The Japanese Lover(74)
“Were you in the Resistance too?”
“Yes, for a time.”
“Then you should come to our house and have a drink, my grandfather will be pleased to meet you, Mr. . . .”
“Samuel Mendel.”
The young woman hesitated a moment before bending over the name on the plaque again and turning around in astonishment.
“Yes, it’s me. Not altogether dead, as you can see,” said Samuel.
All three of them ended up in the kitchen of a nearby house, drinking Pernod and eating baguettes and sausages. Clotaire Martineaux was short and stocky, with a resounding laugh and the smell of garlic. He embraced them both and was happy to answer Samuel’s questions, calling him mon frère and refilling his glass time and again. As Samuel could confirm, he was not one of those heroes who appeared as if by magic after the end of the war, as he knew all about the plane brought down near the village, the rescue of a crew member, and knew two of the men who had hidden him, as well as the names of the rest. He listened to Samuel’s story, drying his eyes and blowing his nose on the same kerchief he wore around his neck, also employed to wipe sweat from his brow and grease from his hands. “My grandfather has always been a crybaby,” his granddaughter said by way of explanation.
Samuel told his host that his nom de guerre in the Jewish Resistance was Jean Valjean, and that he’d spent months in a state of confusion from the brain trauma he suffered when the plane came down, but that little by little he had begun to recover at least part of his memory. He had sketchy recollections of a great house with maidservants in black aprons and white caps, but none of his family. He thought that if there was anything still standing at the war’s end, he would seek out his Polish roots, because that was where the language in which he did sums, swore, and dreamed came from; somewhere in that country the house etched in his memory must exist.
“I had to wait until the war was over to discover my own name and my family’s fate. By 1944 it was already possible to foresee the defeat of the Nazis, do you remember, Monsieur Martineaux? The situation started to turn around on the eastern front, where the British and the Americans least expected it. They thought the Red Army was made up of ill-disciplined peasant bands, poorly nourished and worse armed, incapable of confronting Hitler.”
“I remember it all perfectly, mon frère,” said Martineaux. “After the Battle of Stalingrad, the myth of Hitler’s invincibility began to crumble, and we could start to have hope. It has to be said that the Russians broke the morale and the backbone of the Germans in 1943.”
“The defeat at Stalingrad forced them to withdraw to Berlin,” added Samuel.
“Then came the Allies’ Normandy landings in June 1944, and the liberation of Paris only two months later. Ah, what an unforgettable day that was!”
“I was taken prisoner. My group was decimated by the SS, and my surviving comrades were executed with a shot to the back of the neck as soon as they surrendered. I escaped by chance, because I was away searching for food. To be more exact, I was scouring the nearby farms to see what I could lay my hands on. We even ate cats and dogs, whatever we could find.”
Samuel told him what those months were like, the worst of the war for him. Alone, lost, and starving, lacking all contact with the Resistance, he lived by night, eating worm-ridden earth and stolen food, until he was captured at the end of September. He spent the next four months in forced labor, first at Monowitz and then at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million two hundred thousand men, women, and children had already perished. In January 1945, faced with the Russians’ imminent advance, the Nazis received orders to destroy all evidence of what they had done in the camps. They evacuated their prisoners on a forced march through the snow, providing neither food nor shelter, back toward Germany. Those too weak to leave were left behind to be executed, but in the rush to flee the Russians, the SS did not manage to obliterate everything and left seven thousand prisoners still alive. Samuel was one of them.
“I don’t think the Russians came with the intention of liberating us,” Samuel explained. “The Ukrainian front was passing close by and opened the camp gates. Those of us still able to move dragged ourselves outside. Nobody stopped us. Nobody helped us. Nobody offered us even a crust of bread. We were turned away by everyone.”
“I know, mon frère. Here in France no one came to the aid of the Jews, and I say that with a great sense of shame. But remember those were terrible times, we were all hungry, and in those circumstances all sense of humanity gets lost.”
“Not even the Zionists in Palestine wanted to take in concentration camp survivors; we were the useless detritus of the war,” said Samuel.
He explained how the Zionists only wanted young, strong, healthy people—brave warriors to confront the Arabs, and stubborn laborers to work the arid land. But one of the few things he recalled from his earlier life was how to fly a plane, and this helped facilitate the immigration process. He became a soldier, pilot, and spy. He was David Ben-Gurion’s bodyguard during the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and a year later he became one of the first Mossad agents, working for Israel’s new intelligence agency.
Brother and sister spent the night in a village inn and the next day returned to Paris to fly to Warsaw. In Poland, they searched in vain for traces of their parents, but only found their names on a list of the victims of Treblinka they obtained from the Jewish Agency. Together they visited the remains of Auschwitz, where Samuel attempted to reconcile himself to the past, but it was a journey straight out of his worst nightmares that only served to confirm his certainty that human beings are the cruelest beasts on the planet.