann, so he knew all the awful details.