The World That We Knew(70)

On the first night the captain resided at the chateau, he began to burn the books in the library. There were so many, it took three full days to complete the task, and soldiers had to take over the job. There were sparks floating in the air all that week and people in the village complained of cinders flying into their eyes. The air stank; the sky was black. Everything that had belonged to the family now belonged to the captain. He wore the Jew’s signet ring on his finger. He slept on his sheets. He looked through the bureau containing the wife’s undergarments and spilled his seed on the silk and lace.

To show his loyalty to the Nazi regime, he continued to do his best to find hidden Jews, and had been honored by the Vichy government for his success in this matter. Several families had been discovered in safe houses, then sent east, with their French helpers arrested and taken to Montluc Prison. Anyone who had ever crossed him, or who feared him, had left the village, and fathers had begun to lock their daughters up at night in cellars and attics, hiding the girls under the floorboards or in the woods, hoping this beast would never catch sight of them.



Ettie and Victor kept watch, using the doctor’s binoculars, trying to chart a way to get to the captain. The house was too protected for them to make a move against him here. There were members of the Milice stationed at the front and back exits; guards roamed the garden with little to do, idly destroying anything nearby, breaking the branches off the trees, using stone walls for target practice, pissing in the herb garden, where there had once been rosemary plants as big as the children who had lived here, boys of three and five, who had often been sent out for sprigs of herbs while their mother was cooking dinner. These children had been murdered in a camp in Poland, but one of the policemen on guard often thought he saw two little boys crouched down in reedy stalks of what was left of the rosemary. In time, he asked to be sent elsewhere, anywhere else would do, but even then, when he was stationed outside the prison, he heard crying whenever the wind picked up.

Each day, women were brought here for the captain’s use. They were women from the village who had no choice but to do as they were told when the miliciens came to their doors. Some were married, and would never tell their husbands, for fear their husbands would come to avenge them and be murdered here in this garden, where there was now a pile of bones. One hot afternoon a woman left her son when she went in, and the boy sat by the door, unnoticed and uncared for. Ettie could barely sit still. She wondered how Queen Esther had restrained herself, dressed in her silken clothes in the harem where she was kept, one among many wives, biding her time, knowing that her people were about to be sacrificed.

“The more we wait, the more damage he does,” she seethed.

“We’re here to study him, nothing more. For now.”

The goal was to rid the earth of him, but for that they needed patience. Still, that day neither of them spoke much, and the boy was still there on the step when Victor and Ettie left to make their way to the hidden car. They walked through the dark across fields of what was called the Plateau, the huge expanse of flat land between the mountain ranges. It was a beautiful summer night.

“You’re sure you’re ready for what we will do?” Victor asked, worried by how upset Ettie was.

“Are you sure you are?” Ettie responded, her tone dark.

Victor was quick to take offense. “Meaning?”

She wasn’t questioning his courage, rather his willingness to throw away his life. “You probably have something to live for. Some woman.”

Victor shrugged, but of course, it was true.

“I have no one,” Ettie told him. “Therefore I’m more ready.”

Victor grinned then. Ettie amused him. She liked to win every argument, and was especially scrappy with men, perhaps to prove she could be fiercer and more willing to do battle. Still, Victor was hesitant to bring her into a mission where the object was murder. And now he cautiously let her know that there might be certain circumstances where she would have to allow the captain to do as he liked.

“You think I didn’t understand why my hair was cut? Why I was given beautiful clothes to wear? I know I’m not pretty, but you made me so. I understand I may have to draw him to us. So now, go ahead, make me hate him.”

“You hate him already,” Victor said.

“I want to hate him more.”

So he told her more of what he knew, that their target liked torture as much as he loathed Jews.

“How so?”

The captain had ingratiated himself with the Nazi commanders, including the commander and chief of the secret police, Klaus Barbie, who had sent two thousand five hundred Jews to extermination camps and had executed eight hundred others, personally torturing and murdering them. When Jews were picked up and taken to the prison in Lyon, Barbie allowed the captain to stand outside their cells, built for two, but often packed with fifty people or more, men, women, and children, so that he could delight in their misery. The captain was known to carry a Star of David made from the flesh of a Jew in his pocket, a gift from Barbie.

Ettie shot Victor a look of disbelief.

“What?” he said. “You don’t believe in evil?”

“Oh, I do. But now you’ve done your job and I hate him more. That will help.”

She thought of her sister holding her hand as they leapt from the train, her face focused on Ettie with absolute trust. How could her beautiful sister exist in the same world as this monster they were to kill? There in the woods, Ettie began to recite a section of the Amidah, the standing prayer that is to be recited three times a day by Orthodox men. It was the twelfth benediction, which deals with the fight against enemies. May all evil be destroyed in an instant.